Insights

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Background

Content

Design

Courses

CLASS Courses

General CLASS™ Insights

Internet Realities

Developing on line courses is a lot harder than anyone thinks.
Modification can be very difficult.
You can’t make an Internet course for everyone.

Administration

Be flexible.
Have a common mission with technologists and designers – the mission may change over time, but it should be common.
When teams are formed – they all need to sit down in a group and become cohesive.
Consider putting everyone in the same physical location - engineers, designers, artists, quality assurance. Communication becomes an issue when people are in different spaces.
Be clear about who is in charge and try to have everyone work for the same people. That helps to get away from the – “I did my part so it’s not my problem”.
Define the production roles in the beginning and stick with them.
Be clear about roles and responsibilities up front including the decision-making process and who is controlling the different pieces.
Develop a rigorous framework and work within the constraint of specifications and standards. This includes determining what ‘good enough to go’ means.
Going for quantity regardless of quality means you will suffer.
Decide in advance of production what operating systems, browsers and even screen resolution to support for course production. Decide early on if it is viable to do this across platforms.
Technology considerations must be decided early – before development begins.
- What is the best environment in which to build
- What third party providers would play appropriately together
- Will content be a) all online, b) on CD or DVD, or c) textbook supplements will be used.

Courses and Course Development

Know your audience and their environment.
The web is not the place for a lot of text.
Establish and maintain a 'style guide' for content, presentation and delivery.
Online course presentation must be a happy medium between ‘high tech’, ‘bells and whistles’ and appropriate use of such that does not distract from the content.
Standardize the navigation interface.
Textbook free online courses have an advantage, especially when the courses are being used outside the United States.
Schools ask how well the students will perform on standardized tests. Data on effectiveness would be most helpful for course improvement, sales and marketing.
Build course content with target goals and let the curriculum build from those goals.
It is a challenge to make online courses adaptable – due in large part to state standards.
There are technical issues that make math and science courses somewhat problematic, but technology is gradually taking care of the issues.
You can’t assume a student or school has access to any materials that you don’t provide. This makes science labs difficult. Schools are increasingly requiring a science lab for student credit. There are problems with shipping, biological and chemical material outside of the United States.
Pointing to online labs created by others is problematic because the links change and commercial use permissions can be difficult to obtain.
Instructions need to be very precise for computer scored tests.
Student feedback is very important and very difficult. Students need to be asked many questions. Some way to evaluate the answers is necessary. Considerable feedback is necessary – explain why something is or isn’t the right answer. There is only so much a computer can do for a non-quantifiable answer.
Web based courses should make pedagogical use of the web’s interactive and multimedia capacities with text being integrated as necessary rather than being the primary focus of the course.
The people developing the content and pedagogy aspects of the course need to become intimately familiar with an existing online course (preferably in his/her area of expertise). They need to be familiar with how technology is used to instruct (e.g., pop-ups, links, FLASH™, video, audio).
Course designers need to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of what technology can do – i.e., how long it takes the student’s computer to load a video, what it takes to use FLASH™.

Dissemination – Distribution

The seller or purveyor of online courses needs to participate in the school setups. The site may require setup work on their network and computers prior to course delivery. This site visit must be done in advance of installation to understand the customer environment. The connections must be tested prior to teacher and student use. They are both used to technology that works, like books.
Schools need good onsite management to keep the courses going, and the students need to be prepared for the courses.
Models for course dissemination/distribution include:
- Site licenses were schools, districts or states have the right to use as many of the courses with unlimited support, as they want
- The provision of courses to intermediate educational units such as Nebraska’s Educational Service Units
- The provision of courses to virtual school students at a per enrollment price
- A straight retail model
There are as many registration processes as there are virtual schools. The basic types of data needed in registration include:
- Date to meet federal and state requirements
- Billing data
- Data to activate the students in courses
- Marketing data
Key to commercial success is repeatability and scalability.
Business and academic institutions operate on different time frames; the lead time for sales is much longer in academic institutions, there are cycles of budgets and a lack of discretionary money in budgets.
It is important to understand academic and business differences and build the right bridges between the two cultures; it is not an easy task.
State wide consortium and large school districts currently can better afford online courses than rural schools.
From a business perspective, in the short term, sustainability does not come from selling the courses themselves, but from the value added services to set up the schools. Courses themselves aren’t enough to keep a business going. It is important for the distributor to last long enough and build platforms so it is possible to make course modifications cheaply enough to offer the next cycle.

Materials and Diversity

Access to materials is much more difficult for a profit making organization than for an educational or other non-profit. If one is not careful, permissions drive the content causing designers, for example, to have to limit literature selections to those already on-line. This eliminates most anything modern – for example you could use Shakespeare, but no Toni Morrison.
Seek the copyrighted permissions very early in the course design process.
Guidelines for permissions for online use are still in flux.
It is useful to have guidelines on diversity as it relates to content, visuals, etc. They may need to deal with the concern that a conservative home school market may not be happy with too much diversity in content compared to publics.
Library of Congress online materials stopped at the late 1960’s.
Schedule time to get permission to use copyrighted materials. It may take up to six months to get approvals and payments made. Permissions become much more problematic when dealing with a profit making entity. Permissions granted to a non-profit must be renegotiated when sold by a for-profit entity. This can lead to major course revisions when such permissions are not granted.

Technical Areas

Technology changes frequently. Browsers change, tools change, the environment in which they are used change. Maintaining multiple versions of a course or tools can add greatly to development issues.
Combining research and development with production environments is almost always problematic – yet is done quite frequently because of financial and time constraints.
Don’t expect to go directly from research to commercial sales.
There are many, many limitations when courses are designed for both the PC and MAC platforms along with all browsers – not to mention each platform and browser upgrade. It becomes ‘bleeding edge’ for the wrong reasons.
Inventing technology yourself can cause problems. It may be better to find a third party technology and stick with it.
Don’t try to use the latest technology for a saleable product – most customers will not have access to the latest technology.
It is not viable to use media rich, high band width materials in an online course – broadband access is still limited.
The help desk and quality assurance should either work closely together or be the same – the help desk is invaluable to resource to quality assurance.
Use well supported media creation tools.
Minimize ‘special’ requirements. They typically will require support to ensure continued service.
Optimize images, movies, etc., for the Web.
Document, document, document…

Students

Online education is not for every student.
Internet courses are best for small groups and self motivated students.
Some successful online students are those who are not successful in other settings, i.e., those who are shy or not competitive.

Teachers

Teacher training is required to be sure they buy into the concept and are comfortable with the technology. All classroom teachers are not online teachers and vise versa.
Teachers must be comfortable with the content of the courses they are teaching.
It is best if the teacher of the course is part of development for the content.
Content for online courses should not be from only one author.
Not all content is best suited for online delivery.
Online education is not for every teacher.
Teachers need to experience the course from a student perspective prior to teaching the course.
Students are not good about reading directions – access and navigation need to be easy and apparent to a semi computer literate user.
Teacher compensation is an issue – how does the pay compare to classroom time?

What should a new e-teacher know?

Know your limitations – not everyone is a distance educator.
Know your students – not everyone is a distance learner.
Know the course – but remember students will experience the content differently.
Students will have technical difficulties – so will teachers.

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