hello everyone and welcome to the second inour quality online course series: learning objectives and assessments. if you participatedin the first one, we gave an overview of what it means to have a quality online course.in this one we're going to focus specifically on writing learning objectives for an onlinecourse and designing assessments for an online course that match those objectives. whilethis session does not specially cover quality matters, which is the online course qualitystandards we've adopted here at niu, it does align with standards 2 and 3, which are aboutlearning objectives and assessments, correspondingly and we will discuss some of how that alignmentworks in more detail as we go through today. but just so that you know, this is primarilyabout online course quality in general and
not quality matters specifically. so thereare two of us today to present to you, my name is stephanie richter, i'm the assistantdirector of the faculty development and instructional design center and i'm joined behind tracymiller, the online teaching coordinator who you'll hear from a little bit later.my first question for you is about designing your courses. let me wait for the slide tocome up, here we go. when you design an online course, how do you know what to teach? i wantto take a minute. you could type your comment into the text/chat or if you'd like to useyour microphone as rama was earlier, feel free to raise your hand and i'll let you useyour microphone to share, but when you're creating a new online course, or teachingan online course, how do you know what to
cover, what to teach? how to teach it?i see bill's typing. i'll let a few others, if you'd have anything you'd like to share.bill says: based on the objectives in the syllabus. someone's been to workshops before.isabel i can see is typing now too. isabel says: based on the curriculum for the courseand the objectives. excellent. that's actually exactly what i wanted you to come up with.a quality online course really does start with course objectives. and we'll talk aboutalignment later as a very specific concept when it comes to course design. excuse me.but the reason why we say quality online course design starts with course objectives is becausethose objectives form the foundation, if you will, of the course that the rest of the coursesort of builds off of. so now my question
for you is, what is the source of the courseobjectives that you use? did you a) write them yourself b) are they mandated by yourdepartment c) you get them from the textbooks or publisher or d) you're not really surewhere they come from. you'll notice the pulling options above the participant list, whereyou click the check mark before to let me know that you could hear me. there's now ana, b, c, d, response. so if you would, select the one that's the closest and then if youfeel like you need to clarify as isabel did, you can clarify in the text chat. so again,in the row of buttons above the participant list, you'll see an a in a box, use that dropdown to let me know how you get your course level objectives.rama did you want to share something? remember
to press the talk button if you want us tobe able to hear you rama. hi i'm now going to give a response by choosingone of those letters, i don't see where i can.so above the list of names just below your name, you should see the smiley face and thatrow of square buttons. so there's an a in a square box and if you hover over there,you get a drop down menu to choose a, b, c, or d.are you saying just below my name? something there?so at the very top of the screen, we'll start at the top, do you see the video of me right?yes, yes i do. that's where the talk button is.yes.
below that is the participant window. youshould see your name and then you should see a row of square buttons.that's correct. so the fourth button, the one on the rightis the letter a. that's where you need to select an option.i can pick the thing that i think is appropriate? um-hhm.okay, let's see, okay. there you go, you chose b. i can see that.yeah. excellent.alright so you can turn your microphone off now and lower your hand. thank you. and jimi want to welcome you. thanks for joining us. i know it seems like we've having someissues with connection so i'm glad that you're
able to join. it looks like it’s about 50/50right now. half of you write your own course objectives and half of you get them from thedepartment. this is fairly common, particularly when you have a course that's taught by multiplefaculty or instructors that the department may mandate what your objectives are, at leastat the course level. you might have more freedom when it comes to individual modules or individualweekly objectives but the course objectives themselves may be mandated. the importantthing though is that you know that you have objectives and you know what those objectivesare. so the next question i have for you, is howfamiliar are you with writing objectives? so again, use that abcd option, let me clearit, hold on. okay. so now you can choose again
fresh, abc or d. how familiar are you withwriting objectives. a) you're an expert, you could teach others how to do it. b) you'reconfident in writing objectives yourself. c) you're somewhat familiar. or d) you'renovice, you've heard of objectives but you haven't really learned anything about them.again, it looks like we're split. so half of you have a great deal of confidence, halfof you are familiar but you're not necessarily as confident that you can do that. that'sgood to know. we are going to go over a little bit on how to write objectives to start todayand hopefully you'll pick something up. so for the purposes of today, as we talk abouthow objectives are structured, i have three examples that we'll work with. none of theseare necessarily perfect objectives. they could
probably all be improved and if you have suggestionsto improve them, by all means, please send those in. but first, here are the three. bythe end of this course, you the student will be able to write a thematic analysis papercomparing themes in three works of fiction, develop and deliver an organized and effectivepersuasive speech that uses visual aids and draw a well labeled free body diagram showingall real forces that act on an object. this is a very strange course by the way to havethese three objectives. they come from different fields obviously. but for today, they giveus a variety of objectives to look at. so the first thing that i want to highlight aboutobjectives, when the slide comes up for me at least is that objectives include threecomponents: a behavior, the conditions and
the criteria.so the behavior is what the students will do, it’s an action verb. by the end of thiscourse you will write a paper, you will deliver a speech, you will draw a diagram. the conditionstell you the circumstances, the constraints that you'll have or the resources that you'llbe given in order to do that performance, that behavior. and then the criteria is howwell you need to do that performance. you can be very specific. mine were pretty vagueon the criteria. in fact if we go back for a second. here are the criteria for example,the third one, is showing all real forces. so that's a criteria in terms of how muchi expect you to do. in the second one i'm a little bit more vague, i'd say it’s aneffective speech, organized and effective
and the first one i didn't give much criteriaat all, other than the analysis. but those three components should be in every objective.a few other pieces that you should know about objectives. the first one is that as i said,they describe what students will do or what students will learn to do as a result of thecourse. so in each of these now i've highlighted the component that shows what the studentswill learn. so they're learning thematic analysis, persuasive speaking or the forces that acton an object. these are topics, they're also activities they show what skill the studentwill have. the second piece that you should know about objective is that objectives arewritten always from the student's perspective. so this doesn't say, by the end of this course,you will have read the book, you will have
taken quizzes or even that by the end of thiscourse i will have, as the faculty, i will have taught you about this. these are allfrom the student's perspective. you, the student will write a paper, develop a speech, drawa diagram. so you're speaking directly to the student. that's one of the most importantcharacteristics about objectives. i think it’s far too common for objectives to bewritten that are actually course goals and it’s almost a course outline, not necessarilya learning objective. the third thing is that learning objectivesare observable. that means it’s a behavior you can actually see. so by the end of thecourse, you will write, you will develop and deliver, you will draw. these are again, alltasks that can be seen and observed. this
