What is Best Practice?

Best Practice in Online Course Design

The term "best practice" is a term that is being used to describe effective online course design, teaching strategies, and learning strategies. It is based on current research on teaching and learning in online courses. What has emerged from the research boils down to a few things:

1. Course structure
2. Communication
3. Assessment

Let's not forget student satisfaction surveys and retention rates!

Where does the research come from?

Two (of many) organizations that promote research and best practice for online courses are Quality Matters and Sloan Consortium.

Course Structure

Course structure refers to the physical layout and function of a course. When we build our courses, we must build with it with the perspective of the student in mind. We must look at our course with a student's eyes. It is a matter of "usability" for the student.

• How does the student know what to do once s/he logs in?
• Is the course easy to navigate?
• Are instructions clear, concise, and logical?
• Are there enough prompts to keep the student pointed in the right direction and on task?
• Is the content easy to find and access.
• Is the design of the course consistent across all of the learning modules?
• If the course supports an online degree, are all the courses similar in look and function enough to create a sense of familiarity for the students?

Course Communication

Communication is probably the most important factor in online courses. There are different types of communication. There are clear, explicit communication of expectations, instructions, and guidelines to move the students through the learning process. There is communication that is necessary to create a sense of community and class cohesion. Effective communication in a course is not happenstance, it is carefully planned. There is "static" communication: a welcome page, a well-planned course schedule, clear instructions on an overview page in a learning module, clear guidelines and expectations for assignments. There is "dynamic" communication: planned and guided exchanges between the instructor and members of the class via email, discussion areas, chat rooms, and live classroom.

Assessments

Assessment is a broad term. We usually think of it in terms of evaluating the students' knowledge. For an online course, we need to think outside the box a little. We employ assessment strategies more frequently and for different reasons. We use it to assess what the students know, but we also use assessment to promote student learning and course improvement.

Time on Task
You use assessments to keep students on task. For example, a short quiz after a reading assignment or after a short audio lecture will make them more compliant in doing the work, and it will help them focus on and learn the material.

Promote Deeper Learning
To promote and measure deeper learning we might use group work for problem-based learning, case studies, reflective journals, student products, or guided and graded discussions.

Course Improvement
Another, often overlooked, assessment is the assessment of the course and instructional design. After each learning module (unit of instruction), you could ask the students simple questions to see how the learning experience went. For example, at the end of each learning unit, the students are simply asked open-ended questions such as, "What did you like best in this unit of instruction?," and "What did you like least in this unit of instruction?" They will usually point out problem areas in the instruction or materials. This is good feedback for course improvement, and this is another way to measure student satisfaction.

Student Satisfaction

Georgia Southern University has developed a "template" for Vista courses, with best practice in mind to guide the design. The template speeds up the course development time. Many faculty have adopted the template. Student evaluations from theses courses have been extremely positive.