Over the last five weeks, I have been planning and building an online course intended as a guided, five-week, professional development course for faculty about the benefits and uses of ePortfolios in higher education. I built this course using our Canvas LMS and took advantage of many of the visual design elements that are part of the CidiLabs DesignPLUS integration with Canvas. Through this process, I modified some of the standard layouts to include enhanced navigation elements and module progress bars within each module.
Module Content
Each module within the course was designed to have a standard look, feel, and functional structure which provides a consistent experience for learners throughout the five-week course. The first page in each module begins with a module overview that contains the module objective, purpose, materials list, and brief assignment list for the module.
Any readings or videos for that module were also listed and linked to from the module page.
Online Videos
The second page in each module contained the actual course content for that module. Usually, this included one or more embedded videos from publicly available sources and also contained direct URLs to each video for students who needed or preferred that option. To help ensure accessibility, I only used videos from sources like Kaltura or YouTube which provide 85% or better captions. When a page required multiple videos, like in Week 2 when participants were asked to learn about multiple ePortfolio or blogging platforms, I used enhanced navigation items like accordions or tabs to help provide some organization to the list of videos.
Assignments and Discussions
In order to help assess the learners in this program, each module also contained either a short discussion board requirement or an actual graded assignment. Since this course is just a professional development style course, none of the assignments were really more than basic completion requirements. However, each discussion or other assignment existed within the module structure right after the course content pages.
Module Summary
At the conclusion of each module, participants were presented with a summary that briefly highlighted all the content that was presented in the module and listed all of the items that they should have completed within that module before reaching this page. This sandwich approach used the Overview to introduce what the participants were about to learn while the Summary reviewed what the participants hopefully just learned.
OSCQR Self-Evaluation
To help determine if this course would be considered a quality online course, it needs to be evaluated objectively against a nationally recognized set of standards. In this case, I was asked to use the Open SUNY Course Quality Review (OSCQR) rubric which is now made available through a partnership with the Online Learning Consortium (OLC). Other quality rubrics exist like Quality Matters (QM), but Baylor University choose to adopt the OSCQR rubric so I was fortunate to use this same rubric when evaluating my online course. This rubric consists of 50 standards in the following categories:
- Course Overview & Information
- Course Technology & Tools
- Design & Layout
- Content & Activities
- Interaction
- Assessment & Feedback
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Open in new tab I evaluated my online course using the descriptors provided for each of the standards (e.g. Standard #1 – Course includes Welcome and Getting Started content). My course began with a Start Here page that included a short welcome video, a welcome message, contact information, and a list of next steps that students should review before proceeding with the course.
Action Plan
At the conclusion of the OSCQR rubric evaluation, I realized that I had satisfied almost all of the basic requirements. Many of the items are Not Applicable in several sections for a non-graded faculty professional development course. However, overall, I think this course scored very well! It helped being aware of the OSCQR standards before building the course, so I could plan on consistent layouts and was able to design the course from the beginning knowing how it would be evaluated at the end.
The only item requiring Major Revisions would be to provide grading rubrics and exemplars. Since this was a guided professional development course, I’ll confess that I didn’t bother at all with developing grading rubrics. I could have potentially produced a standardized discussion rubric and a standardized ePortfolio post rubric, but I am not a big fan of generic rubrics. I would much rather have a very specific rubric for each assignment with categories and weights specific to that assignment. In a subsequent revision of this course, I would probably take the time to develop detailed rubrics for each of the five assignments. In addition, since this would be the first time that I facilitate an online course like this, I am aware that I don’t really have exemplars from previous participants to show to current participants. While I can certainly show some of my own work as examples, I would prefer not to hold myself up as the exemplar. This would be something that I would most definitely include in future revisions after I have had a chance to collect some exemplars from my own faculty participants in the course.
Although I have links to all external resources and videos, I need to go back and create a References section to cite sources in each module. As I was building this course, providing a separate references section was not something that I was really thinking about since each video was linked and essentially contained an internal citation through the linked URL. For all of the major readings and weekly videos, those citations were listed in the Overview screen, but a more formal references list in APA format would probably be a good addition at the conclusion of each module. That would be a relatively easy fix and was scored as a Moderate Revision, but it would take a bit of time to produce the list of references.
All of the other areas that needed improvement were marked as Minor Revisions. For example, it would be good in a future update to expand the assignment descriptions. I relied upon knowing that I’d be meeting each week with the participants over Zoom to help explain the assignments each week so I only included a fairly brief assignment description. While these descriptions are probably sufficient by themselves, they really need the explanation in the synchronous Zoom sessions to be ideal. In addition, I would like to include additional self-checks in the various modules. Currently, only two of the five modules have self-checks, and it would be very easy to add a self-check to the other three modules as well. Finally, I would like to expand the Syllabus area to include more thorough descriptions of each of the assignments.