Practicum Week Two: Course Design

Image Credit: John Hopkins University School of Medicine 

Welcome to the wonderful world of online course design for the sciences.

This has been something that I have been perfecting for years now. Designing online courses for the sciences is quite challenging. The sciences are very structured and have specific requirements that must be completed throughout the course. In the sciences, we must have a strict set of summative assessments to ensure students are making progress. It becomes a design challenge to figure out a way to work in some formative assessments along with exams and labs without overburdening the student. This blog post will focus on some of the things I have developed in order to give my students the best possible experience in Microbiology.

The Learning Curve

As with anything we are learning, we have trial and error and a learning curve to get past. My journey

Image credit: bhwn383 on cartoonstock.com

into online teaching is no exception. While I taught and improved my courses before starting this program in Online Teaching and Instructional Design, it was not until a got into the "nitty-gritty" of instructional design that I really started making real connections between course design and student needs. I knew my students needed material and resources, but I failed to fully understand that connections between course material and course assignments were vital to student success. I also failed to understand the extra time and care that is needed to make these connections in the online environment. There was a disconnect. So, this program has helped guide me to putting ideas together to design them in a way that most benefits the student. I learned that I was not doing anything wrong, I just needed to add more and make better connections with my students. Once I made this realization, I was able to really move forward. Here is where I am now...

Course Design: The Online Microbiology Course

Throughout the semesters I have been teaching online courses and learning about how to teach online courses, I have made many changes that I believe have helped improve my instruction in the online environment. My institution uses blackboard and I am very lucky to have a college that will provide me with almost any technology tool I can ask for. So, as I work to improve my courses, I keep adding more tools to help improve my instruction. 

Structure with Flexibility

A short view of the Online Microbiology Course showing the Module Structures
Image Credit: P. Williams 

One of the big things that I wanted to make sure worked in the design of the course were the structure of the modules and the corresponding due dates. I had colleagues who taught classes online with only one due date: the last day of class. Those students never seemed happy and I could never figure out why an instructor would design a course like that. It had to be a nightmare... for both instructor and student. I have had colleagues that chose to have multiple dues dates with a very short time frame on different days of the week. That did not seem any better. So, I sat down and thought about what to do. I wanted to make sure not to rush students and give them flexibility while also setting hard deadlines to keep students on track and for me to give them appropriate feedback throughout the term. I settled on modules that last two weeks each. All assignments for that module are always due on the last day of that module (Sunday). I felt two-week modules gives students time to learn the material while still keeping it structured. There is some breathing room within that structure, while still be task oriented. After using this structure for many semesters, I have received a lot of positive feedback. Students tell me that it does not overburden them and they feel like they can learn. This has given me confidence in this particular set up.

The online course I am teaching is set up in 7 modules, each lasting two weeks. The course is 14 weeks long (actually... counting holidays and some funny state requirement rules.. it is actually 15 weeks long... so the students will have a week to get their feet wet in the course before they are required to start the modules). The course is a 6 contact hour course and students have a pretty hefty workload for the course. Each module contains material for between 2-4 chapters worth of material, lectures and notes (prepared by me and closed captioned by my college). There are lots of videos and animations for the students to study with as well as games, study guides, and other resources to help students do well. 

Assessments 

Each module also contains different assignments (formative and summative) to ensure students are learning the material and succeeding the best they can. Here are some examples of their assessments....

The Discussion and VoiceThread

During each module, the students (and myself), participate in a discussion. There are seven total discussions in the course. Each discussion relates to a topic we are learning about within the modules. These discussions are more of a formative assessment. Although there is a grade for the discussion, it is more about participation, effort, and gaining knowledge about our course content with real world examples. The discussion is designed to get the students talking about a complex scientific issue. Just as in the course module design, the discussion lasts two weeks in length. Each student posts an initial post on what they learned or found interesting during the first week of the module. The students then respond to at least two fellow classmates (or myself) by the end of the second module.

