Advice on creating online classes

October 7, 2007 3:18 PM

Help me design and teach an amazing online college course.

I am putting together to teach an online course for my school, and I need some help. I've never taught online before, and I want to put together a great proposal and a great course that will be innovative, fun, and user-friendly. Here are the details:

--The class is a sophmore level Women's Studies class, "Women in Western Culture." It will have max. 25 students, some of which will be WS majors or minors. However, the class fulfills a basic general education requirement, so there will be people not familiar with (and probably some not interested in) the subject matter.

--It will be offered during the winter session: Dec. 17 to Jan. 8th, the 8th being the "final exam" day. Three days off: Dec 24-25, Jan 1. So, a total of 14 "class days." Of course, since it is web delivered, there will not be any actual meetings.

--My proposal and syllabus is due Oct. 15.

So, my questions:

1) How much reading should I assign daily? The students taking this understand that it is very compressed, but I don't want to overload them. What is a reasonable amount of material for a college sophmore to read each night in a self-directed course? I'm thinking anywhere from 40-60 pages, at max, and depending on the kind of material.

2) How to best manage discussion? The university has various interfaces that I could use that feature threaded message boards. I was thinking that each day I could provide them with a list of questions and require each person to make at least one post on the discussion board.

Or, I could assign different students to make "presentations" and start each day off with student questions and require everyone to respond to those. Is there an easy to manage that? What about time limits (say, discussion starts at noon, ends at 5pm, something like that?).

3) Is there other technology that would be better/easier/more fun for the students to work with, such as a community blog? If so: recommendations for how to set it up, manage it, what site to go with, etc.

4) What kinds of assignment will be most helpful? I'm thinking of daily responses to the readings -- perhaps something like 250 words, due at 10am. In addition, probably a midterm paper and a final essay. Is there an easy way to manage quizzes? Other suggestions for types of assignments that might be inventive, fun, and helpful to the students?

5) Other types of web technology that would be useful to incorporate, such as student wikis? If so, any recommendations on how to incorporate them into the course or assignments that could be designed around them?

I know this is all rather broad and vague. I've never taught nor taken an online course before, but I'm very excited to try. Any advice covering these topics or anything else that I have left out is much appreciated.

posted by papakwanz to education (13 comments total)

check out an email list called "techrhet."
posted by mecran01 at 3:52 PM on October 7, 2007

Sophomore. Normally I wouldn't nitpick, but you can't make this mistake as the teacher.
posted by smackfu at 4:06 PM on October 7, 2007

As a former IT major, I am very familiar with online courses. All of my courses had web components, even if we did meet in person.

First, you have to remember that many people take online courses because other factors in their life make it harder to take courses in person. Courses may only be offered at one location, at the wrong time of day, or the person might not even be in your town... or time zone. Online courses are like Academic TiVo. You can move the class to a time that works best for you.

Personally, I know that I took several classes online because I was working 40+ hours a week, carried more than average class load, worked on school projects such as redesigning the school's website and edited the school paper. So, it was easier to log in and quickly take my Psychology quiz at 3am than try to fit it in my 'regular' schedule.

My suggestions:

- Students who are used to online courses are generally used to looser deadlines. To say something is due on Tuesday, generally is taken to mean that I have from 12am until 11:59pm on Tuesday to turn something in. I know that if one of my courses had a window for discussion from 12pm-5pm, I'd miss it every day. I'd be in class then off to work.

- That being said, set firm deadlines. Every class I've taken that had "Zombies", that is deadlines that everyone ignored and that would not die, ended with everyone in the class turning in 75% or more of the work with the last few hours of the last day. Unless you really want to spend the 8th-12th grading posts online, take off points for 'late' work.

- Many of your e-learning packages have settings so that forums, assignments, and quizzes can be automatically deployed. So if your assignments go live at midnight, you don't actually have to be up to do it.

- Start daily discussions, and require everyone to post daily. Make sure that everyone knows that "I agree" isn't an acceptable answer, but a rebuttal/response to someone else's reply is. While you make sure that everyone posts to the new question every day, don't close/kill/archive the old discussions. Let people continue a discussion they feel strongly about.

- Don't just use the reading as a source for questions. Current Events & interesting web sources can add a lot to a course.

- Group assignments are very hard to get done with online courses. Avoid them, especially in a short course like this.

- Start an "off-topic" area. Our teachers used to refer to this as the "Coffee Shop" area. You'll be surprised how many good topics for regular discussion will come out of here.

- Most of your "e-learning" systems such as Blackboard or Moodle have quiz builders built in. Moodle also has student wikis, journals, blog, and forums.

Here's a online slideshow about Moodle that I made for one of my professors to show at a conference.
posted by aristan at 4:20 PM on October 7, 2007

I'm taking the fourth in a series of online classes at the moment. I wish the folks who developed these classes had come here for hints the way you did! I'd second a lot of what aristan says above.

Periodic deadlines which are benchmarks to a final project are very helpful; they keep students from doing all their work at the last minute. However, there are a lot of things that can be done at any time, and I always appreciated broad deadlines for, say, the final draft of a paper. But making me turn in an outline by a certain date kept me on track.

I like fast feedback, so having a way to respond quickly to student questions is great; the best teachers I've had keep a discussion board area just for questions, and monitor it as much as possible.

