The Article of the Future project, an initiative of Elsevier, recently released prototypes for the web-based display of research articles in six discipline areas. The templates amazed me with their thoughtful design that allows readers to easily breeze through research articles on the screen. The design is as simple as a three-pane view we usually see on a web page, with the article outline, the content, and the references section. But what strikes me the most is the design philosophy behind the project: to leverage the use of technology to make reading more convenient, efficient, and rewarding, which is the philosophy needed for online-course design.

For example, the layout prototype for a business-management research paper offers a content view with tabs that can expand the layout to include an outline on the left, a context information pane on the right, or both of them, with a single click.

In the content area, the prototype takes full advantage of the multimedia and user-control capacity offered by the web: from graphic animation and video abstracts to interactive charts and diagrams, it offers a full spectrum of options to the readers.

The idea that Elsevier has of building a standardized online layout for research paper coincides with the desire our students have expressed to have a common structure for all of their online courses. In this summer DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, during the online student panel discussion, one faculty member asked, if there was one thing that the students could name as the most important for an online course, what would it be? The answers given were: feedback and structure.

While it is quite understandable how important it is for faculty to provide feedback to students they’ve never or rarely met, why would the structure matter?

“So we don’t have to worry about where to find stuff,” the student said.

The “stuff” is the content and the “where” is the structure. If we save students from using their mental power to seek and search for the content, they can then use that mental power for the content itself. And, as Ruth Clark pointed out in her efficacy in learning theory, one critical goal of instructional design is but to achieve the efficacy in learning by reducing the wasted mental power and maximizing its use for the instructional purpose.

Parallel with the Article of the Future project, DePaul’s Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) is moving toward creating a standardized course shell for online and hybrid courses. This master course shell includes not only preloaded menu items and module structure but also built-in content such as orientation, instruction on course navigation, online learning guidelines and expectation, and where to begin with the course.

But if all the courses look the same, will it be like an attack of the clones? What about creativity, innovation, and character?

As an instructor who strives to make every class refreshing, memorable, and profoundly “unique”, the hat that I also wear as an administrator of instructional technology helps me face reality, in which, as Gerry McGovern pointed out, the formality is merely the shell, the content inside of it is the one that is winning us the competitive advantage—whether for a web site or for a course. Besides, a consistent format, as Lee Schulman pointed out during his speech at DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, is critical for student success. Without a box, no one will be able to think outside it!

In April, Dr. Constance Stanley of the University of Colorado gave a day-long workshop titled “50 Ways to Teach with Impact” to the Chicago Area Faculty Development Network. To my surprise, the workshop presented techniques grounded in user-centered-design best practices. The workshop was geared toward instructors teaching in a face-to-face classroom; however, many of the strategies could easily be transferred to an online class. As a former user-experience analyst and current instructional designer, I found the bent of the workshop to be a welcome integration of these two disciplines.

Whitney Hess wrote the blog post “Guiding Principles for UX Designers” for UX Magazine that went gangbusters in the Twitterverse. Her guiding principles correlate nicely with Dr. Stanley’s “50 Ways to Teach with Impact.” Let’s take a look.

By taking the student perspective and needs into consideration, the instructor becomes a user-experience designer of the classroom environment. Dr. Stanley provides numerous techniques that emphasize engaging the student at multiple levels so as to “hook” each student. This is similar to the best designs, which allow users easy and seamless access to a service or product.

Details on Dr. Stanley’s strategies:

Pre and post interviews: To get a feel for the prior knowledge and assumptions of the students, instructors require that students take an online survey with questions about the content at the beginning of the course. With the results, the instructor now “understands the problem.” Tweaking the content and its delivery to make it accessible and engaging for a particular class of students is “attempting to solve the problem.” The post interview gives the student a sense of “where they have come” and gives the instructor valuable feedback on their content-delivery choices or user-experience design.

Metacognitive Activities: Dr. Stanley stated that, “these activities ask the learner to observe ‘the way things are’ versus ‘the way I make them as a learner.’” In other words, students are put into situations that ask them to reflect on their process and understanding of the content. Examples of these types of activities are: self-assessments; selecting from a choice of activities based on their preferred modality of learning; or having a dialogue with peers about their understanding of the content. By creating these opportunities, instructors provide pathways for students to access the content in simple and intuitive ways.

VARK (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic) learning preference assessment:Students and the instructor answer a quick sixteen-item questionnaire to find out their learning preference. The instructor receives the student results anonymously. By knowing the breakdown of learning preferences within a particular class, the instructor can adjust the delivery of the content to meet student needs. In addition, the instructor can be cognizant of his/her own learning preferences so as not to tilt the presentation of content towards that modality; thereby “acknowledging that the user is not like you.” The assessment is available at: http://www.vark-learn.com.

