What makes a great self-paced online learning course?

To me, any kind of learning is about the interactivity that you are able to integrate into it. In traditional classrooms, there is a very strong teacher-student level of interaction and in the more modern face-to-face classrooms which follow the constructivist approach, the level of student-student interaction is high, along with continuing to have a great deal of teacher-student contact time. Although, in my mind, the level of student interaction with the content is not that great.
Because of the reduced role of teacher or student presence in a self-paced classroom, we need to find a way to increase interaction, but how can we do that? One way is to increase the interactivity of the material. Now, this doesn't mean that you need to go out and create the flashiest of flash apps, but it does mean that you need to 'chunk' your material and intersperse it with reflection questions, small quizzes and include some types of multi-media, whether it's youtube videos or .jpg images, and include many others. There will still be some types of traditional learning in the form of readings etc., but for the most part, students will increase their level of interaction with the material by taking it in in a different fashion than in days past. Whereas before they were listening to lengthy lectures, now they will be answering questions on their own and working content in an entirely new way, but on their own and creating their own meaning through that.

Now, self-paced learning doesn't need to completely erase all form of teacher-student and student-student interaction. Modern technology has helped us connect with peers and instructors in new and exciting ways with social media. There are many ways to work together, whether they are through private discussion forums on an LMS or over publicly available platforms such as twitter and facebook. Having this kind of network allows you to pose questions at large and get feedback or you can search for questions that have been posed by others in your situation and see how it was handled in the past and you can decide whether it would be relevant to your or not.

So, with a title like the one I provided, I'll bet you came here looking for a definite answer, but you won't get that here. It really depends on what the learning outcomes are for the course and who the audience is. Different strokes for different folks is one way to put it.

Is any one particular way you like to interact with your self-paced online courses? Do you find most courses you do boring and have some ideas for how to jazz them up a little? Let me know in the comments section.

Developing a workshop training course for university students in Moodle

After being with Carleton for nearly a month, I've just been given my first Instructional Design related project. Thus far, I've been mainly dealing with helping instructors with the Moodle courses and looking at other training option for getting everyone transferred over from the old WebCT system. While those were challenging in their own right, I'm pretty excited about this opportunity that I've been given.

What I've been asked to do is to develop a workshop type of independent study course that will help students succeed in their studies. There is current training currently being offered F2F, but putting the information online will be a first for this department. They are looking to start with just one workshop, but over time there are at least five different workshops that will be going online.

I met with the subject-matter expert this morning briefly to outline the capabilities and limitations of Moodle and to discuss what her expectations are for the workshop. She gave me a pretty good picture of what she is looking for. I gave her a few questions to think about so that we can create strong learning objectives and expected outcomes and we'll meet again next week to discuss further.

I've done some reading and I'm trying to decide what the best strategy to take for this type of course could be. I looked at problem-based learning to allow students to work through some issues and transfer the knowledge gained to the problem, however, this will be an independent course and I could see that it may be difficult to manage without more instructor support. I also looked at cognitive strategy instruction, and while this does seem to be a good fit for it, it may pose a challenge for first-year students who aren't really cognitively aware of when they should put these strategies into place.

I'll follow up with further posts as we move along in the process, but if anybody has any insight they wish to share, please provide them in the comments section below.