Abstract:

What is involved in producing a sustainable, fully online post-secondary course? What are some obstacles and stumbling blocks to look out for? What are some lessons learned that could help you avoid surprises in your own course development projects?

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) is based in Kamloops, British Columbia (BC), Canada. TRU has been offering open, online education since 2005 when Cariboo College, as it was then known, merged with BC Open University (BCOU), the institution tasked by law to meet the open educational needs of BC learners. TRU has almost equal on-campus and online course registrations.

TRU is unique in that continuous 365-day, 24-hour registration is available for the majority of its online courses. Course redevelopment, therefore, poses unusual challenges as it occurs parallel to continuing to offer the current version.

In response to the changing expectations of students and increased technological skills of faculty post-COVID, online courses are more prevalent in post-secondary institutions worldwide. However, students and faculty recognize an inherent need for courses to be more professionally designed to address, for example, determining student and faculty workloads appropriately, or mapping learning outcomes effectively. Among other primary concerns in online course development is the time it takes to develop a new or revised version of an online course. The timeframe is elongated by the need for a development team and multiple areas of expertise, including instructional designers, subject matter experts, course consultants and reviewers, editors, copyright specialists, and people with media and digital production skills.

As the pace of educational innovation accelerates, our response relating to course development also must move more quickly. In this presentation, we will share how we are attempting to streamline our processes using our simple ABC model, shorten the development timeline, and inform an ever-widening circle of university personnel about the realities of online course development at this time.

Keywords:

Education, development, contract, constraint, designer.