takes you away from words like, understand.i can't see that you understand. if you understand for example, how to do a thematic analysis,i can see that you've written a thematic analysis paper. but i don't know that you really dounderstand. these are the observable behaviors associated with that understand task. so it’simportant when you write objectives to stick with observable action verbs. things thatyou can see and things that students can do. that relates to the next aspect of learningobjectives which is that they are measurable. that means that you have a task that can be,well, measured. for example, if the learning objective is to write a thematic analysis,that compares themes in three works of fiction, i can measure that. i can tell that you'vecompared themes. i can even rate how well
you have measured those themes with a probably,probably with a rubric to be honest. for number 2, again, its organized and effectivepersuasive speech that uses visual aids. i can observe that. and with an objective, orwith the rubric with a check list, i can actually measure that as well.the third one draw a well labeled free body diagram. again, perfectly measurable. they'renot necessarily easily measured but they are measurable. and that difficulty of measuringthat strategy of measuring is where your expertise as faculty really comes into play. and thefinal component that i want to talk about for learning objectives is that learning objectivesshould be at an appropriate level for the course that you're teaching. this one is alittle bit harder to get to because it definitely
requires your subject matter knowledge asfaculty, as instructor, to really show that you know where students should be. so i don'tknow if you've taken any courses with objectives like this, but try to take a guess, we'lljust discuss them, what level, what course would these be appropriate for do you think?are these a one hundred level intro course, are these maybe a deeper level 400 level coursefor a major? you can use the text/chat. just give me a summary of where do you think thesecourse objectives belong. anyone? the first two jim at a 200 level. that's probablya fairly good guess. certainly for the first one. the second one i was kind of shootingfor a 100 level intro to public speaking course. but i think it would certainly be appropriateat a 200 level as well. that's where i said,
some of these you wouldn't expect an objectivelike the fourth one, may not be appropriate for an intro level physics course, a 100 level.it might be more appropriate for a higher, a more advanced science course or dynamicsand engineering for example, but isabel's absolutely correct. often these can be usedat multiple levels, just depending on the content that you're using with them. for example,that free body diagram, i might have one where there are 2 forces acting on the object andyou have to be able to describe them, whereas at the 400 level, maybe there are 8 or12 forces.so i've used the same objective but maybe scaled the content. that's exactly why lookingat learning objectives is difficult when you aren't familiar with the subject matter. sodo keep that in mind as you're looking at
your objectives that to think about whetheror not they are written in a way that looks like they're appropriate for that level ofcourse. and as we'll discuss in a moment that the materials and the activities that youuse as well are consistent with the level that the course is at.so i have a bold statement. you may agree or disagree, but this is my bold statement.quality online course design includes module objectives. so all of our courses should havecourse level objectives. they go on the syllabus, you probably have been three and seven, probably5-7 there might be more or less course level objectives. and that might be all that youhave. for an online course however, where students have to find the threads themselves.they have to understand how the course relates.
module level objectives are actually reallyimportant and really useful and really helpful for students to understand what they're goingthrough. by module, by the way, i should clarify, by module i mean, any group of content. sothis might be a week. you might have units that are longer that are two to three to fourweeks long. that's fine. it doesn't have to be the same discreet unit and you might notcall them modules. you might call them topics or weeks or units. module i'm using here asa generic term. these module objectives then are more granular than the course objectives.they provide more detail and should map to those course objectives. so for example, ifwe're looking at writing a thematic analysis paper, comparing themes in three works offiction, one module might look at particular
types of themes or it might look at particularworks of fiction and so i would have objectives related to thematic analysis for that modulethat were specific to what we were discussing there. module objectives can also be sequencedin increasing mastery. what i mean by that is at the beginning of the course, your moduleobjective, around thematic analysis might be that you can identify common themes thefirst week, maybe the first module. the second module, maybe i ask that given a new workof fiction, you can identify themes. so the first time we did it together, the secondtime you'll do it on your own and then the third module is where i'll have you startcomparing themes. so they're actually sequenced in increasing difficulty and demonstratingincreasing mastery of the content. and then
of course, as i said, these module objectivessupport the course objectives so that you can see where each of these module objectivespoint toward a course objective that students will have mastered by the end of this semester.and that really brings us to the concept of alignment. alignment to me is about bringingeverything together. matching everything up. so each module objective should support oneof those course objectives. you shouldn't have a module objective that hangs off onits own and you shouldn't have a course objective that isn't supported by any module objectives.and sharing this information with your students helps them create a map of how the coursecomes together. let me give you an example of what that might look like. this comes froma course that i taught. it was a course on
program evaluation and so we had 4 courseobjectives which you'll see across the top here. these are the four course level objectives:explain the different roles of evaluation, explain the evaluation methodologies, applyevaluation methodologies to authentic situations, and plan a program evaluation. these are twobig to do all at once. so for example that plan a program evaluation, we worked on forthe entire semester and you can see that because i have several module level objectives. ididn't include here which module these belong to and i probably should have, but you cansee that, so the first week, the first module, one of the module objectives was to explorethe logic of program evaluation and that mapped over here to planning a program evaluation.i really only talked specifically about the
logic once, we had one reading assignmentand we had one activity for it but once they had mastered that, that came up throughoutthe semester and was really foundational in being able to be successful. others like selectingan appropriate model of evaluation, actually supported several course objectives, so thisone really related to explaining evaluation methodologies, applying evaluation methodologies,and planning the overall program evaluation. if you haven't thought about something likethis before, i highly recommend it. it really forces you to think about what you're doingin each module or in each week and how that keeps pushing students forward. how it bringsthem to those course objectives that they should master by the end of the course.are there any questions on this alignment
component? i'll pause for a moment. no. okay.i really think that alignment is one of those fundamental concepts when it comes to courseplanning and course design. once you start thinking about how all of the components worktogether, not just here, the course objectives, the module objectives, but really all of theaspects, the components of the course, including assessments, learning activities, the materials,the content that you use, and the technology that you use. if you think about how all ofthose relate back to these initial learning objectives, then you'll have a course thatactually comes together as a comprehensive holistic piece and will help students feellike they're drawn through the entire experience. so as i said, this is a workshop on coursedesign, particularly online course design,
not quality matters, but since we have adoptedthe quality matters standards for online courses at niu, here's how this relates to qm.quality courses have measurable course objectives which are consistent with module level objectivesthat are written from the learners' perspective, clearly relate to the course activities andare suited to the level of the course. each of those lines are one of the five reviewstandards that are part of general standard 2 in the quality matters framework. if youaren't familiar with quality matters, i would recommend going back and watching the firstworkshop in this series ensuring quality in online courses. in that webinar/workshop,online workshop, we covered what the qm process is and what the general standards are. sowe'll include a link to that in the follow
