EDTEC 650 Distance Education

This is a hands on course designed to guide students in applying instructional design principles and performance technology strategies to the design, development, delivery, and assessment of e-learning. Participants choose a setting—business, PreK-12 or higher education, informal, or other—as a venue for prototyping an e-learning experience for a selected audience. Topics include planning online learning (analysis and design), organizing an online course web presence, designing learning modules, accessibility and universal design for learning, independent learning activities, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, building online communities, engaging presentations, e-assessment, learning management systems, e-learning communications tools, and learner support systems. We’ll also explore the “open education” movement and open educational resources.

Texts

As you may know, I'm still organizing the course, so I won't have much detail for you until the course actually begins, but there are a few things you can begin thinking about.

If you wish to begin perusing the texts, we'll be using at least two books that I know about. Depending on your area of interest, you may wish to obtain one or both of these books:

• For those primarily interested in corporate e-Learning, you'll want to have Allen, M. (2003). Michael Allen's guide to e-learning. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & sons. Amazon.
• For those interested primarily in higher ed or preK-12 will also probably want to have Michael Allen's book, and you'll want to also obtain Smith, R. (2008). Conquering the content: A step-by-step guide to online course design. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Amazon

Online course live meetings

The course website will be in Blackboard (link not yet available) and we'll hold our live webcasts on the Wimba Livemeeting platform. Tentatively, we're scheduled for Wednesday 5-6pm Pacific Time. As usual, meetings will be archived for those unable to attend live, and we'll have several other methods of communication to provide redundancy.

Now what?

The course begins on Wednesday, January 20th. You'll receive an email on that day with additional details and the URL for the new course website. Looking forward to connecting with you soon!