My Quest to Online Teaching is coming to an end. I have completed the majority of the requirements for the final course "Producing Digital Content." I have developed the first three lessons of my course "Service with a Smile; A Student Worker's Guide to Good Customer Service," created the syllabus, orientation, and announcement  pages, and evaluated my course using the Blackboard Exemplary Course Rubric.

This Certificate has allowed me to provide support for student who need customer service training skills by developing an online course that can give them these skills. I have learned a great deal of information over the years as an Office Manager and even more now as an Admission Counselor and I am excited to get the chance to share these skills with others.

As I have explained to you before, I took online classes for the majority of my undergrad experience. I was always curious about how these courses were designed. Because of this certificate program I have been able to experience the facilitators view by constructing a course in a learning management system (Blackboard). Within this course structure I included a course menu that supports course structure and instructional design. I was able to upload YouTube videos to my course, Instant Messenger, and links to readings from the web. My discussion board focuses on student-student interactions by encouraging weekly postings and responses to two of their classmates. I have created quizzes and surveys in the Blackboard system to assess the students learning. Learners will be able to connect with me through virtual office hours, via Collaborate. They will also be able to contact me via email and through the course discussion board. Every student will immediately know what is expected of them by reading the Syllabus and Orientation during the first week of class.

I am confident I was able to meet best practices in the development of my online course.

Make no mistake, this was not an easy task, but I am very proud of the work I have done for this certificate program and I can't wait to complete the course on my on as an Independent Study.  I will never stop learning, because learning never stops.

Producing Digital Content

Producing Digital ContentIt's hard to believe that this is the final chapter of my "Quest to Online Teaching." I am eager to see the finished product of my course I created last semester, "Service with a Smile; A Student Worker's Guide to Good Customer Service."

As I have stated previously my current job is centered around good customer service skills and it is also part of my job to teach new student worker's who are under my leadership not only how to complete the job, but how to also demonstrate good customer service skills while completing the job.

The course I developed helps students to learn the basics of good customer service. It is important to have good customer service skills, because we want our students to be the best they can be in the class room and also in the workforce. I am hoping my course will help students to embody these skills throughout their college career and beyond.

My expectations for this course is to learn how to put the course I created into a successful online course shell in which students will be able to use for years to come. I don't have a great imagination when it comes to seeing the end product so I am looking forward to the step by step design of this course. According to the syllabus and course schedule each week we will be adding different design elements from our blueprint of our courses.This will make the process easier for us to learn, by giving us the opportunity to work on one element at a time.

There will also be plenty of help along the way from both my peers and my instructor. Since we are in groups we will be commenting on our group members design process each week and helping him or her to improve on the design. This will help with  making sure things are understandable from a students prospective.




 The only prior experience I have with web design is my blogs and portfolios I have completed for this certificate. I didn't  know how to create them before starting this certificate, so I am confident that I will be able to create my course shell with the same professionalism and understanding. I am a very technology savvy so I am positive in my ability to learn how to create the course shell from the teacher's perspective. I also have tons of experience taking online classes. I think this will help me with understanding what the students are looking for while enrolled in an online class. I believe the experience listed above is enough to successfully complete my design process.

I plan to get my design for the week done as early as possible, so that my peers are able to give me feedback as early as possible. If I have any trouble understanding how I should complete an assignments, I will have time to ask the necessary questions and still complete the requirements. This will also give me a chance to make corrections from my peers feedback, if I need to and get started on the next weeks assignments. I believe having a plan of how I am going to complete my work will help me in the long run throughout this course.

I am really looking forward to completing this course and seeing my course design finished product. I am also looking forward to how having this Online Teaching Certificate will develop my career. 

Service with a Smile; A Student Worker’s Guide to Good Customer Service

Designing Online Courses

In the beginning of this semester I was tasked with figuring out the type of course I would like to design. I blogged about two different ideas in which I thought would make great online courses. The course I came up with was a variation of my first idea "Service with a Smile; A Student Worker's Guide to Good Customer Service."

I believed this would be the perfect course for me to design because of my background with customer service and working with student worker's in the Office of Admission. So many students do not know what good customer service is and this course is designed to help them develop good customer service skills. Below is the design process I learned throughout this course that has helped me to design my course and will help me through the next course "Producing Digital Content."


Deciding what type of online class was only one part of the design process, but there was so much more thought put into it after the type of course was decided. I needed to understand what I wanted the students to know after the class ended (course objectives), describe the setting in which it would be taught, describe the likely learners and decide whether I wanted the classes to be taught completely online or as a hybrid course. These decisions along with my lesson outline were all part of my course overview.

1.    Identify a customers need for help and guidance and assist with those needs without being prompted.

2.    Demonstrate actions that show they care about the customer’s experience with their company.

3.    Identify excellent internal service

4.    Evaluate one’s own customer service skills and identify ways in which they can be improved.

5.    Identify opportunities for success and ways in which these opportunities can be applied in their career.

Not only should there be course objectives, but there should also be objectives for each lesson. It is important for your students to understand what they are expected to learn each week.

This course will be taught in a community college or a four-year university, it is intended for undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in developing customer service related skills to gain employment in a customer service environment, the course will be delivered on a local course management system such as WebCT, and it will be a fully online course.

Learner and Non-Learner Issues

 When designing an online course, it is very important to consider issues that will affect both the learner and the non-learner and possible ways to address these concerns. Some issues that may affect the learner are student proficiency with technology, varied student experience with online courses, and netiquette and cultural differences. Some issues that may affect the non-learner are content changes and making sure material is up to date, broken link web resources, technologies, having funds to purchase development tools, multiple learning styles of students, having time to grade discussion posts, blogs, and papers, and teaching for the first time. These are all issues I have considered and prepared for throughout my course design. 

Assessments

Assessments are an important part of the learning process for many students because it is their way of determining their success in the class. Without assessments students can't demonstrate what they have learned throughout the course. There are two types of assessments which need to be utilized in a course, formative and summative.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are used throughout the course to give the student practice in using new ideas. During my course these will be used in the form of discussion questions, quizzes, and blogs.

Summative Assessments

Summative assessments are used during the course to determine if the student has met the learning objectives throughout the course. The types of summative assessments I plan to use are a mid-term exam, final exam, and the final paper. All of these assessments will help me to determine the learners understanding of what was taught throughout the course.

Interactions

Throughout the course I must also make sure their is multiple types of student interaction. Some of the interaction needed is student-content interaction, student-student interaction, and student-instructor interaction.

The student-content interaction I have included throughout my course are the readings, videos, discussion boards, the blog, final paper, and exams. The student-student interaction included in this course are the introduction, icebreaker, and the discussion board. The student-instructor interaction included throughout this course are the course questions discussion, the grading of assignments, emails sent to the instructor and the discussion board.





With the use of a design worksheet and putting all the above knowledge together I was able to design my first three lessons for my course "Service with a Smile; A Student Worker’s Guide to Good Customer Service." The design worksheets are an easy way to understand your lesson for each week. This includes the lesson title, the lesson objectives, the resources for the lesson and what learning objective they address, the learning activities for the lesson, and the assessments for the lesson. Having these items on one design worksheet makes the design process a little easier to follow. It is important that this is done for each lesson so nothing is missed in delivering the online course.
 

 Conclusion

As you can see there are numerous steps in designing an online course. Including developing course objective, lesson objective, learner and non-learner issues, assessments, both formative and summative, and student interactions. My course "Service with a Smile; A Student Worker's Guide to Good Customer Service" is a design in progress. I am hoping I will be able to develop this course to its full potential and help an enormous amount of students become good customer service professionals.