Data Driven Decision Making for Online Instructional Design

If you’re feeling the heat to improve your online educational offerings, use the one tool readily at your disposal: Data. Applied in the correct points of the instructional design process, data can help to dramatically improve the overall effectiveness of your courses.

Despite its many benefits, online education faces serious obstacles. High drop-out rates and an increasingly skeptical Congress have caused many to question the effectiveness of online education, forcing online programs to continually evaluate their courses with an eye toward increased effectiveness.

Now, more than ever, you need to institute an established method for improving your online programs. You’ll discover it in the video online seminar Data Driven Decision Making for Online Instructional Design. The seminar will introduce you to methods for leveraging analytics in the instructional design process and ultimately enhance your courses, helping you to:

• Understand how data relates to instructional design elements, and develop strategies for measuring the relationship between implementations and learning outcomes.
• Utilize end-of-course and real-time intelligence to understand your instructional strengths and weaknesses, and to influence your future improvements.
• Develop ways to streamline your design team through the application of institution data points.
• Create strategies for using data to best allocate financial resources.

Order this Seminar

You’ll develop both a theoretical understanding of how to improve your instructional design process, as well as practical methods for enhancing your own efforts. The seminar will help you discover:

• How to utilize institutional data sources to optimize instructional design strategies and components.
• What methods you can use to collaborate with faculty and staff to inform instructional design initiatives while complementing institutional research objectives.
• How to include data collection elements in the workflow so that analytics can help optimize your instructional design.

By the end of the seminar, you’ll understand strategies that will aid in the development of workflows, content refinement and enhance your program’s overall learning effectiveness.

Who will benefit
From the one-person shop to instructional design teams, anyone involved in an online program will benefit from the seminar. Recommended positions include:

• Instructional Designers
• Institutional Researchers
• Instructional Technologists
• Online Faculty
• Program Directors
• Department Chairs
• Deans
• Associate Provosts (responsible for institutional effectiveness or online programs)
• Learning Strategists

If you wish to share this seminar with others across your campus, consider ordering a Campus Access License. For an additional $200, a Campus Access License allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Order this Seminar

New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

As a former journalist, Holland knows how to engage both serious readers and casual scanners and to meet their diverse needs and expectations. In newspapers, this is accomplished by providing multiple entry points, something he learned many years ago when USA Today came on the scene with its innovative design.

“Whether you hate it or love it, USA Today offers readers multiple entry points into the copy—sidebars, subheads, photos, captions, et cetera. The idea is to get readers into the story however you can,” Holland says.

A sidebar or graph might encourage readers to read the main article, or these might give them just enough information to suit their purposes. This same concept is at the core of Holland’s approach to course design: Provide multiple entry points and offer additional information to those who need it.

Diagnostic quizzes
Holland incorporates quizzes into nearly every lesson in his online courses, which helps him and his students know which concepts students understand and which they need more help with.

Text poppers
Holland uses Softchalk to incorporate some of these design principles into his courses. One feature that he finds useful is “text poppers”—highlighted words on the screen that display additional information when the learner rolls his or her cursor over them. These are small bits of information that are optional—they appear only if the learner wants to know more, and they do not take the learner to another page, which could be distracting.

Bookmarks
Softchalk also enables Holland to link back to previous course material, for students who need to review. This provides them with the information they need, when they need it, and they don’t have to search for it.

Audio and video
Holland also incorporates audio and video into his courses to create a personal connection with his students and to supplement information conveyed via text. He decided to limit each clip to approximately five minutes after he realized that his students typically did not take the time to listen to longer clips. Holland also encourages students to add their voices to the course. He might ask them to read exemplary work and provide a link to the text of that work for students who would like to follow along.

Linear to a point
Holland does not intend for each student to access every single course element. Rather, he tries to anticipate concepts that give students trouble and to provide additional resources to help them. “I’ve got lots of links to websites with lots of audio to support them. I think it’s important that that’s available to them, but I think it would be crazy to be assigned to do every one of those things,” Holland says.

