In this podcast, Robin M. Smith, Ph.D., author of Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design, shares tips on organizing the content of an online course.
She talks about using a graphic syllabus; creating courses with re-use in mind; and setting up navigation that ties directly to your course content.
During the 2010 Online Teaching and Learning Conference Online, Robin will be speaking more about the use a graphic syllabus in your online courses. A graphic syllabus is a low investment/high yield addition to your online course that can assist students with information storage and retrieval of your content. Robin will highlight the use of a graphic syllabus to facilitate course design and development. During the session you will acquire examples of graphic syllabi, tools for creation of graphic syllabi, and templates for use in developing your own graphic syllabus.
Robin Smith, Ph.D., is coordinator of e-Learning at the Office of Educational Development at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. She is also author of Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design (Jossey-Bass). Smith will be presenting at the 2010 Online Teaching and Learning Conference Online, October 19-22, 2010. Learn more.
Enjoyed this podcast. Thanks!
Hi Sharon, glad you enjoyed Robin’s post. She will be presenting a session on The Graphic Syllabus as a Course Design Tool at the Online Teaching and Learning Conference in October.
Great! Useful podcast.
Thank you.
Robin, this was a great podcast! I loved your talk about graphic syllabi at last year’s JBOTL, and I really appreciate this podcast. Our college uses ANGEL for its elearning, and a number of faculty still have their classes in the old WebCT format where navigation is organized by object type – all quizzes in one folder, all discussions in another, PowerPoints in another, etc. Many of them are reluctant to convert to a more user-friendly format where content is chunked into weekly folders (All materials for Chapter 1 are in the Week 1 folder, for example….materials, assignments, etc.) These faculty argue that it’s much easier for students to find a PowerPoint if they know to go to the PowerPoint folder, rather than a certain weekly folder. How would you respond to this argument? If a learner is trying to locate a PowerPoint on a specific topic, they may not remember in which week it was covered and where to find the file.
Thanks for your feedback and help!
Mary Beth
Mary Beth,
Thank you for your interest. Change is always a challenge! My recommendation is to go even a bit further with the reorganization and avoid the “organization by weeks”. This is all part of a purposeful scheme to keep your course easily update-able. If, rather than week one, the topic name (ex. Red Blood Cells, Civil War, Photosynthesis) is used, then students can navigate to their topic of study and find what they need. Since it is always advisable for students to know what topic is being studied, this makes logical sense to the students. Also, it provides faculty with an easy way to rearrange their course in the event that the book changes, they teach a summer term, etc.
My typical pattern is to use Learning Modules (as Tom mentions below). Each learning module is labeled with the topic name and inside that topic is everything the students need for that lesson. Since we prefer the technology to be more in the background, naming content by the tool used to produce it seems a bit “off topic” for providing students cues for their focus. Also, does EVERY module ALWAYS have ALL the components? Students can spend a lot of unnecessary time searching for a non-existent piece of content just because every other lesson had one of “those”.
I tell faculty the advantages of this approach for students, and then the looong list of advantages for them (easy to update, etc.) Would love to hear more about what you are doing.
Robin
conqueringthecontent@gmail.com
We are using your textbook in our Online Course Design class at Boise State University. It is so practical and insightful. Thanks for the podcast!
Tom,
Thank for the feedback! I’m glad you are finding Conquering the Content helpful.
Robin
conqueringthecontent@gmail.com
Dr. Smith talks about content driving navigation as opposed to tools or the content itself. Anyone out there still doing this? Does anyone use a combination of navigational approaches? Learning Modules?
I really appreciate the idea of keeping all textbook references in one place so there is only one place to update. It’s practical and efficient! Do the students express concern when they see topic references in other places with no reference to the text?
Intriguing. Jut bought the Kindle version of the book so I could explore your ideas more fully. My course is actally face2face but I want the students to collaborate online in groups to produce their final work product online