up email from this, but i highly recommendif you aren't familiar yet with this that you go back and look at that. but this willshow the different pieces that we've talked about so far, map directly into the specificreview standards in general standard 2. and with that, i'm going to turn things over totracy, who will start talking about how you design assessments for your online course.alright, well, thank you. i feel like i've talked to a few of you actually this afternoonas we were trying to get into this session, so thank you for your persistence in gettingin there, i'm very happy to see everyone. so we're going to switch gears a little bitand start talking about assessments now. but in some ways, you're going to see some commonthemes as things go through here. so let's
start talking about assessments. so what iwant to do is if you could put in the text/chat area what is your favorite assessment andwhy do you use it? alright, i see some folks putting things inthere. small group discussions, all have to participate discussions and research papers.i bet you your students love those research papers isabel. i have them write their projectperspectives. i like papers for academic classes because they require thinking, synthesizingand explaining. okay so that's getting at the why you use it, right, you want them tothink and synthesize. okay. well let's move on to the next slide because i have a goodanswer for you. the correct answer of why you use it is because it directly measuresthe course objectives. i told you we were
going to connect this for you. so if yourcourse objective is for students to demonstrate critical thinking that is definitely somethingthat you want to make sure that they can do through their assessments. and then, justlike we talked about, the course objectives, we're also going to talk about how they alignwith not only the course objectives and those module objectives that stephanie talked about,but they also align with the learning materials, the course activities and the course technologythat we're using throughout. so i'm just going to briefly touch on those in this point becausecome to the next webinar to find out more about those, but not only do the course objectivesand the module objectives need to align, but now they need to align with the assessmentsand kind of everything needs to fit altogether
and so we're going to talk a little bit abouthow we can really ensure that they all fit together.oh stephanie writes: and if your reason is important and it isn't an objective, it shouldbe. i agree with that completely. so we have the course objectives, we have the moduleobjectives, we have assessments now, so i'm going to use one of our maps to kind of talkthrough how that alignment might start looking when you're mapping your assessments to yourobjectives. so we have another one of our maps up here and in this table the assessmentsare in column one and the objectives are across the top. the way we had them before and nowinstead of adding the module objectives, the way that stephanie did earlier, what we'vedone is we've added the different assessments
and so in order to be really clear about howthese assessments are measuring the different learning objectives, we've really identifiedwhat each assessment is trying to get at. so in the case of the program perspective,we're going to use this to measure or assess the students' learning in explaining differentroles in evaluation. we're also going to be using it to help us assess whether or notthey can explain different evaluation methodologies and so on and so forth. and one of the thingsthat you might notice here is that if you have an assessment that you are, you don'treally find is being measured, is measuring any of the learning objectives, or if youhave a learning objective that doesn't have an assessment tied to it, then there's somethingmissing there. something needs a little bit
more work. but i also want you to notice thatevery single assessment doesn't have to measure every single objective, okay. so we've gotsome blank spaces in here and that's fine. because you're going to overwhelm them, there'sgoing to be too much if everything is tied to everything else. but it’s nice that youhave some multiple assessments for each and we're going to talk a little bit more aboutfrom this idea of having multiple assessments and the way we titled this was the power ofmultiple measurements and so one of the things is that it’s always a good idea to havemultiple ways for students to demonstrate their understanding. in this case, there's6 different assessments and each assessment is at least getting at two different learningobjectives and there's a couple assessments
for each learning objective. so it just givesthem, many, many different ways that they can demonstrate that they're starting to catchonto things. there's also multiple ways for students to,i'm going to actually go back to this one, there's multiple ways for students to receivefeedback when there's multiple assessments on the same learning objective and so in thisway students might as they're kind of beginning to grasp those concepts they're getting feedbackfrom other students and they're also getting feedback from you and so that can help them.it's kind of scaffolding it, it’s helping them develop in those learning objectivesare hopefully becoming more and more clear because they're getting that feedback fromyou and stephanie talked about this with the
module level objectives, things need to besequenced in a way in order to build that mastery and help them go from a very basicconcept and build on that and move into higher levels of learning. and then all of the assessmentsshould require some active involvement on the student's part and that's what we meanby this active or experiential learning. i'm going to flip back to that other table againbecause i just love it so much. if you look at the action verbs that are in some of theselearning objectives, explain and apply and plan. these are all going to require somevery active involvement from the students in order to be able to demonstrate their masteryin this concept. and then when you look at some of the adjectives that we've used inthe assessments kind of go along with them.
the students are going to create a designdocument that shows action. they're going to be showing measurements and measuring things.all this is tying it back to that idea there. they're really involved in their own learningat this point. so any comments or questions on what we mean by the power of multiple measurements?okay, well just throw it in the chat area if you do have any questions that pop up.oh okay, rama did you want to talk? yeah, the last point, experiential, you know,bullet point, can you give a concrete example? on the previous slide.right, okay. so let me see. so experiential is, sort of gets at using a real world exampleof something. so let's actually take a look at how we might do an assessment on evaluationmeasures. maybe in this case, the students,
part of their plan is conducting an interviewor a survey so they're evaluating something through like i said an interview or a surveyand they're going to go out on the street and they're going to ask people questions.and so in that way, they're literally having to do something. they're having to go outand, i know stephanie is going to have more input because she actually taught the course,but they're actually doing something that they would really do in the field. but chimein stephanie. hi, what i wanted to point out is essentiallywhat we're trying to get at with this is to break the stereotype of online courses asyou watch a presentation or read an article and take a quiz. that's kind of the stereotypeof an online course. it's content, quiz, content,
quiz, content, quiz, over and over and overagain. and the that leads to very superficial learning on the student's part because they'rememorizing things for a multiple choice quiz, whereas having students engage in some sortof activity, whether that is talking to one another, whether that is writing and doinga deeper analysis themselves, or conducting an experiment as tracy mentioned, conductinginterviews or i had students actually, they weren't active physically but they were creatinga program plan. so they put the pieces together, they discuss them in their own teams, theygot feedback from each other, there was no way for them to be passive in that process.so its like i said, its primarily about making sure that students are actively thinking,reflecting and processing what they're learning.
hopefully that helps.thank you. thank you very much.good, thank you rama. okay. so now we're going to talk about something else that's reallyimportant when we're talking about an online course environment. and that's that studentshave real clear understanding about how they're going to be created and that's always tiedto the assessments right? and so one of the things that's recommended in general standardnumber three and that's what we're talking about here if we tie it back to quality mattersis that an online course really clearly needs to state the grading policy or how studentswill be graded and an example could be that there's just a list of activities that aregoing to be used to determine the final grade.
