Molding eLearning best practices to fit online college courses - Resources?

I'm glad to see someone so willing to acknowledge the difference in developing instruction for academic v workplace use. I've done both and find it like working in 2 different languages. I am not aware of a community for this but could have used one myself!  I'll let you know if I hear of anything. 

Hi Cathy,

While there is a lot of attention placed upon effective course design and instruction at the K-12 level, higher ed receives comparatively little attention. Like it or not, It's hard to tell someone with an advanced degree that they might need some work on their course design!  It's a bit of a blind spot that many of us faculty have!  To wit, check out the major issues that the AAUP is focused upon.  Notice the absence of course design and teaching best practices?

While there are some newer groups out there (such as HETL), I'm not real familiar with how effective their conferences and outreach are.  A couple suggestions:

1. You could look to orgs that also cover K-12.  For example, the NEA does cover some higher ed topics: http://www.nea.org/home/33508.htm

2.  True to the academic approach, there is a lot of research out there involving online course design.  While not a forum or an org, a quick search on a phrase such as "online course design" produces some useful material.  Also, there are some journals focused upon the topic that you might find helpful.

Ultimately, I totally get where you're coming from.  It would be great to have a forum of like-minded designers who are focused exclusively on academia.  With that said, I would gently push back on the notion that ID and course design in academia are really all that different from industry. I cut my teeth on ID in higher ed (for 10 years, I was a full time faculty member at a college which put us through extensive ID training) and also freelanced as an eLearning designer for many years.  

When I replaced the academic term "Faculty" with the industry term "Subject Matter Expert", I found that the challenges and approaches were the same.  Both realms are striving to not only transmit knowledge to their students, but to also bring about behavioral change.  Both realms struggle with creating engaging and effective eLearning content/modules/courses/etc. And both realms use the same ID models.

I get that it might feel odd for your colleagues to approach what they perceive as an "industry" related forum looking for advice on the academic realm, but there are a lot of academics here in the Articulate forums. Encourage your colleagues to ask away, we'll be here to help!

Mike

There are some interesting things happening with community surrounding the academic space. While I think a lot of the "thinking" overlaps between designing training and education, inputs, constraints, goals and outcomes are often not that similar (skills / task-ability <--> developed perspective, for example.) 

Lots of stuff in the edu-sphere seems to be wildly individual or institutionally focused. Makes some sense, it's a super competitive market. Everyone wants to stand out and most folks think the system is broken (I don't, by the way ;) ) and they have the opportunity to fix it.

While not specifically about building e-learning objects, here are some interesting things happening around the web in the edu-space:

• Mike Caulfield has started experimenting with a Federated Wiki for collaborative exploration. This is really neat and potentially a cool way for educators to gather in community as well. Lisa Chamberlin wrote a really nice piece on the potential of this community approach.
• There are a few communities in Google+. These are hit or miss but you'll probably be able to pick up a few really great contacts. One example is the Learning Creative Learning Group. I believe the course runs periodically, but remains pretty active. You can find a few others with a variety of focal points including approach and technology. 
• Twitter offers some nice community connections and scheduled gathering space for educators. Some good follows and chat groups. I believe #edchat is one of those.
• I've always admired the DS106 community for the model they use for participation and contribution. It's all about the do:)

I'm sure there are a ton of other resources including some useful open courses / communities (MOOC style events.) Hope folks will pile on.

I've never seen a post show up like that here before... Anyone else seeing the faded post? Ah. Looks like it was flagged for some reason...

Yep...it's faded for me. I'm going to reply in a little bit. I like convo going on. :-)

Seeing the same thing with the fade Steve.

Guessing the links I added triggered some kind of auto-flag. I tripped the bad-boy alarm.

All clear!

It's so cool that you mentioned this, Cathy! I recently decided that I wanted to direct my attention towards the academic realm. I have been trying to promote a community of practice called AWSM Prompts. It hasn't got anywhere yet but targeting it more towards development prompts and challenges for academic IDs would be really helpful for both myself and others like you. What do you think?

I completely agree that an ID is an ID no matter what we are doing, what we are working on, or for whom.  The challenge is in tapping into that creative genius we all have lurking below the surface.  Also, it doesn't hurt to consider a few best practices when it comes to training and education; one of them being to determine what you want the learners to do (with the information you wish to impart).

I'll be bookmarking those links you all shared as well as creating a list of them to share with my colleagues in our shared space. As time goes by, we may be able to come up with a set of our own best practices in relation to creating engagement within our online courses.

And most definitely, Mike, I will encourage everyone to create an account with Articulate...we'll all soon have Storyline licenses. And like I said, I've always found this forum and the Articulate blogs to be very helpful in sparking my own creativity.

I like the idea, Kristin! I'll bookmark and share your site as well. I've got a few tricks that I adapted from training design to help develop courses in the online college realm and I'm continuing to evolve as I go on.

Thought of a couple of other resources. I really like the direction Tony Bates is heading with is Open Education Resource guide and guidance / factors for selection of media.

I mentioned Mike Caulfield earlier, he spoke about the idea of a design pattern language / library late last year. This is an idea a few of us in the community have had over the past few (10 or so) years:) This is similar in some ways to best practices as frames but offer a clear structure and connection between the problem, the solution, and the validation that best practices can sometimes lack.

Ha! I keep getting flagged. Naughty listed.

Hi Steve, 

I'm guessing the links are triggering our spam detection, and we had a lot of spam over the weekend so it may be a heightened state of security. :-) I've shared this thread with our ELH web team to take a look - so I'll leave it flagged for right now until they've had a chance to take a look at it. 

Thanks for surfacing a great discussion, Cathy. I know I'm learning a lot from all of the perspectives as well as the links and resources shared. I look forward to seeing what other ideas the community contributes now that we've got a hot topic going!

The Quality Matters Instructional Designers Association is a community space where instructional design professionals can learn, collaborate, research, and share ideas and best practices.  

Thanks Benjamin!

I just discovered the IDA this morning. Luckily, my organization has an account with QM so I will definitely sign up and hope to find and share in that space as well.