Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

In Faculty Instructional Technology Services, we’ve established a recommended timeline of two academic quarters to develop an online or hybrid course, assuming the instructor has a normal course load over that time frame. That’s twenty weeks, give or take. In this time frame, we can help instructors in planning, development, and quality assurance in creating a professional online or hybrid course.

With less time, we can do less.

This quarter, most of our consultants are working on at least a couple build-as-you-go courses, where instructors are still developing course materials while the course is running. I understand why this happens, particularly in the Spring quarter. Instructors are busy people, and it’s hard to find the time to prep for the upcoming quarter, particularly when there are so few breaks in the academic calendar. It also might be a shock to be asked to spend so much time preparing a course they’ve been teaching face-to-face for years and are not accustomed to needing to do a lot of preparation for each offering.

I’ve never seen a course simply not run because the online materials weren’t ready. The course always gets done in the end, because it has to. But that’s not to say that building a course while it’s running isn’t without consequences.

• Good course design takes a back seat to just putting the content online. Normally, if an instructor works with FITS, we’ll make sure the course meets Quality Matters standards as it’s being developed. If we’re rushing things, we’re going to focus on posting lectures and assignments as soon as possible rather than whether the learning objectives are aligned with the assignments, if the syllabus has all the orientation information it needs, or if the assessment instruments are really well suited for the topics.
• Instructors spend too much of the quarter focusing on the content rather than the students. If course materials and assignments are set up and in place before the start of the quarter, instructors can devote 100 percent of their energy to coaching students, facilitating discussions, providing assignment feedback, and recognizing and responding to gaps in student understanding. If not, their attention will be divided between actually teaching and creating next week’s lecture video and quiz question bank.
• Students get confused. It’s harder for instructors and instructional designers to stay on the same page under tight time constraints. I’ve seen it happen a lot where an instructional designer puts a video or an assignment in one place in the course and the instructor sends out an email saying it’s somewhere else. This causes students to get confused.
• The instructor will likely have to re-do a lot. Many instructors are required to pass their courses through a Quality Matters review, and if we can’t design the class to QM standards the first time around, many course elements will need to be revised or replaced. Making sure objectives, assignments, and learning activities align with each other after they’ve been produced can feel like trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Instructors may need to scrap elements of the course entirely and re-create them from scratch.
• It takes more total time for the instructor. This goes without saying–creating the course once for the first offering of it and then making significant revisions to meet the Quality Matters standards takes more time than creating a well-designed course from the start.
• It takes more total time for us too. For instructors working closely with FITS and getting help from us in producing course content in D2L, building the course on-the-fly has an impact on our workflow–our production staff are more efficient when they can create 10 discussions all at once rather than doing them one week at a time.
• We make more mistakes. It’s harder to remember to include every setting and formatting option the instructor wanted on the quizzes when we’re getting them one at a time and only a couple days before students need to take them. It also precludes the possibility of doing a full quality-assurance check to catch these mistakes before they affect your students.
• It hurts other instructors. The two weeks before and after the start of the quarter are the busiest time of year for us. For faculty who are following our recommended timetable, we reserve this time for independent quality assurance checks, dealing with last-minute problems, and coaching faculty on delivering the course. Our capacity to do this diminishes when we’re working on too many build-as-you-go courses.
• It’s impossible to try new things. We love it when instructors want to try things in their courses that we’ve never seen before. But generally this takes a lot of prep. We need to have a conversation about your goals, research the tools and technologies that are available, and design a workflow that’s as easy as possible for both the instructor and the students. This isn’t possible under tight time constraints.

I’m not trying to suggest that every build-as-you-go class will inevitably be a disaster. I’ve seen a lot of them. The courses run; students learn something; they do well on their final assignments. And of course there are situations where it’s out of the instructor’s control. But if it isn’t, it will be a smoother experience for everyone if the course is set before the quarter starts.