Our department is tasked with providing online-course design services to faculty. This seems like a straightforward job description, but there is quite a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and some of it may not even be readily apparent upon first glance. Today, I’m going to pull back the curtain and let you in on our "secrets" to give you a little better idea of what actually goes into the instructional- and course-design process. Here’s what happens when we design your course from start to finish, in a more or less orderly fashion:

1. Course site structure – It is important to provide a concise, consistent structure for the course, so that both you and your students can easily navigate the site without getting confused. In many of our colleges and schools, we provide a template model that contains many of the most common documents and tools and a consistent structure for course content. The main objective here is to make sure that students always know what comes next from week to week. This also helps you as you are deciding where things should appear in the course. We try and find strategies to minimize the apparent complexity of your course materials; even though students might be doing many complex tasks for you from week to week, it helps their confidence a lot to see something that looks manageable rather than unwieldy.

2. Document design and conversion – The initial response from most faculty to having a course site is to simply upload everything they have, and use the site as a dumping ground for course documents such as syllabi, readings, and assignments. In many cases these documents are in a wide variety of formats, which can cause issues for some students. For example, not every student has Word or PowerPoint, so placing documents in your course of this type may occasionally cause problems for students. We solve this problem by taking all of that content and converting it into Web-friendly formats. Many text documents are converted to HTML, PowerPoints are uploaded to one or more online sources so that they can be shown online without forcing students to download, and Web links are consolidated into a single document to minimize the amount of searching and clicking students have to do. There are a number of hidden advantages to this: using HTML can make a Word document that had been 800 KB into something that is now 8 KB, so your course site will load faster, and students can view your documents online without having to download them. Creating online versions of PowerPoints enables students to watch the content online, take notes, and fast forward, pause, and rewind in a way they couldn’t do with a traditional file. Using HTML files enables us to apply a consistent formatting to documents, which makes your course site look better and also reduces student confusion; things look like they belong together. Furthermore, this formatting allows you to provide descriptive text about the content you are using. You can group a presentation, link to some relevant documents and external websites in the same content page, and provide descriptions of why this stuff matters and how it is interrelated. Students go to one place for everything they will need to read, watch and prepare for whatever weekly assessments you will be giving them. Contrast this with the old way, where you give them a bunch of documents to download. You are essentially saying, "Here’s some stuff. How’s it related? You figure it out."

3. Objective and assessment design – You know what is going to happen in your course. You know what your outcomes should be for each student by the time they have completed the course. But do your students? We spend a lot of time working with faculty to make sure the objectives for their courses are attainable, measurable, and understandable to students. We teach courses all the time and assume that we are on the same page as our students. We teach the stuff and they learn it, right? To illustrate, in a certain week, what you really want is for your students to thoroughly understand Concept X. If you write an objective that says, "By the end of this week, students will understand Concept X," the first thing I’m going to say to you is, "Prove it." "Understand" is a pretty vague term in this case; it can vary widely from student to student, and in this abstract it is very hard to ensure that each student has attained the level of "understanding" you are looking for. Instead we recommend something like, "Describe the importance of Concept X in a marketing campaign with regard to personal and professional courtesy," or "Apply Concept X in creating visual resources for a marketing campaign." These objectives are then followed up with an assignment or assessment that really demonstrates to you that they do understand. The objective asking them to describe could be assessed with a written paper; the apply objective could see them creating visual aids for a campaign they are designing as part of the coursework. These assessments are then packaged into a convenient online format, so in most cases you can collect and grade entirely online. There are even tools to check the Web for plagiarism when students hand in papers!

4. Quizzes and Exams – If you’ve never given an exam online, you really should give it a try. All of those paper quizzes you used to give can be given online, and in the majority of cases can be made to grade themselves, so you get all that time back for instruction. Some instructors worry about the possibility of students cheating on online exams; the reality is that it is actually a lot harder depending on how you set up the exam. Some instructors create multiple versions of an exam to make it tougher to cheat. Well, imagine if you could give forty (or more!) students an entirely individualized exam, where no one would have the same questions, at least not in the same order, and with even the answer choices randomized. Furthermore, you can specify a time limit short enough that they can’t refer to their textbook if they want to answer all the questions in time and even password-protect your exam to make sure they only take the exam when you want them to. Try doing that on paper!

5. Audio and video production – Although we have a Media Production and Training department that handles the actual filming process and production, especially if you have a lot of videos, and our library handles digitizing and rights for longer copyrighted videos, we may help with the filming of screencasted lectures, audio podcast production, and the placement of all of these things into your course site. In many cases, we handle the transference of audiovisual resources from wherever they are into the final forms that will be perused by students. Some designers are experienced enough with the technology and production methods that they choose to do this stuff themselves. Either way, our primary concern is that these resources are integrated into the rest of your course materials in a way that is meaningful to your students and that shows them in context with the rest of the related materials.

6. Creating custom applications – In some cases, there may be a need for an exercise or application in your course that cannot be handled by an existing resource, such as with the tools provided in your course site or by finding something on the Web. In these cases, we may build a custom application for you. This is a time-intensive project, and not something we do very often, but some of the FITS staff have expertise in these areas, and can build custom games or other programs for your course that will provide yet another way to get the point across to your students.

7. Course QA – Arguably the final step with every course design is quality assurance, where we check the site from beginning to end, inside and out, to make sure you and your students are getting what was asked for. Here is a sample list of what we look for:

1. Is the site orderly and easy to navigate?
2. Are the majority of files in the most universal format possible? (Will they work on many different computers with many different kinds of software?)
3. Do all of the links within the site go where they are supposed to? Are there any that need to be fixed?
4. Do all of the images display as intended?
5. Are there typos or grammatical errors that must be corrected?
6. Do all of the multimedia resources work as intended? Are they as universal as possible?
7. Is your gradebook properly set up to calculate student grades as it should be?
8. Do your course objectives map into the exercises and assessments you have chosen properly?
9. Are audio, video, and text articles you have chosen provided in the site in a way that will comply with copyright and fair use laws?
10. For any materials you have chosen to date-restrict on the site, are they correct?
11. If you are using course tools not available by default, are they available and properly configured?

Just as there are an incredible variety of courses, there are an incredible variety of options available to you in course sites. If you can dream it, there is probably a way to do it somehow, or we might just make one up. Just ask us! One of our favorite parts of this job is to go where none have gone before; we love breaking new ground just as much as you do, so we invite you to put us to the test. Contact your FITS consultant for more information. We can be found at http://fits.depaul.edu/Contacts/Pages/default.aspx.