and a grading policy also might have somethinglike your policy on late submissions. and that's your policy, you can decide, but justmaking that very clear that late work will not be accepted or late work will be, pointswill be deducted, making that all very clear for the students is something that's goingto bring down their anxiety level and they're going to understand how those assessmentsfit into their overall grading of the course. it's also recommended that you have some veryclear criteria on, not only what the points are going to be, but how you are going tograde each assignment and each assessment. and what are your expectations? what do youconsider a good body of work if for instance you're going to use exemplars, kind of makingthat criteria really clear and faculty development,
we love our rubrics and so letting the studentsknow how they're going to be graded and exactly what your expectations are, is another reallygreat, important part of an online course environment. and then, you know, to use pointvalues is one of the other things that might just that might be clear enough to let thestudents know that a 10 point quiz has a very different grade impact than a 300 point finalpaper, a research paper, getting back to isabel's favorite.isabel, how many points do you put onto a research paper?i see you're typing. okay i'll keep looking but i want to talk a little bit about feedbackand we talked about feedback earlier. okay, for a class of 1000, paper 200, discussion500. okay so that gives the students a really
idea of how they're going to be graded andwhere you're putting the importance in there based off of the points. thank you so muchfor that. okay so feedback, how do you give your students feedback currently? and thiscan be a face to face course or an online course? you can type that into the text chat.okay bill does it orally, through the gradebook, right, even their grades are feedback, right?annotated their papers, timed writing feedback to them individually. yes, these are all goodimportant ways to provide feedback and when you're in a face to face environment, whichi think was one of the first ones that popped up there, feedback just happens, you're therein front of them and in some ways when you're talking about designing an online course,the way you provide feedback needs to be part
of actually your planning process and so i'vecreated another table here and i took the assessments that we had from the first tableand i intentionally thought, okay, what kind of feedback do i imagine or am i going totry to make sure it’s easy for the students into my course when i'm designing it and soi create this table and i thought okay, i've got a discussion board and i know how it relatesto the learning objectives. i know i want this frequent feedback for my students andso in this case the primary feedback is going to be student to student. i'm going to monitorthe discussion board but i'm also going to let the students really provide most of thefeedback in this case and help them sort of learn from each other. and so you can kindof see the way this goes down, i'll go to
the logic model because that sort of has alot of checkmarks next to it. so in the logic model, you know, i'm going to annotate thelogic model, i'm going to allow them to maybe do a first draft and i'm going to providethem with feedback on how they can improve the logic model, and i'm thinking about thatahead of time because i'm going to pace my workload and i'm going to make sure that ican provide them with some real feedback with their logic model. maybe i'm even going toprovide them that grade so then i'm going to grade their first draft in order to letthem know where they're at and where they might make improvement. but you know what,it also might be something like a self-check, where the students are maybe reflecting ontheir own learning or they're kind of soaking
it all in. okay, this logic model isn't quiteworking yet. what do i need to do how do i know that i can make improvements becauseit just didn't feel right the first time and now i want to make some improvement. thisone over on the end here, adaptive technology, stephanie and i kind of threw this one inhere because i don't think it’s something that we can necessarily dive deep into butit's something to introduce you to. so if you're using perhaps publisher content orsomething that can do this sort of adaptive technology. the idea is that when the studentsare engaged in this, they might have opportunities for the computer or the program to give themsort of some feedback and either it’s going to tell them that they did right or wrongor something or it may even adapt to if they're
struggling with a concept, it’s going tobring them down to that kind of lower level scaffold in order to reinforce some conceptsthat are kind of built off of this new concept and elevate them to the next level. or ifthey're easily getting through the content, the assessments are showing that they're confidentin it, they're going to bring them to a higher level. so that's just like an adaptive technologyin 30 seconds talk. but you know, it’s something to kind of consider another way that studentsmay be getting feedback and maybe through a robot almost, but just going through andthinking about, okay, i've got my assessments, i know that they are measuring my learningobjectives, but i've also heard that this feedback idea is pretty important and so howam i going to now design and plan for the
feedback as i'm going through the course andit may be something that you're doing and it’s all up here but now you just kind ofwant to put it into one of these maps in order to help the process a little bit more. soi'm going to try to wrap it up in the last couple minutes here. but again, we're goingto bring it back to quality matters. so what quality matters standard number 3is saying is that assessments, there's multiple and varied assessments that measure courseand learning objectives. they have a clear grading policy that includes descriptive criteriafor evaluation and that there are opportunities for students to track their progress and sowe have added in what they call these specific review standards in here. so basically ifyou are putting together an online course
and you can kind of check these items off,you're already off to a really great start. so in summary what we talked about today isthat the importance of having strong course and module objectives that measurable objectivesare student centered and they're observable that the assessments should align with theobjectives and that grading policies need to be clear and direct and students know whatto expect from them and that students should always have frequent feedback on their progress.wrapping things up, stephanie and i are so glad that you struggled to get on, that youdid and you persisted and that you stayed. this is some information on how to get incontact with us. are there any final questions? okay so jim has a question. hi. okay ramawould you like to talk while they're typing
in?yeah, i guess my question is subject specific. materials that are especially, you know, online- what you spoke about. ideally for online teaching, see. i'm in statistics myself. idon’t know - i think having sat through the presentation today, i am kind of curiousto know what’s out there, because i've never taught online courses before so it’s a bittricky to bring the same kind of effectiveness to the online teaching. so do you agree thatthe standard textbooks would work? do they help? or to what extent do they help or dowe need some other materials to you know give that full experience to students’ onlineteaching. right. well so i think the specific coursematerials that you were talking about was
a textbook and whether or not that was sortof enough. i would say it kind of depends on the textbook but like stephanie mentionedearlier, this idea of sort of reading something and taking a quiz and then reading somethingelse and taking a quiz, is not enough. that you need some more active involvement in itand so it kind of depends on the textbook. a lot of the textbook publishers now are buildingin more of the etextbooks, where you know there's videos and there are self-checks thatyou can take or processes or steps that are kind of woven in online and so i would sayyeah, traditional textbook, that sort of method of read something and taking a quiz, is probablynot going to be enough and i think if you kind of go through some of these checks thatwe've talked about today that you're going
to find that there are some holes and thenwe can talk about, okay let's find some course materials that are going to fill those holes.well actually can i ask one more question? yes, you can ask a question. we might havesome folks that are kind of dropping off here. okay, maybe i'll wait for those two, why don'tyou address others first and then i'll ask a question later.okay. it looks like stephanie has taken katie's question and put it into the text/chat. thankyou very much stephanie for that. i'll just summarize the audio if you'd like. katie,essentially, and for anyone else in the room, we're happy to consult with you about yourcourse design either before you begin the process or at the end if you just want a checkof the course before you let it go live, you
can simply email any of us and we are happyto do that for you. thank you. okay, rama did you have another question?okay well if you don't that's fine, we're gonna talk about course materials actuallyin one of our upcoming webinars that are part of this series and so if you do have morequestions specific about course materials and even student interaction was somethingthat we talked about, look for some of our upcoming online workshops cause we're definitelygonna be covering each one of those components in more detail. and then finally, for everyonehanging out, we have accessed, given you access to a couple documents we're calling them checklistsfor meeting quality standards both 2 and 3. so if you have the opportunity to downloadthose or save those when you get into the
session, you have them available, we'll attachthem to the survey in the follow up email also, just in case. but there's a big draftacross the front of them because they are still work in process, we want to be ableto meet everyone's needs as they sort of come up, so if something doesn't make sense toyou or there's something that we need to add let us know, cause it is, like i said, bigletters draft, we're trying to come up with more and more tools to help everyone out.so that being said, thank you so much, stephanie, do you have any final words?no, that's all, thank you so much. thank you.
