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Designing an Online Curriculum for Instructor Inheritance

By IGI Global on Oct 21, 2011
IGI Global would like to thank Shalin Hai-Jew for contributing this article outlining how to design an online curriculum which can be inherited by other instructors. Dr. Hai-Jew's newest publication, Constructing Self-Discovery Learning Spaces Online: Scaffolding and Decision Making Technologies, is scheduled to be released this Winter. An excellent resource for any library, her edited research volume, Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends, is currently available in the IGI Global Bookstore.

Often, the development team building an online course curriculum on a federal or state-funded grant is not building for the main instructor. There may be a number of subject matter experts (SMEs) serving as informants on such a project. Making a curriculum inheritable is not only about building easy "handover" objects like electronic instructional manuals and generic syllabi. In such circumstances, with an unknown inheriting instructor but a range of contributors, there are some basic strategies to make sure that the curriculum is usable and inheritable.

Clear Structures, Pedagogical Strategies, and Legality

The first rule of an inheritable course is to have a well designed online course curriculum. There should be a clear developmental sequence in the learning structure. The assessments should be varied but with clear feedback for learners; the assessments should offer instructors sufficient local flexibility in how they bring their own expertise to bear. The items in the course should all be findable and clearly inter-related. The course should be structured predictably and consistently. All the course materials should be legally obtained for all projected uses, without any contravention of intellectual property rights or misrepresentations. All digital contents should be fully accessible, per federal guidelines. No one wants to inherit problems, and a clean hand-over is important.

Future Proofing

To protect the value of the work into the future, it is important that the design is not time-dated. It should be built to the most flexible technologies, so that obsolescence is much less likely. Proprietary technologies which do not "play well" with other technologies should not be used. The information used should be the best information at the time in the domain field, without idiosyncrasies introduced by the subject matter experts (SMEs).

Flexible Curriculums

The harder part of making an online course inheritable has to do with the ability to edit the curriculum. Usually, courses are built to certain master course outlines. The curriculum is built to the standards of the learning objectives and credit hours and other requirements mentioned in those outlines. Making changes to a curriculum may change those dynamics and skew whether the curriculum is transferable.

In the hands of a professional instructor, though, any online course curriculum should be modifiable and still meet core standards.

Technologically and pedagogically, an online curriculum may be more resilient if inheriting instructors may easily switch modules in and out. The contents of an inheritable course should include the raw files which are editable, in case changes are needed.

While fixes may occasionally arise from the original development team—in consultation with the teaching faculty—oftentimes, the development team disbands after a curriculum is launched. Then, it's in the hands of the inheriting instructors. In such a scenario, protectionism of the curriculum becomes a negative rather than anything that promotes powerful online learning.

Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer at Kansas State University (K-State); she teaches for WashingtonOnline (WAOL).
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