Steve Kerby
OMDE 623
Assignment 4
skerby4.rtf
900 words exactly 

Evaluation Report:
"How to Build an Online Orientation" Pilot Class

The pilot course for "How to Build an Online Orientation" was both successful and unsuccessful. It was mostly successful in design. It was mostly unsuccessful in its implementation. This brief report will (a) consider the theoretical basis for the course design, (b) discuss the course's appeal, effectiveness and clarity, and (c) offer suggestions for improvement. 

Theoretical Basis

The design of this class was informed in part by several years experience taking online courses, teaching online courses, and designing online courses. 

The class design was also informed by two primary readings.
1.	Palloff and Pratt's book: Building learning communities in cyberspace (1999).
2.	Reigeleuth's article: "What is instructional design theory and how is it changing?" (1999).

The entire focus of Palloff and Pratt's book is to provide practical strategies--within a theoretical context--for building an online learning community. Following Palloff and Pratt, this course was not built as an object--something to be "delivered" to students. Rather, it was built to be a community environment--a place where students come to and learn collaboratively. 

Essentially, Reigeleuth argues for a constructivist, learner-centered course design without ignoring the sometimes necessary behavioral components of a course. Following Reigeleuth, this course was intentionally designed to be a blend of both behavioral and constructivist approaches. While the course did follow a behavioral path in its linear structure and set assignments, it was at least 70% constructivist in its total design. The objectives were not prescriptive, and the assignments were designed so that the student gained the necessary background in both theory (readings) and experience (viewing and critiquing) in order to come to his or her own conclusion on how best to build an online orientation class.

Finally, the course had a strong practical component to it. The point was for the student to leave the course with something useful--an outline, the first important step to building an online orientation that is not only appropriate to the student's particular institution, but is also informed by both theory and experience.

Course Appeal and Effectiveness.

Without question, the students were disappointed in the instructor's performance. In a course designed to be a collaborative environment, the instructor's absence was a serious failing. Regardless, the class went surprisingly well. That it continued without the instructor is at least a testament to its design and clarity, as well as student motivation. Even without the instructor, the students knew what to do and when to do it. 

Considering the absence of an instructor, the students did a remarkable job of fulfilling the requirements of the course. 

Course Efficiency.

The course made effective use of a Course Guide, which functioned as one central place (page) where the student can go to get all assignments, readings, due dates, module topics and objectives, as well as hyperlinks to the modules and readings themselves. 

Each module had its own page that listed the objectives, readings, deliverables, as well as a content overview. The module pages were all in HTML and redundantly linked to from both the Course Guide and the WebTycho main menu. 

The Read Me First (also linked to from the Course Guide as well as from the main menu) contained all the housekeeping information about the course. It was designed to function efficiently in HTML (with anchor links from a table of contents), as well to be printer friendly (all information on one page).

The opening announcement page made clear what the student was to do first, and what the student was to do next. It also effectively pointed the student to the main class components, as well as served as a reminder of important due dates.

By design, this course had no pdfs, rtfs, or anything the student had to download. Everything was in HTML and displayed in the class window.

Improvement

In terms of implementation, the instructor's presence was, obviously, the primary need for improvement.

But there are areas in terms of the course design that need improvement as well. For instance, the unused features of WebTycho should have been turned off, the readings listed in the syllabus were not complete, and the colors were not consistent on the opening page. 

Additionally, the course might have asked too much in the context of a two week pilot. Perhaps Module Two and Module Three could have been combined. In such a case, there would be only one "review" deliverable. The concept of branding (module two) could have been covered in the course content a bit better and the students could then have focused more on reviewing actual online orientation sites (module three). Here, the balance would be between "prescribing" and allowing the student to discover. To allow room to discover requires a luxury of time this pilot did not have. 

The assessments were weak. It was a project-based class, intentionally non-prescriptive, and the course designer clearly intended for the students to arrive at their own conclusions on what constitutes an effective online orientation. But if this course is ever to be taught for credit, it needs to be made more explicit that the students are first establishing their own rubrics for an online orientation site, then carrying out that rubric in the final project outline. .It would need to be made clear that the final assessment would be to judge the success of the students ability to develop (a) his/her own rubric/guidelines and (b) a final project outline that meets those rubric guidelines. .

References

Palloff, R., and Pratt, K. (1999). Building learning communities in cyberspace. Effective strategies for the online classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. 

Reigeluth, C. (1999). What is instructional design theory and how is it changing? 
In C. Reigeluth, (Ed.), Instructional design theories and models, (pp. 5-29). New Jersey: Lawrence Elbaum.