Influx of Information/Multitasking: Being empathetic to the bombardment of information students are faced with via text messages, e-mails, twitter feeds, etc. is essential in understanding the “user.” Designing a course experience that capitalizes on these devices and information streams encourages students to participate, because their frame of reference is being acknowledged. Rather than competing, play along with it. Poll Everywhere presents a content-related question to the student that is answered via text. Instructors can project the real-time results on a screen in the classroom or present them in an online collaborative environment. Multitasking and information overload are part of our students’ realities; so let’s use the very devices and technologies that vie for their attention.

The instructor as a user experience designer—I like that idea. Through the strategies presented by Dr. Stanley, instructors get a sense of the audience, their needs, and their preferences. Using these “specs” to inform the design of content delivery will lead to student engagement and participation. As one of the pioneers of user-experience design Donald Norman said, “Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.”

The most recent video posted on DePaul’s Teaching Commons features Mary Frances DeRose of the School of Public Service. The video focuses on what she’s learned about how to teach statistics since first arriving at the university.

Difficult Courses: Statistics, produced by videographer and animator Heather Banas, joins a growing number of short videos about teaching available in the Teaching for Learning video archive. Each video features DePaul faculty members—from a variety of disciplines—talk about how they teach.

I am not an objective observer. By way of honesty, I was privileged to produce some of the first videos for the DePaul Teaching Commons website. But, as a sometime qualitative researcher, I also can’t help seeing this archive as a growing collection of data! And have, therefore, noticed some themes!

Watch some of the videos and see if you don’t agree:

• Theme One: Some assessments are worthwhile, some are not.
• Theme Two: Real world examples engage students.
• Theme Three: Make good use of students’ time in the classroom.
• Theme Four: Use multiple techniques during class to address the varying abilities among students.
• Theme Five: Create opportunities for immediate feedback.
• Theme Six: Create opportunities where students can view their progress.

In the statistics video, I was particularly impressed by one assignment used by DeRose: returning to the same journal article (one selected by the student) several times throughout the quarter. Over the course of the class, students realize how much they have learned. An assignment to match all six themes!

An upcoming opportunity to hear DePaul faculty talk about teaching—this time live and in person—is the DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, May 6. Register today!

In the FITS Department, there are a few things we assume pretty often. We are tasked with providing technology training and support services to faculty and with designing and assisting in the implementation of online courses. So the technology part of the Instructional Technology Consultant or Instructional Designer is often what’s emphasized the most. The majority of the work we do involves interacting with, mastering, and then teaching emergent technologies. However, even before the explosion of all this technology, people like us were doing the same job with more emphasis on the instructional part. We are here to support teaching and learning first. Doing so with technology comes second, but it’s easy to forget this when we are surrounded with faculty who want the next big thing right now. Think back a long ways to the days when reel-to-reel films became available relatively cheaply. Before long, someone decided that these films would be great to show to students in school, and then the initial challenge was presented: how to incorporate such a novel experience as watching a film in school as authentic learning experiences. Once the novelty wore off for students, the next challenge was to continue to use audiovisual materials to enhance instruction rather than just relying on them as instruction in and of themselves. Thus, instructional design begins to be an important idea, as a changing world prompts new ideas and new challenges in bringing those ideas to fruition.

We live in a technological world; by most accounts we are firmly entrenched in the digital age, and technology of all types is becoming virtually inescapable. We take for granted the ability to do things that were impossible only a few years or even a few months ago. I’m just old enough to remember the first wave of personal computers in schools and homes, and today you can buy a calculator that will do more than that TRS-80 or Apple II was ever capable of. Not only are we improving these near-ubiquitous technologies at a relentless pace, but the pace of these improvements is also increasing as development cycles are shortened. Today’s college students probably don’t remember not having the Internet or cell phones, but the tipping point where just about everyone had them still happened within their lifetimes!

I’ve got a technological job. I spend my days exploring technologies on the cutting edge and helping professors integrate them into classroom instruction. I am usually in front of at least one computer, more often two, all day long, and I am connected to the world through a work e-mail account, a personal e-mail account, and an instant-messaging client. I’ve got a telephone, but honestly it doesn’t get used much, as most people seem to prefer e-mail these days. I couldn’t escape all of this progress if I wanted to; in fact, it’s my job not to! Some days I feel like a technological fire fighter, because it’s my job to run into the fires that everyone else is running away from.

With all of these technological marvels swirling around us all the time, it’s easy to lose focus on the real nuts and bolts of the task: designing instruction. The task is about people, about talking to them and finding out what makes their course tick, and then translating that into improvements in pedagogy, streamlined access to resources, and smoother technology integration in the classroom for those elements that are technology dependent. Even though we’re some of the chief pushers of technology at DePaul, the ideal we are striving for is to get the technology out of the way so the teaching can continue, unburdened by “How do I…” or “I can’t….” Instructors should be asking questions that begin with “I’d like to” instead of “I need to,” and students shouldn’t be confused as to why something is used in their courses; a well-designed course makes all of the answers transparent and linear.

