Development Services
Professional Development | Quality Assurance and Assessment | Multimedia Development | Instructional and Organizational Design
Professional Development
We are committed to ensure instructors are prepared to teach quality online courses and offer a variety of services, including consulting on instructional design and development and facilitation and management of online courses. Instructors work one-on-one with instructional designers and technologists to develop their course and then have the opportunity to receive pedagogical and technological assistance on a variety of topics to teach the course. Instructors can take workshops that provide strategies for engaging learners and ensuring interaction using technology, including through a course management system and webinars.
Visit our online teaching workshops page for free sessions currently available.
Quality Online Course Design Using Quality Matters
Educational Innovations is committed to work with UW Madison faculty to develop quality online courses. There are many factors that affect the quality of an online course, including course design, course delivery, course content, technology, institutional infrastructure, faculty readiness for online teaching, and student readiness for online learning and support.
One tool Educational Innovation is using to focus on one of these factors, course design, is Quality Matters. Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty-centered, peer review process designed to certify the quality of online and blended courses. The QM rubric consists of eight General Review Standards and 41 Specific Review Standards selected because the research, national standards, and instructional design principles have found these elements to positively impact student learning.
UW-Madison subscribes to Quality Matters so instructors can use the research-based rubric as a guide to develop their course and participate in either an informal or formal peer review process to receive constructive feedback to improve course design. The annotations provided in the QM Rubric are quite extensive and deal with the nuances in each standard, issues of interpretation and examples of good and poor practice. Following is a summary of the rubric standards: http://www.qmprogram.org/rubric. For the complete rubric with annotations or information on informal or formal QM course reviews and any future training opportunities, contact Karen Skibba, kskibba@dcs.wisc.edu.
Multimedia
To assist faculty with online course development, we offer a variety of services including consultation in design and development as well as multimedia support. We work with faculty to create multimedia components that help them meet their course objectives, including
- Lecture Capture
- Video Services (Filming and Editing)
- Audio Services (Recording and Editing)
- Podcasting
- Narrated PowerPoints
- Interactive Case Studies and Scenarios and other Instructional Tools
- ADA Accessible Course Materials
- Graphic enhancements
Please note that our services are not limited to this list. We are always looking for innovative ways to work with faculty and to deliver content to students.
Instructional and Organizational Design
Teaching online involves more than just transferring your in-class documents from print to digital form and learning how to put them up on a course management system. The dynamics of an online course depend heavily on the way course material is organized and presented. The pace of the course on a self-paced yet controlled schedule, the interaction of student with content, instructor with student, and sometimes students with students in meaningful ways, are all significant factors in a successful online course.
While technology plays a major role in facilitating the mechanics of delivering a course online, the ultimate success depends on the interaction of all elements properly selected and integrated together. Here are brief tips on “How [not] to Design an Online Course”.
Following are a few strategies that the Educational Innovations team utilizes to help faculty with online course design.
Quality Matters
Quality Matters emphasizes that it is important to employ a deliberate design process when developing online or blended courses. This process includes purposefully selecting instructional methods, content, activities, and assessments that will help learners acquire skills and knowledge. Then it is important to organize instruction to develop coherent learning units that can easily be understood by the learner.
The most important concept in Quality Matters is alignment: "Critical course elements work together to ensure that students achieve the desired learning outcomes." Quality Matters takes a holistic view of the course and research has found that students learn best when learning objectives ALIGN with the assessments, resources and materials, interaction, and technology.
More details on the rubric and alignment are available at the Quality Matters Website: http://www.qmprogram.org/rubric.
Backward Design Process
In the Backward Design Process, instructors design their courses based upon the following three questions:
- What is worthy and requiring of understanding?
- What is evidence of understanding?
- What learning experiences and teaching promote understanding, interest, and excellence?
For more information, go to http://www4.uwsp.edu/education/lwilson/curric/backdesignoverview.htm
ADDIE Model
When developing a course, it is important to follow an instructional design model in order to thoroughly think through important questions regarding course design and delivery. The most common model used by instructional design experts is the ADDIE model, which stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate.
- Analyze: Pre-planning stage to consider understanding the BIG picture and identifying what you want to preserve and transform in your course redesign.
- Design: Planning stage to identify learning activities and key course components.
- Development: Creation of the learning activities, assessment plan, and content for your course.
- Implementation: Delivery stage when you are actually teaching your course.
- Evaluation: Determining the effectiveness of the course and planning for future improvements.
To learn more, each of these steps are explained in the following article: http://raleighway.com/addie/