Your Guide to a Successful Online Course
“You’re using DISCORD for class??”
While many of our teachers opted to use Zoom and Google Classroom for their online courses, one had decided to use a totally unexpected medium to run his class.
A platform created for video gaming. Used as the main tool of communication for a school class. What a world.
I guess this was the tiniest taste of how the pandemic affected the education world — it really threw it on a wildly unpredictable roller-coaster ride. Schools suddenly shut down en-masse. Students were kicked off campuses without much notice. Teachers had to fit the square peg of in-person classes into a round online hole, all while juggling a thousand other tasks. SAT’s and ACT’s were canceled, and AP tests were shrunk from 4 hours to 45 minutes. Prom was gone. Animal Crossing graduations became a thing. And Discord, which had originally sealed itself as the channel for absolutely-one-hundred-percent-indubitably-definitely-not-schoolwork-related communication, was now a classroom tool.
In the chaos wrought by the sudden upheaval of, well, just about everything, schools suddenly faced the gargantuan task of switching all their activities to an online setting and navigating uncharted waters. How would classes be structured? What technology would be used? Zoom? Google Meet? Slack? Microsoft Teams? Facebook? Discord? Would tests be given? What about projects? Should homework be mandatory? How would discussions work? And looking further, what would the fall semester look like?
Enter, the Faculty Guide to Online Courses!
With the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Every Learner Everywhere, the Online Learning Consortium, and the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities created a playbook setting guidelines on how to design and manage sustainable, high-quality online courses. Titled Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19, it lays out practices to get your classes to not only survive, but thrive.
This intro article will cover…
Key concepts and issues that arose due to the switch to online learning
An overview of the Every Learner Everywhere playbook
Let’s start with the key concepts:
What’s Emergency Remote Teaching?
Emergency Remote Teaching, or ERT, is the name given to the rapid switch to online learning due to the coronavirus. In the blink of an eye, courses designed for in-person classrooms had to somehow maneuver themselves to fit a 100% online setting, leaving schools, teachers, and students alike scrambling for what to do. Because the changes and the transition had to take place at breakneck speed, ERT served more as an emergency patch-up than a sustainable solution, like sticking a couple of band-aids on top of a gaping crack in a wall.
Compared to optimal online learning, ERT is marked by key limitations, including severely restricted time for course development and quality control, a sharp reduction of resources and support for students and teachers, and a one-size-fits-all structure that lacks flexibility.
The Equity Issue
As classes changed to being 100% online, equity issues rose to the forefront of the pandemic. Access to technology varied at every level, with students having to face a vast number of issues ranging from accessing wifi demanded by synchronous classes, managing time zone differences, or dealing with a lack of devices as a whole. The sudden switch left thousands of schools and students with no way to continue their courses and education, placing them at a huge disadvantage.
What’s Engagement? Why is it important?
It’s how we can avoid this:
The Glossary of Education Reform defines student engagement as, “the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education.”
Engagement is the super glue that holds a class together. It’s what brings all the different parts floating around — the students, the teachers, the activities, the lessons, everything — into a single, incredible educational experience. The more engagement, the better students learn and the more the class thrives (added bonus, it’s so much more fun!) After all, we can create the best course content in the world, but if nobody is there to learn it, all our hard work would be for naught.
In the new online setting, finding ways to keep students engaged and actively involved in the course is even harder. Without the ability to physically be with others (not to mention the drop in motivation from the shift in atmosphere and having to sit in a room chock full of distractions like phones and worse, beds), students and teachers are facing difficulty connecting with each other and the course material.
That’s where we step in! We’ll get into how CLASSUM can help your class and boost engagement in the coming articles. But for now, with definitions in place and issues covered, let’s move on to how to create and manage your course.
The playbook splits its core concepts into three tiers: Design, Enhance, and Optimize.
Design: implementing the guidelines at a basic level and taking the first steps in building your course
Enhance: improving on the foundations you set in the design stage and beginning to customize and craft your ideal class
Optimize: finding stability and how to continue to perfect your optimal online course
Here’s a brief overview of the subjects covered in the playbook:
Course Design
The course design portion of the playbook goes over general ideas and overarching strategies to think about during the planning and designing phases of your online course. Subtopics include…
Design principles: What’s the best way to find alignment between learning goals, assessments, and activities?
Design strategies: Which strategies should you use while crafting your course? (Hint: it might be something that rhymes with “dackwards besign”)
Instructional strategies: Based on the neuro, cognitive, and learning sciences, what are some of the best ways to teach?
Accessibility strategies: How can you make courses that accommodate those with different needs?
Course Components
On to the next section! This section constitutes the largest portion of the playbook: it tackles tangible, physical realizations of the strategies and ideas from the course design section. Since each class is unique and has different needs, the playbook doesn’t explicitly give a one-size-fits-all structure for building your class — instead, it focuses on components most common to most courses like…
Course content and materials: What kind of media can we use to best share knowledge, and what resources are out there?
Welcome pages and syllabuses (syllabi?): It’s that old adage again — first impressions are the most important. How do you introduce your students to your online classroom with a bang? (and show them what you’re about!)
Assessments: A lot of standard assessment methods used in face-to-face classes don’t translate well to online environments, so what kind of alternatives are there?
Course interaction: How do you maximize interaction?
Digital Learning Technology: What technology is the best for you to use in your classes according to your goals? How can you best utilize your LMS and technological tools?
Course Management and Improving Your Course
Now that the planning portion is done, it’s time to talk about running and improving your course. The Course Management section and the Evaluation and Continuous Improvement section offer tips for how to manage and continue to grow your course, hitting key concepts like…
How to set course expectations: Why is setting clear guidelines and expectations important, and how do you do that?
Student-instructor communication: What are the best methods for creating teacher-student interaction?
Academic support resources: What resources can you share to best help and guide your students?
Online course policies and resources: How do online course policies and in-person course policies differ, and what should you add to accommodate your new environment?
Evaluating your course and teaching: What metrics can you use to continue to perfect your course?
What’s next?
In this 4 part series, we’ll go in-depth about the topics illustrated in the playbook, and how CLASSUM can help you bring these guidelines to life!
In the next article, we’ll delve into course design and the important concepts to think about while designing your course.
Stay tuned! :))
CLASSUM is a communication tool for education used by institutions around the world, including Samsung, Hyundai, LG CNS, Shiseido, and KAIST.
Learn more about CLASSUM 👉 www.classum.com
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