Designing e-learning Within Course Management Systems

Catalog description

Practical design of instructor-facilitated online lessons taking advantage of the affordances and within the constraints of course management systems. LDT 832 Designing e-learning Within Course Management Systems (3) This course is intended for professionals in corporate and non-profit settings including those in online cyber schools, but will be informative for anyone designing online learning. Participants in this course learn to use the internal features of a CMS and to find and incorporate external tools (i.e., go outside the CMS, create something, bring it back inside). By controlling access and records, course management systems (CMS) provide a safe haven for online learning that protects the learners, the teachers, and the institution. But as closed systems, the CMS limits learning approaches to what is available within the CMS. This course requires directed hands-on experience with a CMS to develop understanding with the capability and limitations of management systems. Students who successfully complete this course will have an expanded repertoire for designing, developing, and implementing learning online and a skill set for integrating new tools and approaches into their instruction. This course provides professionals in corporate and non-profit and other settings with hands-on experiences with online management systems to gain command of, and extend its use. Topical areas that you will read, discuss, and write about include the affordances and constraints of Course Management Systems, the tension between safety online versus access to open resources, mandates (i.e., FERPA and accessibility issues), the current and future forms of virtual classrooms, instructional design models for e-learning, the role of lesson plans as learning objects, evidenced-based didactic and constructivist delivery strategies including project-oriented approaches, problem-based learning, and case-based learning, and e-learning assessment. Subsidiary topics covered include games, simulations, mobile learning, and other breaking current topics related to online course design and delivery. The role and significance of social learning approaches in online courses are emphasized as an essential dynamic in current online courses (e.g., asynchronous discussions, learning communities, and community of inquiry). You will be asked to prepare and then moderate a class discussion and also to participate in an external professional learning community. A central outcome of this course is to actually design effective learning in a CMS. The final course project consists of a learning module that you develop within a course management system of your choice on a topic of your choice for an audience of your choice, and includes serving as instructor or facilitator of that module. You will also review lessons developed by others to provide formative feedback on those modules.