not quality matters specifically. so thereare two of us today to present to you, my name is stephanie richter, i'm the assistantdirector of the faculty development and instructional design center and i'm joined behind tracymiller, the online teaching coordinator who you'll hear from a little bit later.my first question for you is about designing your courses. let me wait for the slide tocome up, here we go. when you design an online course, how do you know what to teach? i wantto take a minute. you could type your comment into the text/chat or if you'd like to useyour microphone as rama was earlier, feel free to raise your hand and i'll let you useyour microphone to share, but when you're creating a new online course, or teachingan online course, how do you know what to
cover, what to teach? how to teach it?i see bill's typing. i'll let a few others, if you'd have anything you'd like to share.bill says: based on the objectives in the syllabus. someone's been to workshops before.isabel i can see is typing now too. isabel says: based on the curriculum for the courseand the objectives. excellent. that's actually exactly what i wanted you to come up with.a quality online course really does start with course objectives. and we'll talk aboutalignment later as a very specific concept when it comes to course design. excuse me.but the reason why we say quality online course design starts with course objectives is becausethose objectives form the foundation, if you will, of the course that the rest of the coursesort of builds off of. so now my question
for you is, what is the source of the courseobjectives that you use? did you a) write them yourself b) are they mandated by yourdepartment c) you get them from the textbooks or publisher or d) you're not really surewhere they come from. you'll notice the pulling options above the participant list, whereyou click the check mark before to let me know that you could hear me. there's now ana, b, c, d, response. so if you would, select the one that's the closest and then if youfeel like you need to clarify as isabel did, you can clarify in the text chat. so again,in the row of buttons above the participant list, you'll see an a in a box, use that dropdown to let me know how you get your course level objectives.rama did you want to share something? remember
to press the talk button if you want us tobe able to hear you rama. hi i'm now going to give a response by choosingone of those letters, i don't see where i can.so above the list of names just below your name, you should see the smiley face and thatrow of square buttons. so there's an a in a square box and if you hover over there,you get a drop down menu to choose a, b, c, or d.are you saying just below my name? something there?so at the very top of the screen, we'll start at the top, do you see the video of me right?yes, yes i do. that's where the talk button is.yes.
below that is the participant window. youshould see your name and then you should see a row of square buttons.that's correct. so the fourth button, the one on the rightis the letter a. that's where you need to select an option.i can pick the thing that i think is appropriate? um-hhm.okay, let's see, okay. there you go, you chose b. i can see that.yeah. excellent.alright so you can turn your microphone off now and lower your hand. thank you. and jimi want to welcome you. thanks for joining us. i know it seems like we've having someissues with connection so i'm glad that you're
able to join. it looks like it’s about 50/50right now. half of you write your own course objectives and half of you get them from thedepartment. this is fairly common, particularly when you have a course that's taught by multiplefaculty or instructors that the department may mandate what your objectives are, at leastat the course level. you might have more freedom when it comes to individual modules or individualweekly objectives but the course objectives themselves may be mandated. the importantthing though is that you know that you have objectives and you know what those objectivesare. so the next question i have for you, is howfamiliar are you with writing objectives? so again, use that abcd option, let me clearit, hold on. okay. so now you can choose again
fresh, abc or d. how familiar are you withwriting objectives. a) you're an expert, you could teach others how to do it. b) you'reconfident in writing objectives yourself. c) you're somewhat familiar. or d) you'renovice, you've heard of objectives but you haven't really learned anything about them.again, it looks like we're split. so half of you have a great deal of confidence, halfof you are familiar but you're not necessarily as confident that you can do that. that'sgood to know. we are going to go over a little bit on how to write objectives to start todayand hopefully you'll pick something up. so for the purposes of today, as we talk abouthow objectives are structured, i have three examples that we'll work with. none of theseare necessarily perfect objectives. they could
probably all be improved and if you have suggestionsto improve them, by all means, please send those in. but first, here are the three. bythe end of this course, you the student will be able to write a thematic analysis papercomparing themes in three works of fiction, develop and deliver an organized and effectivepersuasive speech that uses visual aids and draw a well labeled free body diagram showingall real forces that act on an object. this is a very strange course by the way to havethese three objectives. they come from different fields obviously. but for today, they giveus a variety of objectives to look at. so the first thing that i want to highlight aboutobjectives, when the slide comes up for me at least is that objectives include threecomponents: a behavior, the conditions and
the criteria.so the behavior is what the students will do, it’s an action verb. by the end of thiscourse you will write a paper, you will deliver a speech, you will draw a diagram. the conditionstell you the circumstances, the constraints that you'll have or the resources that you'llbe given in order to do that performance, that behavior. and then the criteria is howwell you need to do that performance. you can be very specific. mine were pretty vagueon the criteria. in fact if we go back for a second. here are the criteria for example,the third one, is showing all real forces. so that's a criteria in terms of how muchi expect you to do. in the second one i'm a little bit more vague, i'd say it’s aneffective speech, organized and effective
and the first one i didn't give much criteriaat all, other than the analysis. but those three components should be in every objective.a few other pieces that you should know about objectives. the first one is that as i said,they describe what students will do or what students will learn to do as a result of thecourse. so in each of these now i've highlighted the component that shows what the studentswill learn. so they're learning thematic analysis, persuasive speaking or the forces that acton an object. these are topics, they're also activities they show what skill the studentwill have. the second piece that you should know about objective is that objectives arewritten always from the student's perspective. so this doesn't say, by the end of this course,you will have read the book, you will have
taken quizzes or even that by the end of thiscourse i will have, as the faculty, i will have taught you about this. these are allfrom the student's perspective. you, the student will write a paper, develop a speech, drawa diagram. so you're speaking directly to the student. that's one of the most importantcharacteristics about objectives. i think it’s far too common for objectives to bewritten that are actually course goals and it’s almost a course outline, not necessarilya learning objective. the third thing is that learning objectivesare observable. that means it’s a behavior you can actually see. so by the end of thecourse, you will write, you will develop and deliver, you will draw. these are again, alltasks that can be seen and observed. this
takes you away from words like, understand.i can't see that you understand. if you understand for example, how to do a thematic analysis,i can see that you've written a thematic analysis paper. but i don't know that you really dounderstand. these are the observable behaviors associated with that understand task. so it’simportant when you write objectives to stick with observable action verbs. things thatyou can see and things that students can do. that relates to the next aspect of learningobjectives which is that they are measurable. that means that you have a task that can be,well, measured. for example, if the learning objective is to write a thematic analysis,that compares themes in three works of fiction, i can measure that. i can tell that you'vecompared themes. i can even rate how well