Image Credit: M Yerger

While I have always had discussion posts since I started teaching online, I learned about the using Voice Thread as a tool in this program. One instructor in our program used it several times and I loved it. I really wanted to use it and inquired about the tool at the college where I teach. My institution then invested in the educational account where we have unlimited access to the tool and all of its features. I decided it would be great to use it as a discussion post tool. There were several advantages to using this for discussion posts. The biggest advantage is that it helps connect the students and me to each other. I require the students to use the video or audio component for their initial post. This help brings the class together into a more connected community. I feel like we get to know each other better and can really put names to faces. The second component is that is is free for the student and even if they do not have video or audio on their computer, they can still post and respond on the phone (which is a great feature). I have had several students use that approach and they give it positive reviews. While last semester was the first time I incorporated it into my online courses, this semester I have made it even more integrated with our course material and offered the students different options on how they would like to respond to the material. For this semester, I have given the students more opportunity to respond to the discussion prompt in different ways. They can discuss the biological concept or the ethical implications of the topic on society or the environment...they can be as creative as they want as long as they provide facts with resources. I hope that this will allow students to learn more about the material and the topic we are covering. I am looking forward to the students impressions once the semester starts. 

One downside I have with the tool is that it is not fully ADA compliant and therefore may not accessible for some students. While this has not been an issue up to this point, it could be in the future. Right now, I load accessible images, texts, and files to the VoiceThread, but the posts that I and students make are not individually accessible. I am currently working to find ways to make this accessible. At this point, my college offered to transcribe all posts on the VoiceThread if there is a student with the disability requiring it. I hope to find a better solution and will continue to work through this issue as much as possible. 

The Labs: It's always a Work in Progress

Finding the most appropriate tools to use for lab is always a challenge... especially when trying to make them fully ADA accessible. This is probably the one area of my course that I worry about with regard to ADA accessibility the most. There is not one single program (at least that I can find) in the online world that has fully accessible virtual labs. Many of them are "partially" accessible, but that is useless with regard to federal law. I am in a constant search for accessible labs and it takes lots of time throughout the semester just to search for them. For now, I am using Late Nite Labs. It is a great tool and offers students the best "hands-on" experience in the virtual world. With this program, students can make mistakes, blow things up, redo lab experiments, and test new tools in as close to the real environment as you can get in the virtual world.

Image Credit: P. Williams

For this particular course, students will be completing labs each module. Most modules contain two labs that help guide them to a culminating lab experience during module 7. This set-up is very similar to what a student does in a face-to-face lab. Students spend a large portion of the semester learning specific techniques on how to identify different types of bacteria. They learning about staining, biochemical techniques, biochemical control, and so on. They then have their culminating lab project for the last lab (the lab final) that asks the student to use all the techniques
they learned throughout the semester and apply them to identify an unknown bacterial sample. This is one of the hardest things students have to do (both face-to-face and online). It takes the students a lot of time to get through and to correctly identify the unknown bacteria.The student's job throughout the term is to learn all the techniques so they can apply them to the final unknown lab. I use the labs in modules 1-6 as more of a formative assessment while the final lab is summative.

My job throughout the lab experience is to guide the student through the process, help then identify where they went wrong in the labs, and guide them to the best lab solutions. This aspect of the course takes a lot of my time and I must work hard throughout the semester to guide the students through the material. In the end, the lab program tends to get good feedback. The only complaints I get is that it has a huge learning curve and the first time a student does a lab, it takes a long time. But, after a couple of labs, the students start getting the hang of it and end up liking the lab program.

Quizzes and Exams

No matter what I do, these are the assessments the students hate the most. These are always summative assessments where the students must demonstrate mastery. Because this course is a gateway course to, not only other courses, but also state administered exams for some students, I must have a controlled and monitored series of exams that ensure students are learning. Throughout the course, the students have 6 quizzes (with 30 multiple choice questions and one essay) and a final exam (with 50 multiple choice questions). Students are timed on the questions that are multiple choice and must use the Respondus Lockdown Browser and a Web Cam Monitor. Students are timed 60 minutes on the quizzes and 90 minutes on the final. The essay portion of the quizzes is not timed and the students can use resources (they are not required to use the Lockdown Browser or Web Cam). This allows the students to research and write an essay responding to the question from their research.

Wrap Up

While this blog post was just a start to begin explaining the course, it has taken a lot of work to get to this point. Designing a course, improving the course, and setting it up to help the students the best it can take a lot of time. I also use some other technology in the course that I have not explained yet (such as SoftChalk) and I will add those technologies to later posts. I have worked hard to make sure the students have as close to a face-to-face experience as possible while still being online and (for the most part) at their own pace.  I hope to gain feedback from both students in the course and fellow classmates and supervisors from this practicum on things I am doing right as well as on things I can improve on for future courses.

Here's looking forward to week three (and a goodbye to week two) of this practicum. This week... my students gain access to the course. I am ready for the challenge. :D Here we go...