Abstract
This chapter is designed to provide resources and answer questions on two levels. In the first part, the authors present a menu of considerations and challenges that they have experienced when shifting an accredited undergraduate program to a parallel online modality over the past several years. In addition, they offer suggestions for working within the BlackBoard learning environment and give a glossary of commonly encountered online instruction terms. They identify some commonalities between online and traditional instruction that can serve to make newcomers more comfortable adding online teaching to their skill set.
TopIntroduction
A former student had come to visit Herb Simon, the Nobel Laureate and information theory pioneer, to catch up on things and discuss some of the student's current research.
“The last thing we discussed was an upcoming class I was scheduled to teach on cognitive modeling. As I stepped through the door to leave, Herb made me promise not to use overhead slides.”
“Talk with them,” he said, “And write on the board.” 1
This chapter documents one experience in developing online courses as part of a college-level initiative to offer an online BS Finance program alongside an existing traditional (face-to-face) BS Finance program. This account may at times read like a war diary, but it is hoped that these experiences will have value for others who have to implement an online component in the future. This account describes the development of an asynchronous program, with classes completely stocked with material online and managed without scheduled lecture sessions throughout the semester. This program was also implemented on a campus where students could take either a traditional, face-to-face section of the class or the online section during a semester regardless of the modality of their other classes.
It is argued here that a primary consideration in the design, development and implementation of an online curriculum in finance is bandwidth. This doesn’t refer to the bandwidth of the campus networks, or of the wireless connections on the quad, or even the bandwidth limitations of the university’s course management system, although those restrictions can end up being a bottleneck, certainly.2 This isn't even referring to the bandwidth limitations that faculty face, being pulled in so many different directions at once and having to develop online course components on top of everything else.
The primary bandwidth concern here is for students. They can easily run out of time and energy in a self-driven course, so when designing their experience instructors must focus on the required content of the course. Students have spent all of their lives learning how to learn, and practicing the requisite skill set, in a traditional, face-to-face environment. Some of them may fight coming to class on a regular basis, but they know deep in their hearts that it works (as long as the professor isn't an awful lecturer). In class, they can ask questions. In class, they can feel the excitement when the professor spends time with “war stories” as examples. They can bring up questions about current events, even items from the news of the day. In class, their classmates can hassle them about not doing any work on the exam review (or hassle them about working too hard and killing the curve). In class, students connect with the professor, their material, other students and their profession. They are familiar with the dynamics of that environment. 3
In an online environment, students are easily distracted with all of the “features” of online learning, so they have to be guided carefully. When creating online content and online courses, care should be taken not to obscure the most important parts of the message. It is easy to lose sight of the end result when confronted with all of this new technology for learning. When starting down this path the authors were encouraged to treat online instruction as “something different.” They were told to embrace all of the new tools available, such as discussion boards and online groups, and told how antiquated high-stakes testing and lecture content had become.
After evaluating everything that online instruction modalities have to offer, though, it is clear that the online class must follow the traditional class. The online class has an offline analogue that was designed in the context of a curriculum, or a desired set of knowledge and outcomes. That set of learning fits into the larger curriculum of the college and university, and to make online instruction effective it is first a task of making sure that the online course parallels the traditional course in terms of student outcomes and expectations.
TopSome Principles Of Online Course And Curriculum Design
Throughout the discussion, the authors’ discovered “core principles” for online development are presented. Table 1 introduces these principles and corollary alignment as an overview of the discussion that will follow.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Adaptive Release: A feature of the CMS that allows you to keep information hidden until students have passed a point in time, or passed a certain test, or even to just keep certain items in the shell from being available for all but one student. Very useful for ADA Section 504 students, because you can extend their time by just giving them a separate copy of the exam.
Self-Paced (Assessment or Course Design Method): Students can move through course material at their own pace and finish as rapidly as they want to. Some universities specifically require that online courses not be done in a self-paced fashion, mainly due to the contact hour requirements imposed by accreditation bodies and state law.
Course Shell: the prepared set of menus or folders, assignments and instructions that comprise a class's online component. For a Web-only course, the course shell contains the only opportunities for interaction that faculty will have with students. For a traditional course, the shell (also called a support shell, below) might only contain a copy of the syllabus or slides or assignments but it will not be as completely developed.
Assessment: Another name for the evaluation of student learning outcomes as related to the stated goals of a course or program. Also used to describe the “assurance of learning” activities required by accreditation bodies such as AACSB and SACS.
Synchronous Delivery: Students attend “virtual classes” at the same time each week, and may have access to the professor and other classmates via a voice or camera hookup, or via a chatroom. Often these will be recorded for later, asynchronous review or playback in podcast or other A/V form.
Correspondence: The method of instruction where students are provided materials to work on their own and submit for grading. May or may not involve a campus component at some point during the program of study.
Web-Assisted: A term for classes that have some online component (materials, for example, or a support shell) but for which the Web doesn't play a significant role in assessment or contact time. As discussed, this term means different things at different institutions.
Student Equity Issue: In the enrollment management (EM) or student services lingos, any perceived difference in student treatment or experience across types of student (or, here, between traditional or online sections). Some of these could also result in “arbitrage opportunities,” in the lingo of finance.
