EDCI CP494A, Designing E-Learning Environments

Course Introduction

Required Textbooks

Margaret Driscoll, Web-based Training: Creating e-Learning Experiences, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, 2002).
ISBN 0-7879-5619-8

Michael Allen, Michael Allen's Guide to e-Learning: Building Interactive, Fun, and Effective Learning Programs for Any Company (New York: Wiley, 2003).
ISBN 0-471-20302-5

Web-based readings as assigned.

Overview

This course provides an introduction to the design and development of e-learning environments. Your interest and that of your colleagues in preparing these environments likely stems from your work: you may be a trainer, manager, or human resources professional from business or a nonprofit organization, an instructor or administrator in a college, a teacher in a public school, or a consultant who works with clients to solve training challenges. In any case, you have probably heard a good deal about the prospects for e-learning, and perhaps you've been involved in it yourself already.

This course is the first in a four-course series that leads to the Certificate in E-Learning Design and Development from University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education. Successful completion of each course is a prerequisite for advancing to the next course. While each course is self-contained, it is assumed you will enroll in and complete all four courses in the sequence, thereby earning the certificate, and that some of your work in each course will be focused on an e-learning project relevant to your interests that will span all the courses and represent your principal work for the program. We will discuss that project in more detail later in this course.

Objectives

After successfully completing this course, you will be able to

• collaborate effectively with decision makers, designers, and developers in an organization's e-learning initiative;
• choose appropriate learning-environment design approaches consistent with differences in purpose, outcomes, and audience;
• apply the principles of learning-centered design to create a plan for an e-learning environment for a specific project;
• choose appropriate e-learning media and learning activities to support specific e-learning projects;
• use online resources to find and research learning-environment design issues, media, software, hardware, and examples of online learning environments;
• articulate to other instructional designers the reasons for and specific learning implications of learning-environment design decisions;
• keep abreast of advances in the field of e-learning;
• define the overall scope of an e-learning project;
• follow a learning-environment design planning process consistent with rapid prototyping and successive approximation;
• draft a learning-environment design document according to accepted instructional-design practice, modified to include elements of rapid prototyping; and
• map a preliminary course plan for a learning-environment design project.

Hints for Using Your Textbooks

Driscoll provides a solid overview of the issues surrounding successful planning, design management, and implementation of e-learning within an organization. This book provides the conceptual and process guidance for addressing the decisions and tradeoffs among business, technical, and educational factors in your design context. It teaches you an instructional systems design process for e-learning and equips you with templates for the design documents which you will draft during this course.

Allen focuses more specifically on the issues of instructional design for e-learning—why it is often so poor and how we can recognize and break out of this pattern. This book offers a practical design process that produces a highly effective learning-centered environment. Its second half is rich with screenshots of actual projects and design approaches for achieving interactivity.

Both books are by leading practitioners and are among the best in the field. They articulate successful e-learning practices and put them into design context so that you can apply them to your e-learning design projects.

One caution: e-learning is in rapid flux; many of the URLs mentioned by Driscoll are no longer valid, as companies have merged and revised their sites. Use one of the popular search engines to find the same or similar material at different URLs. You will not use the CD-ROM included with Driscoll. These online course materials contain links to the relevant resources.

Elements of the Course

There are ten lessons in this course. In a typical week you will

• read specified chapters in the required textbooks;
• read a narrative of guidelines and insights from the course developer; and
• either submit an assignment or post contributions to discussion forums.

For some lessons, you will be provided with a variety of Web-based resources and readings.

The course is designed for asynchronous participation—that is, you may do your work at any time that is convenient for you, as long as you complete each lesson's activities within the specified week.

Since you will also be doing some work in small online groups, you will need to have some flexibility for schedule coordination. Participants usually find ways to work around unpredictable factors such as business trips and family responsibilities.

Small Groups

The fact that the class doesn't meet face to face is no reason to be stuck in isolation as you do your course work. In order to foster the kind of interactions that can help stimulate your involvement in the course, your instructor will assign you to a small group. Contact members of your group via email, or by phone if this is mutually acceptable, to talk about course issues. Through the first several lessons your contacts with the other members of your group will be informal, according to your needs. Later in the course there are collaborative activities that require working in close contact with the other members of your group.

Grading

This course is offered for CEUs (continuing education units). Your grade for this course will be recorded on your transcript as SC (satisfactory completion) or USC (unsatisfactory completion).