And can I put in a vote against the awful Blackboard software, please? It feels like 1991 in there; the interface is primitive and clunky.
posted by TochterAusElysium at 5:29 PM on October 7, 2007

I've taught several online college courses over the past 8 years, which doesn't necessarily mean I know all that much about it, of course. With the compressed time format in this case, as you make reading assignments, I'd consider each weekday roughly equivalent to a week in a normal semester and assign no more reading per day than you would in a week for a comparable in-person class -- if that much. Less is fine.

A daily 250-word written response (so long as it is informal) seems OK. That's one single-spaced page.

One thing I've learned a fair amount about is successful discussions. Here's what I do that works well (and it's still evolving): I provide structured questions, and yes, a deadline for responding. All deadlines for all work are 11:59 pm, by the way. I require X number of discussion posts per week (you could do X per day), and I specify the types of posts: one must be an answer to one of my questions that no other student has answered yet -- this prevents "coattailing" or coasting. One post must be a substantive reply to another student's post, and I spell out exactly what does and doesn't constitute substantive response.

Discussion evaluation: I use a mix of "automatic" points and qualitative assessment. Example: your weekly discussion contribution is worth 15 points. You get 3 automatic points for each of your three required posts = 9 points. The other 6 points are as follows: 0-2 points for attendance, 0-2 points for interaction, 0-2 points for insight.

I do urge you to use a message/discussion board if you can; one of the great virtues of online instruction, which makes up for some of the frustrations, is that all students can interact, and I've found that, with some guidance, the quality of and enthusiasm for discussion are greatly enhanced by the asynchronous not-in-person circumstances. Also, I allow and encourage students to generate questions as part of discussion, but I don't require them to do so until the last portion of the course (if then). That way, they know enough content to come up with some relevant issues, and they have your models of successful questions to pattern theirs after.
posted by FelliniBlank at 6:20 PM on October 7, 2007

er, one double-spaced page. Duh, English major.
posted by FelliniBlank at 6:21 PM on October 7, 2007

I feel that a daily 250 word response is an outrageous ammount of work. Per day!? I have never had this much work in any of my classes and I am a junior who has been to two different colleges.

I feel that a longer responce once a week or twice a week makes much more sense.
posted by thebrokenmuse at 7:39 PM on October 7, 2007

I too teach using the clunky WebCT; it is clunky but it's all we've got... and I'm not building my own.

I usually require an initial 250-500 word response by mid-week, but then also responses to other student's posts by the end of the week.

If I don't set firm deadlines, they all try to respond 10 minutes before the end of the week.
posted by answergrape at 8:00 PM on October 7, 2007

FelliniBlank: I'd love to see the way you break down and describe the different types of posts. I would, of course, give you credit in my own syllabus if I use anything based on your material. Would you mind posting them here or emailing them to me at [e-mail] ?
posted by papakwanz at 9:12 PM on October 7, 2007

TheBrokenMuse: 250 words isn't much. Your reply about how 250 words is outrageous contained nearly 60 words. That's nearly 25% of the way there.
posted by aristan at 9:14 PM on October 7, 2007

Yeah, 250 word response to a reading is not too hard if you are clear with them about what kind of response you want. (eg, 1 paragraph recapping what they thought the main point of the reading was, 1 paragraph on an objection they would make to a substantial claim of the author, 1 paragraph on how the author might reply to their objection.) It's like a problem set in a math course. Just don't let them think of it as a stream-of-consciousness "journal" for their "personal reaction", or you will get pages of garbage and they will regard it as a waste of time.

Is your course meant to be all the material of a full semester in just two weeks? That's wild. You should definitely have them turn in short assignments every day, so they stay on top of the readings and actually devote some thought to it every day. (Or: should definitely do as close to this as possible, given that you have to grade the things. I would grade on as simplified a scale as possible to make it easier for you to keep up.)

Especially if the bulk of your course is short assignments like that, my inclination would be not to accept late work at all, but to let them drop the lowest grade. That way they get their one emergency day when they couldn't do it, and you don't get an avalanche of these little papers on the last day (from people who have figured out that if you're taking off n% per day, there's an optimal number of days to wait and then hash them all out together without thinking).

Also, about the online/technology aspect: your university must have a department that handles this. Be sure to touch base with them to get advice specific to your uni, sample courses, etc.
posted by LobsterMitten at 9:55 PM on October 7, 2007

I've never taught online before, and I'm probably not the most qualified person to answer a question along these lines. However, I would suggest doing the reading and assignments along with your students so you can gauge whether or not you're assigning too much work. You may also consider signing up for an online course for yourself so you can get a better understanding of the mechanics of a successful course. Best of luck.
posted by MaxK at 10:31 PM on October 7, 2007

What papakwanz is talking about is not a regular 15-week course but an accelerated "intersession" course that lasts only a few weeks total. In that configuration, each day is equivalent to almost a week in a normal semester, and so requiring not-quite a week's worth of work per day is not an outrageous expectation. Having a heavy reading and writing load and sweating like a stevedore every day just comes with the territory when you sign up for one of these ultra-fast concentrated classes.

And yes, I'll dig up a sample of my discussion guidelines and e-mail them to you, papak.
posted by FelliniBlank at 2:27 PM on October 9, 2007