Two Approaches to Course Revisions

Each week for the rest of May we’re going to look at some of our upcoming new and improved courses. In addition to our usual development of brand new courses, we’ve all been working on updating and revising some of our older online courses. Over the last six months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with two facilitators to revise two of our online courses: Classroom Management and Merging Educational Goals and Interactive Multimedia Projects.

Revising courses is part of our continuous improvement process. I’ve never designed a course that I think is perfect; I don’t actually think it’s possible to have a “perfect” course. Something can always be improved. Taking several months to work on these courses is our chance to push them to be even better than they were.

One thing I discovered is that these two courses required very different approaches to revision. For one course, no significant changes in content or organization were required; for the other course, a significant amount of reorganization and new content was required. One revision was like painting every room in a house and replacing the furniture; the other revision was more like stripping the house down to the frame and completely rebuilding it.

Classroom Management Changes

CM will have basically the same content after the revision as before it. The module organization is the same as it was, although some modules have fewer topics now. No new strategies were added; the participant feedback on the strategies has been very positive, so we didn’t want to change that. During the revision, we focused on two main areas of improvement: activities and research.

Activities

Many participants used the words “repetitive” and “busy work” to describe this course in their evaluations. Others complained that the work was too easy or a waste of time. We addressed these complaints by removing a number of lower level activities. Some activities were replaced with work that was more appropriate to a graduate-level course, but we also significantly trimmed the total number of activities.

We also worked to improve the quality of the activities. The original online course only included one scenario-based activity; the revised course includes four. These activities will give participants an opportunity to apply the principles and strategies of the course in a realistic situation. We also revised the group projects to be more collaborative (another common complaint from students). The revised group activities also take advantage of the wiki, a tool that wasn’t available in Blackboard for the original version of the course. Rather than having so many assignments in the forums (in Blackboard, this course had over 40 discussions), some reflection activities will use the blog as a personal learning journal. All told, nearly every activity in the entire course will benefit from at least minimal improvements.

Research

In the face-to-face version of the course, the research is an appendix at the end of the binder. In the original online version, that entire research appendix was placed in Module 1. Rather than bombarding students with research before it’s useful to them, the research is now integrated throughout the course. Research on motivation, for example, appears only in the module where motivation is covered and where participants can actually use the information. Participants will also need to use the research more in the revised course; a number of activities now ask students to cite research supporting their decisions.

Each research section has been reorganized and includes key points that highlight the main conclusions of the research presented. The research has been formatted for easy reading and skimming online. (If you’re interested in the research on how people read online, check out the F-Shaped Pattern and other articles on Writing for the Web by Jakob Nielsen.)

Merging Educational Goals and Interactive Multimedia Projects Changes

Classroom management doesn’t change nearly as quickly as any content related to technology, and that’s a big reason why the approach we used for CM didn’t work with this course. The last few years have seen an explosion of new tools for creating multimedia online, many of them free. These tools open up wonderful new possibilities for using multimedia in the classroom, and updating this course gave us the opportunity to explore these new tools.

The inclusion of new tools meant replacing a lot of the content from the original version of the course. Some content, like the explanation of storyboarding as part of the project planning process, was retained, but almost all of the activities are new. The previous textbook has been replaced with a new book: Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age.

Because so much of the course has changed, we’re treating this almost as a new course: we’ll conduct a field test in June and then not offer it again until January 2010 to allow time this fall for revisions based on the field test feedback. With so many new activities, I’m sure that some things won’t work right the first time. Fortunately, the continuous improvement process gives us a way to try new things while still having a chance to change later.

To give you just a small taste of the new online multimedia tools covered in the revised course, here’s one of the examples I created for the course. We really focused on real-world project-based learning, and I wanted an example that showed how students could use multimedia to communicate about issues that matter to them. (If you’re reading this post in email or an RSS reader, you may need to visit our blog to see the animated movie below.)

Don’t be fooled by how complicated this looks; this tool requires no programming skills. You pick your characters and setting, type your script, and xtranormal does the rest. They call it “text-to-movie.” The whole thing took me about an hour to complete, half of which I spent writing the script. (Although I did spend another 30 minutes researching hunger facts, but that doesn’t count.) With only a free account you don’t have as many choices for characters and settings, but I can see many ways to use this tool in education even without paying.

I think our participants will find the revised courses more engaging, usable, and relevant. I’m looking forward to hearing from all you facilitators when you teach these courses.