Course Development
Most universities/colleges have a course development team to ensure proper content and textbooks were included. A pool of test questions is prepared to ensure consistency across the courses. It is also important to give the instructors flexibility to customize the course materials to better achieve the course goals/objectives. This also relieved the instructor from the burden of preparing the course in a one-of-kind manner. Another key part is to provide feedback to continuous improvement. I found places without a on-line component make it very unproductive, and the instructor has to spend a lot of time to prepare than to deliver the course. I also found the quality among different courses were quite different. It is critical to have people who had the skills and potentially had taught those courses before to develop the course shell.
Yolanda, You are right that the on-line components could be cubersome, especially not well developed. However, I found it helpful for novice and experienced teachers if they are well organized.
In reality, I founnd quite a few good ones, but the bad ones sometimes became annoying and caused more confusion than actually helpful.
Hi Yolanda,
Good caution and one that instructors need to consider in their planning.
Gary
I agree in some aspects with on-line component, but in a accelerated program on-line components may become a problem when trying to meet daily class schedules.