As a result of the supplemental materials Holland provides, students might take different paths through the course, but this does not mean that the students are free to explore the courses however they want to. “There is still a linear aspect to it, but I believe there are lots of ways to get there,” Holland says.

Excerpted from Designing a Course with Multiple Entry Points, Diverse Paths, Online Classroom, September 2009.

Some of the more common learning disabilities include dyslexia, expressive language disorder, reading processing disability, and attention deficit disorder. Ideally, the students will self-identify and contact the institution’s disability services office so the instructor will know what accommodations are required, but not all students are forthcoming about letting others know about their learning disabilities, Crum says. For some, online learning provides the opportunity to hide their learning disabilities from classmates, which can be a welcome relief from the unwanted attention their learning disabilities received in their face-to-face courses.

This lack of disclosure makes supporting students with learning disabilities difficult for online instructors. Further complicating the issue is that under FERPA instructors cannot make the determination or question the student as to whether they have a learning disability. Instructors can raise concerns about a student’s performance (chronic late assignments, excessive errors in discussion board posts, irrelevant or inappropriate answer to questions that seem to indicate a lack of understanding, etc.) and recommend that the student talk with his or her advisor, at which point the student may make his or her learning disabilities known.

Supporting students with learning disabilities
In her research on the issue of addressing learning disabilities in online courses, Crum asked departments of disabilities how online instructors could help students with learning disabilities. Their response: open and constant communication, compassion, a willingness to bend the rules to accommodate students, and one-on-one instruction.

“You can pretty much see it as an online teacher within the first week of a course. You’ll see postings that just aren’t in synch. If you notice that everybody else is answering the question and one student is talking around the question, the next step is to contact the student immediately by phone or email and say, ‘What’s going on? Did you not understand the question? What can I do to help?’ Get to the bottom of it right away because if it is left unaddressed by week three, frustration sets in and the student basically adapts an attitude of , ‘Why even bother?’”

One aspect of communication that some instructors overlook is feedback on assignments. Crum comments on every paragraph of submitted assignments because it’s a great opportunity to maintain that communication with students. This is a technique she applies across the board, and it benefits students with and without learning disabilities.

Special accommodations for students with learning disabilities can include extending deadlines, working with the disabilities services office to help students get access to assistive software, or working individually with the student, and matching the struggling student with a professor that has a lot of compassion.

Crum has found that when students who need extra time initially receive it, they tend to get subsequent assignments in on time. Planning becomes a way for them to reach their potential once the obstacle of a due date is removed.

Students with learning disabilities may have difficulties with online courses that are predominantly text based. There are ways to get around it. There are several software products that read text aloud (such as ReadPlease, available at www.readplease.com/). In addition, textbooks could be loaded into Kindle, or other wireless reading devices, that can make reading easier by allowing students to increase font size and use with black letters on a white background.

Course design
Instructors do not always have the ability to alter course design to accommodate students with learning disabilities, but instructional designers should pay attention to course elements that might be problematic for some students. For example, students with certain visual discrimination disorders may have trouble distinguishing text from background colors.

“Some instructional designers have gotten fancy with colors, graphics, animations, and so forth, and it creates havoc for people with any type of visual disability. Designers need to take disabilities into account. The bells and whistles do not need to be in the electronic classroom. There are Web tools that are great at adding bells and whistles, but use them as an add-on instead of as one size fits all,” Crum says.

Crum also recommends that instructional designers test courses on students with learning disabilities. Doing so would enable designers to prevent problems before they happen.

Excerpted from How to Handle Learning Disabilities in the Online Classroom, August 2009, Online Classroom.

Florida State College at Jacksonville (formerly Florida Community College at Jacksonville) Open Campus has borrowed a page from the corporate sector to create a continuous process improvement plan based on elements of the ISO9000 and TQM quality assurance programs.

In the recent online seminar, Ensuring Online Program Quality with the eQuality Model, Richard Schilke, EdD., associate dean for online Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Open Campus, outlined the school’s system for measuring and delivering quality in its distance learning programs.