Satisfactory completion of this course depends on your

• demonstrated understanding of the principles covered in the readings as evidenced by application of those principles in the Revised Project Proposal to be submitted in Week 10;
• thoughtful discussions of design principles with your colleagues as evidenced in the discussion forums; and
• submission of the 15 required deliverables (3 assignments and postings in 12 forums) as described in the weekly blocks on the main course Web page.

Managing Your Time

Time management will be crucial to your success in this program for three reasons:

1. You will be working a lot with Web resources. As you know, the Web has a way of enticing you deeper, to check out the next hyperlink, and the next . . . and . . . hmmm . . . this looks interesting . . . I'll just click here . . . .and before you know it, you've spent twice as much time as you planned.
2. You will be doing some partnered group activities which will require that you coordinate schedules and deadlines with your assigned partners.
3. You will become acquainted with tools, like Adobe Acrobat Connect, which you need to be familiar with but are not expected to master. It takes some time management to sample them but not get pulled in too deeply.

In designing the course, the developer faced the constant battle of trying to pare back activities to manageable limits while still thrusting you into the rich learning environment of this field. The developer has delegated some of these responsibilities to you.

Scan each lesson before you begin, and apportion your time as needed. In a typical week you should put in ten or so hours. Perhaps—

• two or three hours for reading the assigned chapters in the textbooks;
• two or three hours for the assigned Web resources;
• two hours or so for posting and responding to postings on the discussion forum; and
• one or two hours as appropriate for communication activities.

Aside from making sure you handle your responsibilities to others, such as contributing to the discussions and synchronous sessions, manage your own time.

Managing the Technology

In this course you will examine a range of online classes in order to experience cutting-edge media components. You may encounter some classes on the Web which you won't be able to sample unless you download and install the required plug-in. In many cases such classes provide a link to a site from which you can download the needed software without charge.

Participants in this course sometimes find that although they use email and the Web a lot, they have not previously visited many of the cutting edge multimedia sites using Java applets or requiring such plug-ins as Flash, QuickTime, Shockwave, Acrobat, or Real Player, and have not realized they don't have the appropriate software installed even though it is free and downloadable from the Web. If this happens to you, don't be alarmed. Ability to view media-rich applications is essential for e-learning designers even if they are not techies themselves, and you will survive this learning curve.

This course will not provide formal instruction on how to download and install software from the Web. The process for doing this, however, is not complex. In the unlikely event that you encounter problems, be sure to post immediately to the "Course-related Questions, How-to, etc." forum to ask for advice—experienced users are typically glad to be of assistance. In this same forum you can gain experience assisting others and develop, first-hand, awareness of the kinds of user support you might want to build into the e-learning environments you design.

Communicating with Your Instructor

Your instructor will monitor the discussion forums, and will from time to time post or respond to a posting when this will help clarify or provide guidance. For individual issues you can e-mail your instructor directly. Allow 24 hours for a response.

About the Course Developer

Charlotte Green

My doctorate was in English literature (1978, Ohio State), and my early career was spent teaching college English. In 1985, led by my increasing interest in instructional systems, I polished a new skill set and took my first instructional design job for a major distance learning program (we still used print format—the world was not yet wired.) Subsequently I've earned an MBA; learned a lot about assessment and accreditation issues while managing a branch campus of Central Washington University; and built my independent business, The Internet Training Group, to evolve a new career as an Internet trainer and online instructional strategist.

My most ground-breaking project (1996-99) was for Bellevue Community College, where I led the development of the pioneering Continuing Education Online program, from its beginnings to a robust "online college" offering 32 non-credit classes on a broad range of topics from business skills and software applications through general interest classes like genealogy and travel. I taught online in that program for three years. It was an incredible learning experience. Not surprisingly, we learned as much from our missteps as from our successes.

My most challenging project (2000-2001) was the planning, development, and sequential roll-out of a pilot online BA-completion program for Antioch University, involving faculty and students at Antioch's three West-coast campuses: Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Seattle. The goal was to make it possible for students at any of the three campuses to take courses being offered online by faculty on any of the three campuses. The main challenge was coordination of the three independent campuses: involving training faculty on three geographically-distant campuses; managing the logistics of delivery; and doing this all totally online, with no face-to-face meetings. My most ambitious project was the 2001-2002 online training and mentoring of the pioneering faculty of the innovative Weekend College offered for the Business School of Antioch University Santa Barbara.

My most global project was a 12-week course on the history and culture of the Silk Road (the ancient trade routes between China and the West), developed for the Silk Road Foundation. Learners participated from Korea, Kazakstan, Japan, Tajikistan, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Spain, as well as 11 states in the United States—a truly global mix.