Yes, we love technology and try to find new ways to use it all the time, but not just because we can. Instructional design is about ideas, not stuff, and the end result should be a memorable learning experience for students no matter how it is reached. Instructors will still teach, and students will still learn, and we will still be standing in the middle of those two, working to make the jobs of both parties easier and more fulfilling and to keep them all looking forward.

In the world of instructional design, it is a given that a set lead time is necessary for online-course development. With faculty availability, course load, and designer workload in mind, the instructional designer wants to plan up front to make as much time and room for the development process as possible. To nail down course objectives, learning activities that meet those objectives, media assets, and any of the other myriad pieces of course content, an instructional designer generally favors the cushion of perhaps two terms ahead of when the course is to be taught to coordinate with the instructor and the other members of the design team.

On the other hand, “on the fly” course development—that is, building a course as it is being taught, week by week—is a common, if little desired, practice. Instructors have many priorities, including academic travel, which too often trump their commitment to developing new courses. Resourceful instructional designers make a course happen, even when bumping against (and past) deadlines. Designing on the fly can seem like the least-desired way to develop an online course offering, but is it always?

Software development, a field not too far flung from online training and teaching, has recently begun to realize a sea change in the dominant process philosophy: from traditional, upfront “waterfall” process to iterative, adaptive, “agile” methods. Waterfall is a process where the activities flow down an orderly succession of steps, such as:

1. Concept
2. Requirements
3. Architectural design
4. Detailed design
5. Coding and development
6. Testing and implementation

This linear series of steps is in contrast to the “agile” concept of development, where projects are built in iterations, with regular retrospection into the needs of the customer and how the evolving project should adapt to meet them.

Image courtesy Kumido Adaptive Strategies

At its core, agile believes that it is impossible to know everything required to build software up front, that the customer can only gain that knowledge from the process itself.¹ And so it often is with course development! Until a course is actually taught to students, it can be impossible to determine whether it will meet their learning needs as it is designed. That tool for the synchronous session never worked as it was promised and will need to be abandoned for a better option, or you realized during the quarter that those five-point discussions need to be turned into written assignments.

This isn’t to say that the structure of a course should be changed midstream. The syllabus given to students at the beginning of the offering term is essentially a learning contract and sets an expectation for the learning experience to come. But what if the process of developing the course allowed for a more iterative model? What would a more agile approach to instructional design look like? How could we design learning modules that are highly adaptable and easily changed? Can we embrace the idea that learning materials and programs are not designed, then built, and only then evaluated—let alone that they are produced with the expectation of updates and new versions to be produced? How do we adapt the course-development process to allow for much, much more feedback from the learners and educational stakeholders?

As e-learning becomes online learning and online learning becomes a major component of the educational model, our development techniques and philosophies must also evolve. All development up front is an ideal, but perhaps it is an ideal of the past.

¹ Extracted from: Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, James R. Trott – NetObjectives Lean-Agile Series.

This is an analogy Dr. Carol Wren used to describe her feelings about online teaching—feelings that are shared by many participants of our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. “Teaching online,” as she says in the video below, “is sort of like learning a second language. You have to take what is unconscious and make it conscious. It is going from what you might call a cognitive understanding and making it metacognitive—that is, thinking about what you are doing.”

Carol’s analogy strikes me — a person who cuts across both fields as a trainer/promoter of online teaching and as a learner/instructor of a second language. Thinking about my own experience in learning (and then teaching), I believe a second language provides me with deeper understanding of how and why faculty would relate it to their feelings about teaching online. Without Carol’s permission, I am taking the liberty of adding a few validating factors to her comparison of the two dichotomies: teaching face-to-face versus teaching online and learning your first language versus learning a second language.

An Unconscious versus a Conscious Process of Learning

In learning to speak our native language, we observe, imitate, and interact. Most of these actions are taken without any awareness that we are learning. In this sense, learning to speak one’s first language is more of a natural and unconscious process, which is somewhat like how many of us get into the teaching practice in the classroom: we observed, for years and years, how it was done by our teachers, picked up the ideas, and carried them into our own classroom.

Learning to speak a second language, on the other hand, is a much more cognizant process that requires not only the intentional effort of memorizing and practicing but also a clear awareness of the learning effort itself. It takes some thinking to bring up a word and some more thinking to piece together a sentence—just like when we start to put a course online. It requires not only knowing what technical tools to use to carry the instruction but also how to conduct it. And often, what comes after the interpretation process is something that is completely “foreign:” a one-hour-long presentation is now four pieces of short videos followed by some online discussions; a term paper becomes a three-phase assignment that requires self-review, peer review, and instructor review; an in-class quiz is an online test with auto-feedback. The only difference is that instead of calling it “interpretation,” we call this process “instructional design.”

