The “Online Teaching, Design, and Development” Course

Abstract

“Online Teaching, Design and Development” was created as a 5-week instructor-facilitated online course to support the instructors at Kansas State University (K-State) in creating online courses and whole degree programs in the distance mode. This dual-track course accommodated both K-12 and university-level instructors, from on- and off-campus. This chapter describes how the course was conceptualized, structured, and deployed. This describes the curricular design and strategies; the creation of the various digital learning objects, the creation of the rubric evaluation structure, the assignment design, and the interactivity plan; and the course housekeeping management. Faculty members (learners) were recruited from both main and branch campuses at K-State and from other institutions of higher education using the Axio™ Learning/Course Management System (L/CMS), which was showcased in the curriculum. The lessons learned from the four years that this course has been offered (twice annually at minimum) include insights on the challenges of learner retention, the importance of learner incentives and record-keeping, and curriculum design and evolution. The curriculum was structured to have faculty build parts of an online course as they proceeded, so that all academic work done was also professional academic work towards building their online course(s). This chapter describes an online learning design structure that was sufficiently open to accommodate a variety of domain fields and teaching approaches and that encouraged peer support among faculty in the co-building of their respective courses.