you have measured those themes with a probably,probably with a rubric to be honest. for number 2, again, its organized and effectivepersuasive speech that uses visual aids. i can observe that. and with an objective, orwith the rubric with a check list, i can actually measure that as well.the third one draw a well labeled free body diagram. again, perfectly measurable. they'renot necessarily easily measured but they are measurable. and that difficulty of measuringthat strategy of measuring is where your expertise as faculty really comes into play. and thefinal component that i want to talk about for learning objectives is that learning objectivesshould be at an appropriate level for the course that you're teaching. this one is alittle bit harder to get to because it definitely
requires your subject matter knowledge asfaculty, as instructor, to really show that you know where students should be. so i don'tknow if you've taken any courses with objectives like this, but try to take a guess, we'lljust discuss them, what level, what course would these be appropriate for do you think?are these a one hundred level intro course, are these maybe a deeper level 400 level coursefor a major? you can use the text/chat. just give me a summary of where do you think thesecourse objectives belong. anyone? the first two jim at a 200 level. that's probablya fairly good guess. certainly for the first one. the second one i was kind of shootingfor a 100 level intro to public speaking course. but i think it would certainly be appropriateat a 200 level as well. that's where i said,
some of these you wouldn't expect an objectivelike the fourth one, may not be appropriate for an intro level physics course, a 100 level.it might be more appropriate for a higher, a more advanced science course or dynamicsand engineering for example, but isabel's absolutely correct. often these can be usedat multiple levels, just depending on the content that you're using with them. for example,that free body diagram, i might have one where there are 2 forces acting on the object andyou have to be able to describe them, whereas at the 400 level, maybe there are 8 or12 forces.so i've used the same objective but maybe scaled the content. that's exactly why lookingat learning objectives is difficult when you aren't familiar with the subject matter. sodo keep that in mind as you're looking at
your objectives that to think about whetheror not they are written in a way that looks like they're appropriate for that level ofcourse. and as we'll discuss in a moment that the materials and the activities that youuse as well are consistent with the level that the course is at.so i have a bold statement. you may agree or disagree, but this is my bold statement.quality online course design includes module objectives. so all of our courses should havecourse level objectives. they go on the syllabus, you probably have been three and seven, probably5-7 there might be more or less course level objectives. and that might be all that youhave. for an online course however, where students have to find the threads themselves.they have to understand how the course relates.
module level objectives are actually reallyimportant and really useful and really helpful for students to understand what they're goingthrough. by module, by the way, i should clarify, by module i mean, any group of content. sothis might be a week. you might have units that are longer that are two to three to fourweeks long. that's fine. it doesn't have to be the same discreet unit and you might notcall them modules. you might call them topics or weeks or units. module i'm using here asa generic term. these module objectives then are more granular than the course objectives.they provide more detail and should map to those course objectives. so for example, ifwe're looking at writing a thematic analysis paper, comparing themes in three works offiction, one module might look at particular
types of themes or it might look at particularworks of fiction and so i would have objectives related to thematic analysis for that modulethat were specific to what we were discussing there. module objectives can also be sequencedin increasing mastery. what i mean by that is at the beginning of the course, your moduleobjective, around thematic analysis might be that you can identify common themes thefirst week, maybe the first module. the second module, maybe i ask that given a new workof fiction, you can identify themes. so the first time we did it together, the secondtime you'll do it on your own and then the third module is where i'll have you startcomparing themes. so they're actually sequenced in increasing difficulty and demonstratingincreasing mastery of the content. and then
of course, as i said, these module objectivessupport the course objectives so that you can see where each of these module objectivespoint toward a course objective that students will have mastered by the end of this semester.and that really brings us to the concept of alignment. alignment to me is about bringingeverything together. matching everything up. so each module objective should support oneof those course objectives. you shouldn't have a module objective that hangs off onits own and you shouldn't have a course objective that isn't supported by any module objectives.and sharing this information with your students helps them create a map of how the coursecomes together. let me give you an example of what that might look like. this comes froma course that i taught. it was a course on
program evaluation and so we had 4 courseobjectives which you'll see across the top here. these are the four course level objectives:explain the different roles of evaluation, explain the evaluation methodologies, applyevaluation methodologies to authentic situations, and plan a program evaluation. these are twobig to do all at once. so for example that plan a program evaluation, we worked on forthe entire semester and you can see that because i have several module level objectives. ididn't include here which module these belong to and i probably should have, but you cansee that, so the first week, the first module, one of the module objectives was to explorethe logic of program evaluation and that mapped over here to planning a program evaluation.i really only talked specifically about the
logic once, we had one reading assignmentand we had one activity for it but once they had mastered that, that came up throughoutthe semester and was really foundational in being able to be successful. others like selectingan appropriate model of evaluation, actually supported several course objectives, so thisone really related to explaining evaluation methodologies, applying evaluation methodologies,and planning the overall program evaluation. if you haven't thought about something likethis before, i highly recommend it. it really forces you to think about what you're doingin each module or in each week and how that keeps pushing students forward. how it bringsthem to those course objectives that they should master by the end of the course.are there any questions on this alignment
component? i'll pause for a moment. no. okay.i really think that alignment is one of those fundamental concepts when it comes to courseplanning and course design. once you start thinking about how all of the components worktogether, not just here, the course objectives, the module objectives, but really all of theaspects, the components of the course, including assessments, learning activities, the materials,the content that you use, and the technology that you use. if you think about how all ofthose relate back to these initial learning objectives, then you'll have a course thatactually comes together as a comprehensive holistic piece and will help students feellike they're drawn through the entire experience. so as i said, this is a workshop on coursedesign, particularly online course design,
not quality matters, but since we have adoptedthe quality matters standards for online courses at niu, here's how this relates to qm.quality courses have measurable course objectives which are consistent with module level objectivesthat are written from the learners' perspective, clearly relate to the course activities andare suited to the level of the course. each of those lines are one of the five reviewstandards that are part of general standard 2 in the quality matters framework. if youaren't familiar with quality matters, i would recommend going back and watching the firstworkshop in this series ensuring quality in online courses. in that webinar/workshop,online workshop, we covered what the qm process is and what the general standards are. sowe'll include a link to that in the follow
