Designing Online Courses
Most e-learning design approaches converge on the idea that participant interaction and collaboration, developing a learning community, and student-teacher immediacy and intimacy are important elements for an effective online lesson. Based on these approaches and considering that individual characteristics of students should be taken into account, given that the latter do not constitute a single and homogeneous group (Twigg, 2003; Pavlis Korres & Lefteriotou, 2020), an attempt was made to include and utilize multimedia in the teaching design of online courses, as well as a variety of communication and collaborative tools, in order to motivate all students and promote their interaction with the content, the instructor and their peers (Moore, 1989, 2007; Thurmond & Wambach, 2004; Guy, 2007; Kang & Imt, 2013; Mutalib, Halim, & Yahaya, 2016; Pavlis Korres & Leftheriotou, 2016; Tawfik et al., 2018; Oyarzun, Stefaniak, Bol, & Morrison, 2018). To promote interaction with peers and instructors as well as collaboration skills, which are considered critical elements influencing learning experiences within online courses (Park & Bonk, 2007a), we tried to select and make use of the proper collaborative and communication tools available on the platform, aligning them with the corresponding educational goals (Pavlis Korres, 2012). The educational practices further intended to increase social presence, immediacy and intimacy between instructor and students (Mehrabian, 1967, 1971; LaRose & Whitten, 2000; Rovai, 2002; Salmon, 2004; Pallof & Pratt, 2005; Finkelstein, 2006; Hrastinski, 2008; Schutt, Allen, & Laumakis, 2009; Garsisson, 2011). The creation of favorable conditions for students’ emotional connection and social interaction (Kim, Liu, & Bonk, 2005; Park & Bonk, 2007b) proved to be particularly challenging and the same holds for creating an enabling environment for the increase of student satisfaction, since, according to the literature, as learner satisfaction increases, the learning outcome improves (Driver, 2002; Hong, 2002; Allen et al., 2006; Schutt et al., 2009; Claus & Changchit, 2017).
In view of the fact that, for the vast majority of students, this was their first contact with online courses, one of the objectives of the course was for the educational experience to have a positive effect in terms of student attitude towards e-learning, following up on Dewey’s continuity of experience (1980). As he puts it “every experience lives on in further experiences. Hence the central problem of an education based on experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (Dewey, 1980, p.9).
In the following section we shall mention the collaborative and communication tools that can be used in the design and implementation of online courses, focusing on those used in synchronous e-learning environments.