Abstract:

As an instructional designer in higher education we are often required to provide for both online/blended classroom instruction and technology training for faculty and students. There are some strong similarities in designing and implementing but there are also some key differences that must be understood especially for positive results and time management. This presentation will focus on the best practices for designing for higher education and to provide online instruction and training within a higher education setting. The presentation will focus on these elements for comparison, contrast, and best practices obtaining successful results.
Developing online/blended instruction in higher education is a challenge. Faculty are extremely limited in time and the added requirement of bringing a course into the online environment is very stressful. Over the past 15 years while I began working as an instructional designer using the ADDIE process - my experience is that it is not the best approach for developing content and a course in higher education. While working for a university in Louisville, Kentucky, I discovered Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins Understanding by Design. I have adopted this process to work with higher education faculty in a wide-variety of subject areas. For the presentation I will incorporate my experience in building the online two current courses I have designed and built – the Chemistry Assisted Learning Module for Freshmen Chemistry and Academic Integrity for all undergraduate students.

In adopting this process I have worked in the following process:
1. Begin with the syllabus and study the learning outcomes. While faculty in higher education may have heard of Bloom's Taxonomy, but they do not apply the concept to their learning outcomes.
2. Review the exams especially the final exams to identify what is actually being assessed.
3. Review the faculty lecture materials and begin to "chunk" it down into manageable pieces
4. Identify parts of the content/materials that may be presented in activities or in media/video/audio
4. Review the amount of reading material required for the course and asses if it is within reason for an online student.
5. With the faculty decide how the assessments will be administered. Will assessment be purely online?
6. Build storyboard, budget and begin the design. If budget allows other departments within the University may be involved to build animation, produce video/audio or games for the online course.

ADDIE was developed in a training environment and it clearly works when producing training. My experience in higher education when producing training for faculty, staff, and students is that the training should:
1. Assess pre-training skills and vocabulary (while we are an English speaking school it is important to assess) to produce the training.
2. Keep it short only 1 or 2 specific skills will provide the best result – and training should be completed in under 20 minutes – 10 minutes is better
3. You are the Subject Matter Expert
4. Updates depending on changes and upgrades to technology and software
5. Most training in my experience is produced in very short time period and is needed immediately – 1 day – 1 week – but it will also need to be updated on a regular basis
6. Can give you the best opportunity for demonstrating new technology and best practices
7. Provide the training in more than one media (paper and video) and make it available through different channels

Keywords:

Instructional design, higher education, online instruction, training.