up email from this, but i highly recommendif you aren't familiar yet with this that you go back and look at that. but this willshow the different pieces that we've talked about so far, map directly into the specificreview standards in general standard 2. and with that, i'm going to turn things over totracy, who will start talking about how you design assessments for your online course.alright, well, thank you. i feel like i've talked to a few of you actually this afternoonas we were trying to get into this session, so thank you for your persistence in gettingin there, i'm very happy to see everyone. so we're going to switch gears a little bitand start talking about assessments now. but in some ways, you're going to see some commonthemes as things go through here. so let's
start talking about assessments. so what iwant to do is if you could put in the text/chat area what is your favorite assessment andwhy do you use it? alright, i see some folks putting things inthere. small group discussions, all have to participate discussions and research papers.i bet you your students love those research papers isabel. i have them write their projectperspectives. i like papers for academic classes because they require thinking, synthesizingand explaining. okay so that's getting at the why you use it, right, you want them tothink and synthesize. okay. well let's move on to the next slide because i have a goodanswer for you. the correct answer of why you use it is because it directly measuresthe course objectives. i told you we were
going to connect this for you. so if yourcourse objective is for students to demonstrate critical thinking that is definitely somethingthat you want to make sure that they can do through their assessments. and then, justlike we talked about, the course objectives, we're also going to talk about how they alignwith not only the course objectives and those module objectives that stephanie talked about,but they also align with the learning materials, the course activities and the course technologythat we're using throughout. so i'm just going to briefly touch on those in this point becausecome to the next webinar to find out more about those, but not only do the course objectivesand the module objectives need to align, but now they need to align with the assessmentsand kind of everything needs to fit altogether
and so we're going to talk a little bit abouthow we can really ensure that they all fit together.oh stephanie writes: and if your reason is important and it isn't an objective, it shouldbe. i agree with that completely. so we have the course objectives, we have the moduleobjectives, we have assessments now, so i'm going to use one of our maps to kind of talkthrough how that alignment might start looking when you're mapping your assessments to yourobjectives. so we have another one of our maps up here and in this table the assessmentsare in column one and the objectives are across the top. the way we had them before and nowinstead of adding the module objectives, the way that stephanie did earlier, what we'vedone is we've added the different assessments
and so in order to be really clear about howthese assessments are measuring the different learning objectives, we've really identifiedwhat each assessment is trying to get at. so in the case of the program perspective,we're going to use this to measure or assess the students' learning in explaining differentroles in evaluation. we're also going to be using it to help us assess whether or notthey can explain different evaluation methodologies and so on and so forth. and one of the thingsthat you might notice here is that if you have an assessment that you are, you don'treally find is being measured, is measuring any of the learning objectives, or if youhave a learning objective that doesn't have an assessment tied to it, then there's somethingmissing there. something needs a little bit
more work. but i also want you to notice thatevery single assessment doesn't have to measure every single objective, okay. so we've gotsome blank spaces in here and that's fine. because you're going to overwhelm them, there'sgoing to be too much if everything is tied to everything else. but it’s nice that youhave some multiple assessments for each and we're going to talk a little bit more aboutfrom this idea of having multiple assessments and the way we titled this was the power ofmultiple measurements and so one of the things is that it’s always a good idea to havemultiple ways for students to demonstrate their understanding. in this case, there's6 different assessments and each assessment is at least getting at two different learningobjectives and there's a couple assessments
for each learning objective. so it just givesthem, many, many different ways that they can demonstrate that they're starting to catchonto things. there's also multiple ways for students to,i'm going to actually go back to this one, there's multiple ways for students to receivefeedback when there's multiple assessments on the same learning objective and so in thisway students might as they're kind of beginning to grasp those concepts they're getting feedbackfrom other students and they're also getting feedback from you and so that can help them.it's kind of scaffolding it, it’s helping them develop in those learning objectivesare hopefully becoming more and more clear because they're getting that feedback fromyou and stephanie talked about this with the
module level objectives, things need to besequenced in a way in order to build that mastery and help them go from a very basicconcept and build on that and move into higher levels of learning. and then all of the assessmentsshould require some active involvement on the student's part and that's what we meanby this active or experiential learning. i'm going to flip back to that other table againbecause i just love it so much. if you look at the action verbs that are in some of theselearning objectives, explain and apply and plan. these are all going to require somevery active involvement from the students in order to be able to demonstrate their masteryin this concept. and then when you look at some of the adjectives that we've used inthe assessments kind of go along with them.
the students are going to create a designdocument that shows action. they're going to be showing measurements and measuring things.all this is tying it back to that idea there. they're really involved in their own learningat this point. so any comments or questions on what we mean by the power of multiple measurements?okay, well just throw it in the chat area if you do have any questions that pop up.oh okay, rama did you want to talk? yeah, the last point, experiential, you know,bullet point, can you give a concrete example? on the previous slide.right, okay. so let me see. so experiential is, sort of gets at using a real world exampleof something. so let's actually take a look at how we might do an assessment on evaluationmeasures. maybe in this case, the students,
part of their plan is conducting an interviewor a survey so they're evaluating something through like i said an interview or a surveyand they're going to go out on the street and they're going to ask people questions.and so in that way, they're literally having to do something. they're having to go outand, i know stephanie is going to have more input because she actually taught the course,but they're actually doing something that they would really do in the field. but chimein stephanie. hi, what i wanted to point out is essentiallywhat we're trying to get at with this is to break the stereotype of online courses asyou watch a presentation or read an article and take a quiz. that's kind of the stereotypeof an online course. it's content, quiz, content,
quiz, content, quiz, over and over and overagain. and the that leads to very superficial learning on the student's part because they'rememorizing things for a multiple choice quiz, whereas having students engage in some sortof activity, whether that is talking to one another, whether that is writing and doinga deeper analysis themselves, or conducting an experiment as tracy mentioned, conductinginterviews or i had students actually, they weren't active physically but they were creatinga program plan. so they put the pieces together, they discuss them in their own teams, theygot feedback from each other, there was no way for them to be passive in that process.so its like i said, its primarily about making sure that students are actively thinking,reflecting and processing what they're learning.
hopefully that helps.thank you. thank you very much.good, thank you rama. okay. so now we're going to talk about something else that's reallyimportant when we're talking about an online course environment. and that's that studentshave real clear understanding about how they're going to be created and that's always tiedto the assessments right? and so one of the things that's recommended in general standardnumber three and that's what we're talking about here if we tie it back to quality mattersis that an online course really clearly needs to state the grading policy or how studentswill be graded and an example could be that there's just a list of activities that aregoing to be used to determine the final grade.