Hybrid: Courses where some component of the class contact hours is accounted for by student access to the course management system. These are also called Web-assisted courses, or Web-enhanced, and other euphemisms exist. This may mean that students only come to campus or go to a proctor to take tests, depending on the institution.
Podcast: A recorded audio or video presentation made available in electronic format. Some of these will have “bumpers” or lead-in and lead-out music or sound effects, but this adds to their size.
Millennial Student: Students belonging to the generation born after 1981. This label has been created to describe their peculiar behaviors and frames of reference. It is also used by some to justify “dumbing down” material rather than enforcing the same standards we've used in classes for a generation or so.
ADA Section 504: The section of the Americans with Disabilities Act that describes accommodations that must be provided to disabled students. The expectations and requirements may be different for online courses due to the use of technology. It also may be easier.
Testing Window: the period of time during which an exam is available to students in the CMS. This is different from the actual time allowed during the test; students can start the test anytime during the testing window but will have some other time limit (say, 2 hours) to complete the test once it has been started by the student. Large testing windows encourage cheating either by allowing time for the copying or printing of tests or by working in groups, as do long periods that they can work on the test.
Learning Style: Type of sensory input most compatible with an individual's cognitive abilities. There are three main types: visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic. Instructors who are putting courses online for the first time might be briefed on these learning styles by their instructional design team so that the instructor can customize the course material for one group or another. The validity of these categories is the subject of some skepticism among cognitive psychologists. See also: Millennial student.
“Zz Account” or Prototype Account: A dummy user account that allows the professor to see exactly what the student will see. Even if the CMS has a “preview” mode for tests, you typically cannot use that mode to test things such as adaptive release or password protection (and trying to do so may cause errors). In fact, we’ve recently decided that having TWO dummy student user accounts is probably the only way to test many of the features in BlackBoard 9.x, especially if using adaptive release to accommodate students.
Modality: The method of presentation of the class, usually face-to-face, hybrid, or online (Web-only). Correspondence is another, time-honored, modality.
Chat Room: A real-time window for typing messages when online, used either for communication during synchronous course delivery or during office hours or something similar.
Online: Also called Web-only . These courses have no face-to-face component at all; student contact, delivery, and assessment is via the CMS. Some institutions prohibit proctoring of exams for this modality claiming that it creates false advertising – any need to come to campus during the student's course of study means that it cannot be billed as an “online” degree program.
Syllabus Quiz: A quiz used to make sure that students have read (and understood) the course syllabus. It is often combined with adaptive release to lock students out of the remaining course material until after they have certified to the professor that they understand what the expectations of the course are.
FAQ: A list of frequently asked questions which can save a lot of time and frustration by answering common concerns in one place. These build over time as new and interesting situations come about. (We've included our post-proctoring FAQ as an example. As Jack Webb said on Dragnet , “All of the items in our FAQ are true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent (guilty).”)
Lock-Down Browser: A browser program or extension set that “locks” the student’s browser during an online assessment. These are available as standalone applications or as part of a proctoring service. Respondus’ Lockdown Browser is the most notable example.
Quality MattersTM: QM is a consortium of schools that has established standards for online instruction. Some universities subscribe to this material and training and some do not, but the standards are available on the Web for anyone to see. Located at http://www.qminstitute.org .
Course Management System or CMS: Sakai, Moodle, or BlackBoard. Software used to organize and deliver material online, and usually used to test and/or collect assignments as well. BlackBoard 9.x barely counts as a CMS implementation; these are more browser-like than those that we've used before. In the old days our CMS was “the classroom” supplemented by “the chalkboard,” “examinations,” and “homework.”
Bandwidth: The information capacity of a particular channel or network node, measured as data accurately received per unit of time. In our discussion, we assume that the student can only digest so much information in a given period of time. Also, students may be conditioned to receive and process information in a certain manner. Similarly, faculty can only process and structure a limited amount of information during a particular period. 10
Instructional Designer, or ID: This is the IT person assigned to translate your course into an online format, and to help you decide what to do differently. For example, they might take the syllabus and translate it into an “instructional plan” that is much more detailed on a week-by-week basis.
Online Proctoring: A service that watches a student while they take an exam or quiz. The service may or may not use audio (likely) and some type of software interface to “lock down” the student’s computer during the assessment. ProctorU.com is a popular example of this type of service.
Asynchronous Delivery: Students can access podcasts or course material and use it any time, outside of scheduled sessions. In many cases this means that the material is easily downloaded and archived. This creates the most flexibility, and it may be a mandate from the administration that courses be designed for this type of delivery above all. Correspondence courses are the extreme version of this. The opposite of this is real-time or synchronous delivery, where classes are held using technology rather than a classroom. Both methods have their proponents.
Support Shell: This is a course management system shell used to store and give access to materials for students in a traditional or face-to-face course. Twenty years ago this role would have been played by an ftp site or “class homepage” at some institutions. For example, one of the authors maintained his homepage at America Online from 1998 onward, and wrote his own html code to create homepages for each class to give students access to slides, article readings, etc.