Implicit versus Explicit Rules and Objectives

While speaking a native language, one doesn’t have to think about grammar, sentence structure, and tenses. Your verbal expression follows the flow of your thinking, naturally and intuitively. Your thoughts are put forward in the form of words without any attentive effort.

When I asked my students why they would use “I have been to New York” instead of “I went to New York,” they said, “Well, ‘cause it sounds right.” But why does it sound right? Without knowing this “why,” we—the nonnative English speakers—wouldn’t know when to use which, and you—the native English speakers who are learning Chinese—wouldn’t know which Chinese word you should use.

Teachers and students both know the rules in the face-to-face class intuitively since they both grow up in this kind of environment, which is like knowing their first language, but all the “grammars” need to be clearly spelled out in the online world: what is expected, why it is expected, how to achieve the expectation, and when to achieve it.

For online students, you have to show them the ropes to avoid the drops.

The Cultural Connection

Language isn’t an independent entity. It represents the culture it stems from, and it is always attached to that culture. Isn’t it the same for online teaching? In order to teach online, you have to not only learn the skills to instruct through this medium but also prepare yourself to see the online world, which has developed (and is still developing) a culture of its own. Being open to that culture, talking to people coming from that culture (e.g. online students), and understanding the expectations of that culture become an important part of online teaching, just like when learning a foreign language. The sense of cultural sensitivity is essential to the online world where even font types can carry meanings that could impact the impressions of a viewer in front of the screen that is a thousand miles away.

The Surprising Benefit of Knowing Another

Students in my Chinese language class never thought that they would have to think more about English when they were studying Chinese. Likewise, it usually caught faculty by surprise when they realized that what they learned about online teaching was impacting the way they teach in the classroom.

Dr. Christine Reyna, a psychology professor, told us during a wrap-up interview with DOTS, “One thing that is really surprising to me about DOTS was how much it challenges me to think differently about my face-to-face class.”

After running eight editions of DOTS in the past three years, we are no longer surprised by comments like this. Examined closely, DOTS seems to be fulfilling the kind of profession education that Dr. Lee Shulman is calling for: to make the learners not only gain the skills but also the mentality and the moral of the profession they are studying for. When it comes to teaching online, what lies behind the technical skill is the pedagogical knowledge, and what goes beyond the knowledge is the virtue of being an online instructor.

So what is the virtue of an online instructor? I would say that an online instructor is the one who has the following attributes:

• Well organized (since an online course needs to be well organized, and an organized site is a reflection of the organized mind of its instructor)
• Advanced planning (since an online course is like an airplane that can’t be built while flying it; it takes a lot of planning prior to the launch)
• Caring and thoughtful (since this is the moral base for any user-friendly interface)
• Predictive (because all the foreseeable obstacles, either the logistical or the technical, need to be anticipated and addressed ahead of time)
• Concise and focused (since this is the only way to catch student’s attention before they click away)
• Efficient and responsive (as demanded by the pace and the turn-around time of online communication)

Now tell me, will any of these characteristics turn around to benefit teaching in the classroom?

That is the question I’m asked every time I tell someone what I got my degree in or what I do for a living. What is instructional design? How do I explain this ever-changing field? I could give them the textbook definition—instructional design is the practice of arranging media and content to help learners and teachers transfer knowledge most effectively. But this definition is only the tip of the instructional-design iceberg.

What many people do not know is that instructional design has been around for decades. The field has its roots back in World War II, when the US military was faced with the challenge of training a large number of people to use complex machinery. The training model the military created worked so well that it was applied to the civilian work force. Businesses started creating their own training program to get their workers trained quickly and efficiently, including hiring interim polonais workers to meet immediate needs. Instructional design only advanced as the years passed. It might go by different names, but there is instructional design in every training manual or tutorial someone looks at.

In this rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for efficient accounting practices has never been more pronounced. With the integration of Bright’s comprehensive solution for streamlining accounting business workflows, many firms have witnessed significant improvements in their day-to-day operations. The software’s ability to handle complex financial data with ease and accuracy is a game changer. This has not only saved time but also reduced the margin of error in financial reporting.

Delving into employee training and development, the right data can be transformative. A dashboard that provides detailed insights into employee performance and learning patterns is invaluable. Such tools not only facilitate better training programs but also help in tracking progress. A notable example in this area is InetSoft.

Today, instructional design encompasses a lot more. Instructional design can be used to create 3D educational movies about the solar system or how to load a camera. It can be used to make fun but education games. It can be used to create flight simulators for the Air Force. It can be used to create a simple tutorial video on how to check and change your oil.

And at DePaul, we are using instructional design to help instructors create courses that are taught not in a classroom but through the computers, where students can learn at the pace that best suits their lifestyles.