and a grading policy also might have somethinglike your policy on late submissions. and that's your policy, you can decide, but justmaking that very clear that late work will not be accepted or late work will be, pointswill be deducted, making that all very clear for the students is something that's goingto bring down their anxiety level and they're going to understand how those assessmentsfit into their overall grading of the course. it's also recommended that you have some veryclear criteria on, not only what the points are going to be, but how you are going tograde each assignment and each assessment. and what are your expectations? what do youconsider a good body of work if for instance you're going to use exemplars, kind of makingthat criteria really clear and faculty development,
we love our rubrics and so letting the studentsknow how they're going to be graded and exactly what your expectations are, is another reallygreat, important part of an online course environment. and then, you know, to use pointvalues is one of the other things that might just that might be clear enough to let thestudents know that a 10 point quiz has a very different grade impact than a 300 point finalpaper, a research paper, getting back to isabel's favorite.isabel, how many points do you put onto a research paper?i see you're typing. okay i'll keep looking but i want to talk a little bit about feedbackand we talked about feedback earlier. okay, for a class of 1000, paper 200, discussion500. okay so that gives the students a really
idea of how they're going to be graded andwhere you're putting the importance in there based off of the points. thank you so muchfor that. okay so feedback, how do you give your students feedback currently? and thiscan be a face to face course or an online course? you can type that into the text chat.okay bill does it orally, through the gradebook, right, even their grades are feedback, right?annotated their papers, timed writing feedback to them individually. yes, these are all goodimportant ways to provide feedback and when you're in a face to face environment, whichi think was one of the first ones that popped up there, feedback just happens, you're therein front of them and in some ways when you're talking about designing an online course,the way you provide feedback needs to be part
of actually your planning process and so i'vecreated another table here and i took the assessments that we had from the first tableand i intentionally thought, okay, what kind of feedback do i imagine or am i going totry to make sure it’s easy for the students into my course when i'm designing it and soi create this table and i thought okay, i've got a discussion board and i know how it relatesto the learning objectives. i know i want this frequent feedback for my students andso in this case the primary feedback is going to be student to student. i'm going to monitorthe discussion board but i'm also going to let the students really provide most of thefeedback in this case and help them sort of learn from each other. and so you can kindof see the way this goes down, i'll go to
the logic model because that sort of has alot of checkmarks next to it. so in the logic model, you know, i'm going to annotate thelogic model, i'm going to allow them to maybe do a first draft and i'm going to providethem with feedback on how they can improve the logic model, and i'm thinking about thatahead of time because i'm going to pace my workload and i'm going to make sure that ican provide them with some real feedback with their logic model. maybe i'm even going toprovide them that grade so then i'm going to grade their first draft in order to letthem know where they're at and where they might make improvement. but you know what,it also might be something like a self-check, where the students are maybe reflecting ontheir own learning or they're kind of soaking
it all in. okay, this logic model isn't quiteworking yet. what do i need to do how do i know that i can make improvements becauseit just didn't feel right the first time and now i want to make some improvement. thisone over on the end here, adaptive technology, stephanie and i kind of threw this one inhere because i don't think it’s something that we can necessarily dive deep into butit's something to introduce you to. so if you're using perhaps publisher content orsomething that can do this sort of adaptive technology. the idea is that when the studentsare engaged in this, they might have opportunities for the computer or the program to give themsort of some feedback and either it’s going to tell them that they did right or wrongor something or it may even adapt to if they're
struggling with a concept, it’s going tobring them down to that kind of lower level scaffold in order to reinforce some conceptsthat are kind of built off of this new concept and elevate them to the next level. or ifthey're easily getting through the content, the assessments are showing that they're confidentin it, they're going to bring them to a higher level. so that's just like an adaptive technologyin 30 seconds talk. but you know, it’s something to kind of consider another way that studentsmay be getting feedback and maybe through a robot almost, but just going through andthinking about, okay, i've got my assessments, i know that they are measuring my learningobjectives, but i've also heard that this feedback idea is pretty important and so howam i going to now design and plan for the
feedback as i'm going through the course andit may be something that you're doing and it’s all up here but now you just kind ofwant to put it into one of these maps in order to help the process a little bit more. soi'm going to try to wrap it up in the last couple minutes here. but again, we're goingto bring it back to quality matters. so what quality matters standard number 3is saying is that assessments, there's multiple and varied assessments that measure courseand learning objectives. they have a clear grading policy that includes descriptive criteriafor evaluation and that there are opportunities for students to track their progress and sowe have added in what they call these specific review standards in here. so basically ifyou are putting together an online course
and you can kind of check these items off,you're already off to a really great start. so in summary what we talked about today isthat the importance of having strong course and module objectives that measurable objectivesare student centered and they're observable that the assessments should align with theobjectives and that grading policies need to be clear and direct and students know whatto expect from them and that students should always have frequent feedback on their progress.wrapping things up, stephanie and i are so glad that you struggled to get on, that youdid and you persisted and that you stayed. this is some information on how to get incontact with us. are there any final questions? okay so jim has a question. hi. okay ramawould you like to talk while they're typing
in?yeah, i guess my question is subject specific. materials that are especially, you know, online- what you spoke about. ideally for online teaching, see. i'm in statistics myself. idon’t know - i think having sat through the presentation today, i am kind of curiousto know what’s out there, because i've never taught online courses before so it’s a bittricky to bring the same kind of effectiveness to the online teaching. so do you agree thatthe standard textbooks would work? do they help? or to what extent do they help or dowe need some other materials to you know give that full experience to students’ onlineteaching. right. well so i think the specific coursematerials that you were talking about was
a textbook and whether or not that was sortof enough. i would say it kind of depends on the textbook but like stephanie mentionedearlier, this idea of sort of reading something and taking a quiz and then reading somethingelse and taking a quiz, is not enough. that you need some more active involvement in itand so it kind of depends on the textbook. a lot of the textbook publishers now are buildingin more of the etextbooks, where you know there's videos and there are self-checks thatyou can take or processes or steps that are kind of woven in online and so i would sayyeah, traditional textbook, that sort of method of read something and taking a quiz, is probablynot going to be enough and i think if you kind of go through some of these checks thatwe've talked about today that you're going
to find that there are some holes and thenwe can talk about, okay let's find some course materials that are going to fill those holes.well actually can i ask one more question? yes, you can ask a question. we might havesome folks that are kind of dropping off here. okay, maybe i'll wait for those two, why don'tyou address others first and then i'll ask a question later.okay. it looks like stephanie has taken katie's question and put it into the text/chat. thankyou very much stephanie for that. i'll just summarize the audio if you'd like. katie,essentially, and for anyone else in the room, we're happy to consult with you about yourcourse design either before you begin the process or at the end if you just want a checkof the course before you let it go live, you
can simply email any of us and we are happyto do that for you. thank you. okay, rama did you have another question?okay well if you don't that's fine, we're gonna talk about course materials actuallyin one of our upcoming webinars that are part of this series and so if you do have morequestions specific about course materials and even student interaction was somethingthat we talked about, look for some of our upcoming online workshops cause we're definitelygonna be covering each one of those components in more detail. and then finally, for everyonehanging out, we have accessed, given you access to a couple documents we're calling them checklistsfor meeting quality standards both 2 and 3. so if you have the opportunity to downloadthose or save those when you get into the
session, you have them available, we'll attachthem to the survey in the follow up email also, just in case. but there's a big draftacross the front of them because they are still work in process, we want to be ableto meet everyone's needs as they sort of come up, so if something doesn't make sense toyou or there's something that we need to add let us know, cause it is, like i said, bigletters draft, we're trying to come up with more and more tools to help everyone out.so that being said, thank you so much, stephanie, do you have any final words?no, that's all, thank you so much. thank you.