The eQuality program looks at quality from four different perspectives, which the Open Campus calls the four pillars of program quality, and has qualitative and quantitative assessments for each.

1. Quality Courses – The quality checks in this area ensure the courses provide a sound learning environment, implement best practices in online learning, meet college requirements for academic rigor, and reflect all official curriculum requirements.
2. Quality Instruction – The quality checks in this area ensure sound instructional approaches and techniques for reducing the transactional distance in online courses.
3. Quality Support – The quality checks in this area focus on those elements outside the courses that make the teaching and learning experience easier and more fulfilling, including, technical support, student advisement, faculty training, and staff training and development.
4. Quality Administration – The quality checks in this area examine the policies, procedures, guidelines, and other interactions between the institution and the staff, faculty, and students. The goal is to minimize the organizational barriers to student success, student satisfaction, and faculty satisfaction. This pillar is by far the most complicated to manage and improve, Schilke says.

“The most successful quality programs ensure they provide their stakeholders with the right tools to succeed,” says Schilke. “In online learning this means giving your faculty, staff, and students the technology, knowledge, and skills to do their respective jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible.”

Teach More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences

Expectations are rising in higher ed. There’s a growing emphasis on outcomes and accountability, and a steady trend toward personalizing the educational experience to boost individual student achievement and competency. But if online courses were customized to meet the needs and interests of individual students, would instructors’ workloads become unmanageable?

Many fear, and understandably so, that introducing customized, student-specific learning to online courses will add a crushing amount of work for the online instructor. And indeed, that’s a fear that could easily be realized if the process was approached incorrectly.

But there’s a way to do it right–a way that can actually reduce faculty workloads while increasing personalization of online learning. You can learn about it in Teach More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences, a 75-minute audio presentation that will introduce you to a model for offering personalized content without creating overwhelming responsibilities for the instructor.

Order this seminar

You’ll learn:

• How to better understand the goals and mental models of individual learners.
• How to integrate the concepts of social, teaching and cognitive presence into course creation.
• How to “design in” choices and options for readings, assignments and projects.
• Where customization makes the most sense within a course.
• How to use rubrics to incorporate self- and peer-review processes.
• And much more.

The program presenter is Judith Boettcher, Ph.D., an author, consultant and leading voice on educational technology and online teaching. Dr. Boettcher has more than 20 years of experience at institutions such as Penn State and the University of Florida, and is co-author of the just-published Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips.

Who will benefit:

• Distance learning deans
• Distance learning directors and coordinators
• Instructional design professionals
• Faculty who teach online
• Program leaders
• Anyone interested in sound online pedagogy

It is possible to give students a rich, personalized educational experience online–without overloading the instructor. Find out how with a copy of this seminar!

Order this seminar

Teaching an Online Course Developed by Others

While new instructors are often handed an existing syllabus to guide them, most are accustomed to having a good measure of control over class content, often tailoring it to fit teaching style and student needs. However, team-developed online courses are increasing in popularity, and as a result, instructors must be prepared to present content they had little role in assembling.

Utilizing standardized content effectively doesn’t mean that instructors are no longer able to make their own unique contributions to student learning. Teaching an Online Course Developed by Others was developed to help instructors and course designers effectively navigate the online course world together.

Order this seminar

The seminar identifies the advantages of “standardization,” while providing tips on how to overcome the difficulties inherent to teaching a course one did not originate. It also addresses the best ways for course designers to anticipate teaching issues arising from standardized content and provides tips on how faculty development and instructional design staff can better motivate and assist instructors teaching such courses.

In just 60 minutes you will learn:

• The advantages, disadvantages and potential challenges of teaching standardized courses
• Ways to make teaching more effective and satisfying
• How course developers can better anticipate teaching issues arising from standardized courses
• How to make personal contributions within the course’s “standardized content”

A key seminar for…

• Instructors
• Faculty
• Department Heads
• Instructional Designers
• Online Administrators
• And anyone involved in the online course experience.

Order this seminar