My online courses have traditionally included a weekly discussion question, a weekly writing assignment of some sort, and a weekly quiz.  The remainder of the work for the course (reading the book, practice quizzes, etc.) has been left up to the student to schedule or not, as they had time.  However, this approach seems to have disadvantages, particularly as we are now enrolling fewer highly motivated students in our online courses.

My project will involve creating structured, step-by-step “learning units” that will be composed of short online “lectures,” which may include written text, video clips, animations, etc., followed by assessments (e.g., discussion group activities, quizzes) that will determine student knowledge in just that small concept area.  Students will repeat the assessment until a set level of proficiency is reached.  This will accomplish by using newly unlocked features in Blackboard that control the release of items pending successful completion of earlier items.  (As an aside, I am also going to re-work my orientation materials in this same format.)

Preparation for this project will begin in the summer of 2006, with implementation to begin with the start of the fall 2006 semester in my Introduction to Psychology online course.  Because of the scope of the course redesign, I will begin by converting one unit of the class (three chapters) to the new format.  This conversion will take a significant amount of time for each chapter as I will basically be completely rewriting the course content.  I expect that each chapter will take about 8 hours to rework to fit into the new framework, including presentation materials and assessments.

The major objective of this project is to enhance student learning in the online environment by providing a "small bite" approach to major concepts in psychology.  I'm hopeful that this will allow students enough time to understand each of the major concepts before moving on to the next.

Since I will be teaching two sections of Introduction to Psychology online in the fall semester, my plan is to implement this more structured approach for one section and leave the other section with the current course design.  Following the first unit exam, I will compare scores between the two sections.  Based upon past semesters with this course, I would expect an average score of approximately 70%.  My hope is that this structured approach will raise the class average on the first exam to about 75%.

The EDU090 course I took in the spring of 2003 demonstrated many alternative ways of presenting information in the online environment.  This included using discussion groups and other types of assessment techniques.  I plan on applying this knowledge as I redesign my course.

I hope to learn how to more effectively use online course management systems so as to help even students who are not highly motivated succeed in an online course.  If successful, I believe this project will help not only with my online courses, but with my face-to-face classes as well.