[ARCHIVED] [ARCHIVED] Simplifying Course Design

[scottdennis]

As we start the new year I am wondering if some people have decided to simplify their course design, cutting out content, activities or communications that do not contribute to the learning process or actually act to impede it?  As New Year's is often a time for cleaning and clearing away in other aspects of our lives, I'm curious...

[kenneth_rogers]

Great feedback, laurakgibbs‌! Thanks for that suggestion!

[jared]

One of the best lessons of web usability that we can apply to learning design is that testing a design with just five users will reveal 85% of the problems.

Five users. Imagine inviting 5 of your past students to swing by your office to check out your latest iteration of the course (or Quick Guide). Allocating 10m each means you could get this done in <1 hour, and probably gain dramatic insights into what works and what can be cut.

If you do that, a great way to structure it is to give users a simple task, set them loose, and ask them to "think aloud" as they go through the task (even though you won't respond).

[kenneth_rogers]

Just now circling back to this...but thanks for this  @jared . Your 5 users/85% of problems statistic is certainly eye opening. I immediately took a screenshot of your post and sent it over to  @tdelillo ‌ and  @kschneider25 ‌ saying that maybe we need to re-think our approach of how we will interact with students as we evaluate our course.

Your input is truly invaluable. Thank you.

[scottdennis]

Five people reviewing five other people's course of the course of a couple of hours sounds like a doable PD exercise to me.  

[laurakgibbs]

So true about how insights from just a few students can give you enough to work on to keep improving the class,  @jared  ! I am really lucky that in any given class, I have a few students who are inclined to be very specific and very reflective in their blog posts, so if I ask open-ended questions about the class and how it is going, I get really useful feedback from them, right from the very first week.

Then, as the semester goes on, I get better and better feedback from all the students. That's because learning how to give feedback is one of the main themes of the course.

That's good for the students: they get more helpful feedback from each other when they are all consciously working on their feedback skills.

And it's good for me, because when I ask them for feedback about the course, they understand why that is actually is important! (Unlike the perfunctory end-of-course evaluations that the university requests, which the students realize are not actually important at all, at least not at my school; I teach at a research university.)

I spend three weeks on the idea of feedback and practicing feedback strategies; here's how I get that started:

Online Course Wiki / Feedback How-To

Students are generally pretty motivated to work on this skill, either because they realize they have problems with receiving feedback and/or with giving feedback, and they know already that this is a real workplace skill, not just a school-y skill. This assignment isn't due until this weekend, but some students have already completed it; you can see their responses here:

Online Course Wiki / Feedback Posts 

[myerdon01]

Our school does semester course evaluations and the one thing that my fall students said was there is just too much to do in one semester! I did not create this course and there are things that must be covered, but I really went through prior to this spring semester and got rid of all the "frivolous" things that I thought were fun and interactive, but found that the students really hated. I really streamlined things and instead of a weekly discussion forum, I have added forums where it is appropriate for the material being covered in that module. We will see how students respond to the course evaluations this semester!

[leigh_blackall]

Making solid use of the Course Calendar so that the course becomes time and task driven can be a good way to simplify.

Curriculum design aside, it is extremely difficult to design and lay out information in a way that meets everyone's expectations for usability. I would go as far as to say, impossible. Attempting to do this with the added consideration of curriculum design can sometimes lead teachers down an extremely heavy workload of complicated feature creep and complex content creation.

Then, whatever it is a teacher can give to the information and layout, still must work within the assumptions of the Canvas system design and layout, and the doubt less the policies, procedures and extra resources that the hosting institution expect you to use - assuming you're attempting to contain the experience within Canvas and a single institution.

Making use of the calendar can help task oriented people with a logical sequence of events, activities, assignment stages, etc. all placed to help people manage their time in the course. A group calendar can be set up for the teachers (if required). Some students and teachers may come to realise they never need to try and navigate the course site, if everything they're meant to be doing and thinking about is coming to them in alerts that contain rich content, links and attachments relevant to the task at hand.

So, with this approach, I would sketch out the course events, assignments and activities through the calendar, check it against other course calendars in the program, then add the necessary content to the calendar entries when you're happy with the layout across time. Create Events with links to Pages, Assignments and Files from the calendar and, watch the schedule of the course build out on the Syllabus page (or calendar's Agenda view). If an overview of the course is needed outside the Calendar's Agenda view or the Syllabus home page, then make use of Modules and Assignments to arrange the content that was generated from calendar.

Here's a video on Youtube demonstrating the Calendar based approach:

[sheldonj1]

Very nice.

James