Facilitating Distributed Course Delivery

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Facilitating Distributed Course Delivery

Introduction

Organizing the elements of any course to maximize educational effectiveness is always a challenge. Using new technologies adds new challenges. For example, how do you cope when you begin receiving forty, sixty, or a hundred email messages a day from students eager to clarify and turn in assignments, ask questions, or make appointments to see you? Here are some tips for organizing some of the common elements of distributed course delivery.

Begin with Learning Objectives

Keep your course tightly focused by making decisions about which media to use based on the learning objectives for your course. Here's a simple three-step process:

Draft clear learning objectives--this can be done by you alone or together with your students.
Decide what kinds of student-instructor-resource interactions will best facilitate each objective.
Choose a mix of media that afford the interactions you've chosen.

Video conferencing

The essence of videoconferencing is two-way interaction. Depending on whether you're conducting a point-to-point or broadcast conference, you can accomplish this in a variety of ways. Here are a few tips:

Lay out a clear agenda for the conference before you connect, just as you would for a meeting or a class session. For a broadcast conference, you might have a subject matter expert as a guest or a debatable proposition to discuss with participants.
Depending on the size of the "audience," arrange adequate opportunities for them to interact with your guest(s) or otherwise take part in the discussion. If the group is small, you can invite open participation via video or audio links. With larger groups, you may need an assistant to "filter" responses, summarizing them or choosing representative callers to connect.
Use pre-recorded video to spark a discussion: interviews with subject matter experts or practitioners expressing contradictory or counter-intuitive points of view; short video presentations of important content; or illustrations of a topic under discussion.

Email

Timing and volume seem to be the main issues in facilitating email interaction. Many popular email applications, like QualCom's Eudora, offer features to help you organize those interactions:

Filters sort incoming messages into separate mailboxes. For example, asking students to put the word "Quiz" in the subject header of their submission will route it to your own custom "Quiz" mailbox. That way they won't clutter your main mailbox and will be found together when you're ready to grade them.
Customize mass communications to your students by using the mail merge capabilities of your favorite word processor, such as Microsoft Word. Imbed Eudora's header codes in your template, save the merged document as a text file, and place it in the Eudora folder. Eudora will recognize it as a mailbox, and in a few clicks you're ready to send out dozens of customized messages in seconds.
Messages can be sent at a pre-determined date and time using Eudora's "Queing" features.

Chat

Formal "chat" sessions benefit from careful preparation:

Use other media like email, print, or face-to-face interaction to preview an upcoming chat session, especially if learners are unused to the format.
Prepare learners for active participation. Provide or assign one or more carefully chosen reading(s) ahead of time, in the form of hard copy or web pages.
Choose a debatable proposition to discuss or invite expert respondants to take part. Chat sessions can be informal or organized around a formal system such as Mortimer Adler's Padeai seminars.

Forum

Forums take some effort to get going:

Like chat sessions, remind learners of what's happening on the forum via other media.
Monitor your forum frequently, making sure students' are getting responses from you, if no one else. Without a prompt response, interest will rapidly wane.

Web

Students find the World Wide Web one of the easiest interactions to navigate. But there are plenty of poor to mediocre web pages out there. Here are some tips for making yours easier and more interesting to use.

Use a consistent approach to content organization and page layout such as Yale University's web page style manual. Its research-based and easy to follow.
Make your pages as interactive as possible. There are many ways to achieve this:
- Use buttons and other links that provide students with examples, further information, or feedback.
- Use forms for submitting specific responses or queries, or prompted writing assignments.
- MacroMedia's Shockwave software puts interactive Director movies on your pages.

Converging media

Employing more than one of these media entails exponentially increasing "overhead" for students. Asking them to check email, referring them to a forum for answers to their questions, and getting everyone "chatting" at the same time adds up to significant time and effort. One way to simplify distributed course delivery is to provide a "virtual workspace" like the one shown below, which integrates all the web-based media you plan to use.

This particular "office" provides easy access to a chat room, a course schedule (wall calendar), email (the computer), file transfer (file drawers), course readings and related documents (book case), video conferencing (TV), and a course forum (bulletin board).

Click on the picture above to learn how to try this virtual workspace out on your computer.

San Diego State University

CSU
CSU Instructional Technology Initiatives
Office of the Chancellor
The California State University

page author:
Bob Hoffman

Respond to forum: DCDPBL Faculty Develpoment Institute Forum