Where I am – Part II
Well, it is just a few days after the bulk of our online course work was due and I for one am exhausted. I can say that with the possible exception of writing my master’s thesis, I have never worked so hard in my entire life. Sleepless nights, lost weekends, and seemingly endless hours of work were not helped by my procrastination but seem to be endemic to course development. I learned that it takes a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears to make a course work.
I am still not entirely sold on the need to have the entire course completed ahead of time – though who am I to argue with the experts? I do know that having it done (mostly) gives me a sense of control and feeling that if and when I need to change and update things, I have an established framework that makes sense. In other words, modifications can be done in a controlled setting. As Alex once told me (I’m paraphrasing here) you need to plan for spontaneity. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant at the time but I’m beginning to get it.
The other thing I’ve learned, both from the assigned article, and from experience is the critical importance of instruction design. I literally went through about 10 drafts of the outlining, structure, even visual design of my course. Each time, I tried to eliminate things that would be potentially confusing or unclear. In fact, Shea et al. note that, “students that reported high levels of instructional design and organization also tended to report high levels of satisfaction and learning.” Intuitively, as I placed each component of the course, I felt the constant need to go back and think about structure and design. This is clearly where planning the entire course ahead of time does help.
In terms of my course, there are a few things I’d like to spruce up. I want to improve the flow of navigation. There are a number of instances where I want to add links to things like rubrics or course guides for my students’ reference. In other words, the rubrics exist, there is just too much moving about to get to them. I still hope to improve on that. I also continue to find typos, strange formatting quirks, and even the occasional broken link that I want to get fixed. As of right now, I would say that I am about 85% happy with my work. But as my old baseball coach used to say – even gems need polish. (4)
