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Make Your Online Courses Rock! 1 Make Your Online Courses Rock! An Instructor’s Guide to Improving Online Learning By Bruce Forciea http://www.drbruceforciea.com 2 Make Your Online Courses Rock! Copyright ©, 2015 Bruce Forciea. All rights reserved. Information presented in this book continuously progresses and changes. The author has done substantial work in order to ensure the information presented in this book is accurate, up to date, and within acceptable standards at the time of publication. The author is not responsible for errors or omissions, or for consequences from the application of the information contained in this book and makes no warranty, expressed or implied, with regard to the contents of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forciea, Bruce Make Your Online Courses Rock!, First edition. ISBN#: About the Author Bruce Forciea is a science instructor at Moraine Park Technical College and Unitek College. In addition to his teaching duties he has completed numerous instructional design projects and developed a number of online courses including one of the first fully online Anatomy and Physiology courses. He has also written several books. In his spare time he likes to write, develop media, and play the guitar. Contact Information: http://www.drbruceforciea.com To those who live with gratitude, belief, and hope in their hearts… 3 Books by the Author: The X-Cure (Fiction, Thriller) Dr. Alex Winter, a brilliant biomedical engineer, teams with Dr. Xiu Ling, a beautiful Chinese scientist, to discover a revolutionary cure for cancer. But Tando Pharmaceuticals, the world’s largest and richest drug producer, also has an interest in the cure, and when they discover that the treatment is flawed as recipients begin to die after four months, causing a media frenzy and a drop in Tando's stock, they call upon their 'Mercenary Soldiers of Medicine' to maintain global domination. An Easy Guide to Learning Anatomy and Physiology can really help to ease the struggle of learning anatomy and physiology. This book breaks down complex concepts by presenting a simplified version of the main idea (called the Big Picture) before getting into the details. Written in an easy to understand and humorous way. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1 Making a Rockin Clear Learning Path 7 Chapter 2 Text That Rocks 21 Chapter 3 Rockin Images 40 Chapter 4 Rock Star Audio 52 Chapter 5 Video That Rocks Your Socks 74 Chapter 6 Going Rockin Mobile (mLearning) 91 Chapter 7 Student-Rockin Assessments 96 Chapter 8 Testing Your Rockin Baby 104 Chapter 9 Make Your Course Rock with Interactivity 112 Image Credits 117 Bibliography 119 5 Introduction I taught my first online course way back in 2002, ancient history in terms of the internet. Facebook had yet to show its face and Google was only four years old. Some of my students today could hardly imagine a life without smart phones, but we somehow got by with our tin can and string brick-like monstrous wonders of technology cell phones weighing down our pockets and pocketbooks. A lot of people still connected to the internet via dialup and DSL made progress in getting us up to speed. In 2002 there were only about 3 million websites compared to over 500 million today. We visited Blockbuster to rent videos and patiently waited for downloads via our 56K modems. Balanced on the boundary of an exploding technological revolution was the concept that we could teach college courses entirely online. My college embraced this Zeitgeist and I jumped on the bandwagon by volunteering to teach not one but two online courses fresh off the IT and curriculum department’s digital presses. Before my courses began I decided to scope out what I had gotten myself into by consulting a fellow instructor who was in the midst of teaching a different online course. “Nancy” taught a basic college skills course online and was happy to divulge her experiences to an enthusiastic albeit cautious newbie. “So, Nancy, how is your semester going with College 111?” “I’ll tell you one thing,” said a frustrated Nancy, “ It’s a lot harder than teaching face to face. I’ve already spent countless hours trying to simulate each class activity, you know, so that the online course is exactly like the face to face course. I’ve had to add something like two hundred links to all kinds of websites and upload tons of curriculum material just so students understand everything the face to face class does. I log in every day and go through countless student emails asking questions about what to do next or where to find something or what to do if a link is broken. I would recommend setting aside at least twice as much time as you would for teaching a face to face class for an online class.” With a growing apprehension and downright fear, I logged into my first online course a couple of weeks later. It seemed organized well enough with tabs for each section, email, announcements and even a help tab. I began my exploration by clicking on a tab for the first unit of the course. A long page loaded with text popped onto the screen containing instructions written in excruciating minute detail regarding how to proceed through the course. The first unit alone had more than twenty learning activities! What the instructor in face to face courses typically summarized was presented in tiny copious text peppered with blue links. I could see why students were confused. 6 Nonetheless, I plodded through my first online teaching experience and earned a few battle scars along the way. My deep rooted faith in online learning carried me through more than a few challenges and helped me to redesign, reconfigure, fiddle with and tweak my way through several learning management systems, a myriad of courses, and helped me to develop one of the first online college science courses. I am often asked the question, “Do you think your online courses are equivalent to your face- face courses?” I always answer with “Yes, they are equivalent but not the same,” meaning that I believe students can learn and master competencies in online courses the same as face to face courses but the courses are presented in a different way. They are designed in a way to facilitate learning in an online environment. I know this sounds simple but I still see online courses presented in a similar manner to traditional face to face courses. I see instructors communicating with students via long textual passages (text dumps). I see videotaped lectures consisting of a talking head or talking head in front of a chalkboard pontificating for hours at a time. I see usability issues whereby students can’t navigate their way through a course, or can’t figure out what to do for the first assignment. I see non-engagement by instructors, text not written for the web, poor audio recordings and so on. Such is the purpose of this book. I sincerely hope to share what I have learned with you and help you make your online courses truly rock. I will cover such topics as how to work within your LMS to provide a clear path to learning, how to produce superior audio and video and how to write for the web so that students actually read what you write. The book will provide plenty of examples, tips, tricks, and ways to do things for free or on the cheap. This is not an academic treatise chock full of technical prose and written like a research paper. It is a simple and straightforward guide written in what I hope is a personal style. Words are purposely kept to a minimum and get to the point quickly. There are plenty of pictures and diagrams to help along the way. The book is laid out in chapters that present one particular topic. You can read it all the way through or skip around if you wish. The book begins with some tips for designing within an existing Learning Management System or LMS. It then presents chapters on text and images and then moves on to multimedia including audio and video. The book concludes with chapters on mobile learning (mlearning), assessments and testing how well your course functions. My sincere wish is that this book helps you to improve your online courses, even if it inspires one small change. With that said, let’s get going and make your courses rock! 7 Chapter 1 Making a Rockin Clear Learning Path If there is one thing I have learned after standing in front of countless students during countless first days of a new class, it is that they are stressed! The process of learning can be very stressful. In face to face courses just making it to the first day of class consists of meeting more than a few challenges. Surviving the registration process, buying and scanning over daunting textbooks, and navigating one’s way through a maze of hallways to a classroom full of strangers facing an even stranger instructor can be a formidable and stressful process. Likewise online courses can be stressful consisting of multiple steps for accessing and logging into a Learning Management System (LMS) for the first time. Students confronted with your online course must complete a number of decisions in order to navigate to the syllabus, assignments and assessments. Each decision takes a certain degree of mental energy and contributes to something called cognitive load. What is Cognitive Load? When learning a new concept information is kept in working memory until more permanent connections are made.
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