OMDE 603: DE Course Design and Faculty Agency

The most significant difference between f2f and DE course design can be summed up in one word: faculty agency.

Designing and "delivering" a course is a complicated process in any environment. Most college faculty have little, if any, training in course design and pedagogy (this is widely researched and published--see, for example, Bean's (2011) Engaging Ideas, Fink's (2011) Creating Significant Learning Experiences, or Nilson's (2010) Teaching at its Best), so they're already at a disadvantage. Most faculty teach the way they were taught, for better or for worse. At least they have a model, though. At least they remember what it was like to be a student in a f2f environment. This is far less likely with DE instructors.

Enter instructional designers. Enter, at large, single-mode DE institutions, Web designers, audio and video designers, "subject-matter experts," editors, and so forth ((Moore & Kearsley, 2012, p. 102). Enter a complex systems model for course design and "delivery." As OU UK has been doing this for forty years, I would anticipate that their courses are slick. Polished. Professional. Awesome.

But most institutions that offer DE courses are not single-mode DE institutions.

It's easy to see the advantages of the large course team model. No one can be expected to be an expert in all of these areas. Subject matter expertise at the doctoral level is hard to come by; expecting academics to become as proficient in web design as they are in their own fields is one step short of unreasonable. 

Yet what Moore and Kearsley (2012) and Caplan and Graham (2008) do not address adequately is faculty agency. By this I mean the actual creation of the course--designing course objectives, or even if those are already defined by the program or department, designing the assessments, activities, and resources that will help students meet those course objectives. In other words: teaching. 

Both Moore and Kearsley (2012) explain that the key to effective DE course design is organization: breaking course content "into self-contained lessons or units" (p. 105). Caplan and Graham (2008) refer to the individual components that make up these isolated lessons and units as learning objects, which, "ideally…are designed to be shareable, resizable, and repurposed so that they can work in multiple contexts" (p. 248).

And scene. Stop right there. Suggest to faculty that a learning object designed wholly or partly by another faculty member can be dragged and dropped into her own course, and you're likely to face significant resistance. Teaching faculty have been (partly) hired on the basis of their expertise and teaching effectiveness. Outsourcing teaching preparation time--which is exactly what course design is--devalues the unique perspective that each faculty member brings to bear over her subject and her innovative ideas about how to teach what she knows better than anyone else. Everyone with a doctorate has, through the dissertation, made a unique contribution to the field. Why would anyone expect faculty to willingly import someone else's learning object?

I'm harping on this because I take issue with Moore and Kearsley's (2012) language when they describe what is needed for a DE course design team: "Some special skills and attitudes are needed to be a successful member of" a "design team, and these are not the skills and attitudes normally associated with university academics. First, it has to be recognized that no individual is a teacher in this system, but that indeed it is the system that teaches" [italics original] (p. 104). I don't necessarily disagree with this argument. I disagree with the sentiment. The risk here is that administers and staff are too likely to look down on faculty for being recalcitrant. They are too likely to dismiss legitimate faculty complaints about loss of agency, and are too likely to ostracize faculty that don't "buy in" to the "delivery" model.

Why the scare quotes around "delivery"? Because it's antithetic to pedagogy. Delivery smacks of anonymity and business-like efficiency. Delivery removes the student from the process entirely, except as the recipient of a pre-packaged product. Instructional designers and technical experts can help faculty--greatly--but I believe that this model of course design is a temporary one, one that will recede as faculty themselves have grown up with the technology they will then use when they become teachers themselves. Then they'll have both the subject matter expertise, the technical ability, and, with any luck, the pedagogical training that they need to design and teach good courses. It's this last piece--pedagogical training--that warrants the most attention. Then everything else will fall into place.

References

Caplan, D., & Graham, R.  (2008). The development of online courses.  In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 245-263).  Retrieved from http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/second_edition.html

Moore, M., and Kearsley, G. (2012). Course design and development. In Distance education: A systems view of online learning, pp. 97–125. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.