Guidelines and Advice: Development of Online Teaching Materials

Why are you going online?
Instructional Development
Checklists

Why are you going online?

Listed below are some reasons that may have encouraged or influenced you to think about going online:

• Time constraints
• Student demands
• Examples by colleagues
• Personal professional development
• Increased opportunities for collaborative learning
• Improve access to a more extensive array of learning resources
• Increase student control over the pace and pathways of their learning experience
• Desire for increased flexibility

Whatever has encouraged you to think about going online, it is an ideal time to re-examine your unit and make decisions about what content, topics and activities are important and what is unnecessary. You could ask yourself: what can you do online that you can't do in a traditional classroom? What can I replace so that I'm not just including additional modes/media of instruction? This document aims to make this process easier for you by considering the following issues.

What do you want your students to be able to do and know after they have completed your unit? What information, skills and competencies are necessary for them to move onto the next stage of their education, or indeed, to leave university? Developing student learning outcomes for your unit will help you to clarify your thinking in this area and will help your students to understand what is expected of them.

The following link provides you with some information on how to write learning outcome statements.

Following the development of student outcome statements (and consideration of how you will assess the outcomes!), think about which aspects of your unit will benefit from an online presence. For example, if developing communication skills is an identified outcome in the unit you teach, the use of an online Discussion Board would probably be a very worthwhile activity.

In summary, consider how you expect that the students' learning will change (and hopefully improve!) with the establishment of an online presence.

Students' needs and characteristics will affect the choices that you make regarding your online material. Maturity levels, preferred learning styles, demographics, computer literacy, hardware and software issues and access issues need to be considered when planning and developing online components of your unit.

For example, inexperience with computer navigation may cause students to lose themselves in the material unless clear guidelines/signposts are given. The use of large graphics, audio or video can impact on download time and as a consequence on the students. Students with a disability and students from varying cultural backgrounds also need to be considered. For example, it is good practice to label all graphic and media objects with a text description and ensure that appropriate colours are used.

Flinders University Inclusive Teaching Site provides some helpful information about this.

At UWA, most of the online components of units will probably be web-enhanced, i.e. some things are on the web but there are still regular face-to-face meetings and activities such as tutorials or laboratory classes. It is, nevertheless, important to plan how you want the online component of your unit to develop. Many academics start with minimal material or resources available online, and, when they are comfortable with the technology, progressively develop the online component of the unit. For example, the initial online material may be a powerpoint file of the lecture material plus links to sites of interest. The second step may be to include communication tools such as a Discussion Board and thirdly develop some online assessment items. Developing a strategy for your online unit will enable you to work to a realistic time-scale for resource development and implementation.

Your faculty CATLyst may be able to assist you with this.

Become aware of what resources are available for you to use at UWA. Successful implementation of an online component usually involves more than one person. For example, academics often seek the assistance of a graphics designer and/or programmer when preparing online teaching resources. Knowing what is already being done and what is available will prevent you falling into the trap of re-inventing the wheel or duplicating effort.

The following resource groups at UWA will be able to help:

• DUIT Multimedia
• Arts Multimedia
• Advance Education
• IAAF

Instructional Development

Once you have considered the issues listed above, it is time to think about how you are going to go about getting online. The following model identifies the major stages that you will pass through.

• What is the need and how can the instruction being planned meet the need?
• Consider your audience, the students
• Establish goals and outcomes

• Create content outline
• Review existing materials
• Organise and develop content - you may want to consult an instructional designer, educational developer or academic advisor. Contact your Faculty CATLyst:
• Consider and select the delivery method.

• Review goals and outcomes - are you achieving your goals and outcomes?
• Develop an evaluation strategy
• Collect and analyse data
• Personal reflections

Evaluation Links

• Project Handbook for Learning-Centred Evaluation of Computer-Faciliated Learning Projects in Higher Education
• Evaluation Matrix
• Basics of Designing a Questionnaire
• Guide to Web-based Resources re Evaluation
• Tom Reeves - papers on Evaluation

• Revise as necessary.

For example, break blocks of content into more manageable components, increase feedback, improve interaction. For some more information, see Other Instructional Advice.

Checklists

A checklist to enhance the quality of your online units is available to download as a word document:
Guide to Enhance the Quality in an Online Unit

Use the following checklist to consider what information and resources you might like to include in your online unit material.

** Unit Outline - There will be a template available on the CATL website.

The template will have online links for additional advice and will be for print and online unit outline documents.

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