Designing Course Material for Online Learning

Need for Clarity
One of the advantages of using the Internet is the ability to make information available to students twenty-four hours a day. In essence, students no longer 'miss' handouts given out when they were absent or lose the syllabus with the due dates for their assignments. In fact, as mentioned above, one of the main uses of WebCT in English 302B was to post descriptions of all assignments, directions for completing assignments, the syllabus and schedule, model assignments, and links to more information on the topics the class was studying.

In addition, the Student Tracking feature in WebCT also gives instructors information about how often students were accessing material and which pages they were accessing, providing valuable feedback to the instructor on how engaged students are in the course. This was particularly true because I had the material in my course folder timed so that information about new assignments only appeared to the students when it came time to focus on the assignments. Usually I released material about one week before an assignment was due. I soon began to recognize certain patterns of student behavior, such as which students were looking at the material right away, which students did not look at the material until a few hours before the assignment was due, and which students never read all the material related to an assignment at all. Particularly in the case of model assignments, it seems that not all students bothered to look at the model and that the time spent on the model per student was relatively low.

Unfortunately, I did not keep a specific log of these patterns as I noticed them, but such patterns would be an interesting area for future research. Furthermore, as the information in WebCT represented the primary “text” for the class, it was important for the online material be as clear and detailed as possible, not only so that students would learn from the material, but also so that students would be able to complete successfully their assignments. Although we spent a great deal of time writing this material, we still found that the materials were sometimes still not detailed enough.

For example, one assignment asked students to complete an in-progress memo containing specific information on the progress of their research on one company. However, in retrospect, it seems clear that many students did not gain a clear enough understanding of what a progress report was from reading the instructional material, and many submitted assignments that were not, in fact, progress reports. Instead, these students turned in first drafts of their company research. In one journal entry, I noted:

In the days since we had class, I have gotten e-mail from students w/ questions about the stuff in WebCT. Once again, using WebCT is forcing me to be much more detail-oriented. Like, I forgot to make one small change in the online syllabus.

Teaching with a Course Management System

Designing Course Material for Online Learning (con't)