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Planning Your Course Development
When each Course Design document is complete and you’ve transferred your “thoughts into words”, major decisions have been made and the general design of your online course will be in place. At this point in the seminar, it’s time to formulate a Course Development Plan. While we hope that you are able to develop everything for your course by the end of our 12 weeks together, we want to remind you that course development will go much quicker with a coordinated effort involving the instructional design team at eCampus.
Most instructors take one of two typical course development approaches, as described in the table below:
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Working with an Instructional Design Consultant
Your Instructional Design Consultant may assist you during course development by:
(a) holding weekly one-on-one consultations
(b) facilitating meetings with other faculty
(c) performing hands-on course development work.
Your consultant will be able to tell you more about the level of course development assistance available to you. Your Instructional Design Consultant can help you with anything you need. Here are some of the suggested activities that other faculty have found most helpful to delegate and saved them a lot of time and effort:
- Establish an effective course design pattern.
- Consult on your instructional design and development plans.
- Build the course shell with module framework including placeholders for everything.
- Provide template activity and test instructions (boilerplate text), or feedback on written instructions.
- Help build question pools and tests.
- Calculate reading time estimates.
- Set up the grade book.
- Set up discussion boards, journals, blogs, groups.
- Set up module evaluations, self-evaluations, course evaluations.
Building a Course Development plan
In the development time we have allocated in the last six weeks of the seminar, it’s appropriate that you plan your time well and build yourself a roadmap with guideposts and trail markers to let you know how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go to complete your course. The plan may be adjusted as we go, but just as the course design map summarizes your thoughts about design, so too does the development plan summarize your thoughts about how we will realize your plans.
Your Course Development Plan may contain your plans for building any or all of the following course elements:
- Contact Information
- Readings
- Assignments
- Quizzes
- Tests
- Discussions
- Groups
- Wikis
- Journals
- Module Participation/Discussion Board Self-Evaluation
- Module Feedback Surveys
- Midterm or Final Evaluations
- Gradebook
- Course Schedule
- Syllabus
- Initial email
- Announcements
- Getting Started module
- Course Navigation tour/help
- Instructor welcome video/Course Overview
In the activity that follows, you will be given prompts to write down your plans for some of these course elements. However, you may also write down any other information that you think may help you and your instructional design consultant to plan out the development work that needs to be done over the next six weeks of the seminar.
You are now ready to proceed to the next design task in which you will draft your Course Development Plan.
Design Task Directions
Learning objectives:
J1. Identify the remaining tasks that need to be completed before the course is ready to be taught.
J2. Identify the people that will complete the tasks and the resources they will need to do the work.
J3. Create a schedule for when the remaining tasks will be completed.
J4. Share the plan with the appropriate people and explain how progress toward course completion will be tracked.
Introduction
For this design task, we ask you to put together a development plan to answer the following questions.
- What do you need to develop and how far along are you?
- How much time should you set aside for development?
- How can we help?
The first goal of this task is to help you recognize the number of discrete items to be developed for each module so you can track your current progress toward completing course development. Acute awareness of time is needed to develop all of the items for your course, in order that you continue setting aside at least 8 hours a week to develop your course. Identify those items which can be delegated to an instructional design consultant for development. Each consultant has several courses to help faculty develop this semester, so it is important that the work is spread out over the remaining time in the seminar.
To help you visualize the sort of information that is helpful to include on a development plan, please refer to the worked example included in the Google document where you will complete your own Course Development plan.