Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

10.11. Many Structures, One High Standard

There are many other ways to ensure an appropriate structure for an online course. For instance, the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative provides a complete course ‘in a box’ for standard first and second year courses in two year colleges. These include a learning management system site with content, objectives and activities pre-loaded, with an accompanying textbook. The content is carefully structured, with in-built student activities. The instructors’ role is mainly delivery, providing student feedback and marking where needed. These courses have proved to be very effective, in that most students successfully complete such programs.

The History instructor in Scenario D kept a normal three lectures a week structure for the first three weeks, then students worked entirely online in small groups on a major project for five weeks, then returned to class for one three-hour session a week for five weeks for students to report back on and discuss their projects as a whole class group.

We saw that in competency-based learning, students can work at their own speed through highly structured courses academically, in terms of topic sequences and learner activities, that nevertheless have flexibility in the time students can take to successfully complete a competency.

The Integrated Science Program at McMaster University is built around 6-10 week undergraduate research projects. 

cMOOC’s such as Stephen Downes, George Siemen’s, and Dave Cormier’s #Change 11 (Milligan, 2012) have a loose structure, with different topics with different contributors each week, but student activities, such as blog posts or comments, are not organized by the course designers but left to the students. However, these are not credit courses, and few students work all the way through the whole MOOC, and that is not their intent. The Stanford and MIT xMOOC’s on the other hand are highly structured, with student activities, and the feedback is fully automated. Less than 10 per cent of students who start these MOOCs successfully complete them, but they too are non-credit courses. Increasingly MOOCs are becoming shorter, some of as little as three or four weeks in length.

Online learning enables teachers and instructors to break away from a rigid three semester, 13 week, three lectures a week structure, and build courses around structures that best meet the needs of learners and the preferred teaching method of the teacher or instructor. My aim in a credit course or program is to ensure high academic quality and high completion rates. For me that means developing an appropriate structure and related learning activities as a key step in achieving quality in credit online courses.