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.
