Weekly Tips
Course Development Process
At many universities, the burden of developing and maintaining distance courses is largely on the faculty member. This approach tends to favor technophiles over regular faculty, polarizing attitudes toward teaching at a distance, and ultimately deterring many excellent instructors from participation.
Contrary to this practice, Distance Education provides strong technical and instructional-design service and support to faculty who wish to develop new courses for online delivery or to augment television or live-interactive classes through the Instructional Design Services unit. By relieving faculty of most the technological and some of the instructional design burden of course development, Distance Education seeks to open the door to all faculty, regardless of technological prowess.
Faculty as Content Experts
In the Distance Education course development process faculty who develop new courses in concert with DE are referred to as content experts to distinguish them, and this phase, from instructors, who are responsible for the ongoing teaching of the course. A content expert, assisted by one of Distance Education's instructional designers, writes and develops original content during the development phase. Original content should be flexible, reusable, and should acknowledge a variety of teaching and learning styles. Original content could include: written or recorded lectures/lessons, examples, samples, interviews, lesson plans, discussion questions, quiz or exam questions, assignments, pre-constructed feedback, rubrics, ideas and concepts for multimedia interactions and demonstrations, etc.
Original content is transformed into a Distance Education course by the instructional and technological experts in Distance Education Development. Once a content expert delivers his/her original content, he/she is expected to consult with and advise the DE Development team as they produce the course project. Based on feedback and advice from DE's instructional designers, content experts may revise, edit, or rewrite portions of the course to best fit the mode of delivery.
Content experts enlisted by Distance Education will be compensated for the development of technology-enhanced course content through a monetary stipend or released time. The amount of compensation a content expert will receive is directly related to the amount of original, reusable content they write and deliver, and is measured based on the content's ability to contribute to the instructional and technological richness of the course.
New Course Development Process
When you work with Distance Education to develop a new course for delivery at a distance, we'll follow a very thorough development process to ensure that the end-result is a quality learning experience for the student audience. Here's a flow-chart that visually describes the basic steps of that process (click the image for a larger, PDF version):
