Design and Reflection
The following is a reflection of the experience redesigning the course BU310: Business in a Legal and Economic Context. The redesign and this reflection are part of EDUC 763 Instruction Design for E-Learning, a graduate course offered by University of Wisconsin Stout.
Following this introduction and reflection there are a series of hyperlinks to pages that exhibit samples of various components of the redesign.
This is the course description for BU310:
This course covers copyright, publishing, contracts, and other legal issues related to digital media. Business structures, the modern corporate environment, business, best practices and legal ethics are also explored.
The course is for 3 semester credits and consists of 15 modules introduced as one module per week for 15 weeks. BU310 is presented as a hybrid course with one third of the class (one hour per week) in a face-to-face setting and the remaining two thirds of class consisting of online presentation. All materials, content, and activities are administered from the Learning Management System (LMS). Students enrolled in this course are in their second semester of a four semester bachelor of science degree completion program in the Entertainment Media Business (EMB) department of Madison Media Institute (MMI) a privately held technical college.
As I reflect on what I have learned over the course of this redesign project I found many areas for improvement.
I found, as I proceeded through EDUC 763, that the topics chosen for BU310 are appropriate. Navigation for the course is consistent with previous courses students have participated in for the program; due dates and activities are clear and visible.
Some editing of objectives, reducing their number and aligning the objectives more clearly with activates is necessary. Retaining the objectives supplied with the third party supplied instructional content resulted in too many objectives and objectives not connected to activities as well as they chould be. The plan is to reduce the number and retain or modify the remaining to suit the outcomes in a more appropriate manner.
I found as I tried to classify my activities into absorb-do-connect appellations that I was confusing do and connect activities. The do activities are popular with students and do relate to learning objectives but I will add connect activities to increase variety and introduce different higher level learning modalities.
The sample activity visible through the hyperlink is a connect activity from one of the sample modules. I feel it is a well designed, useful and appropriate activity that provides an example of the type of learning outcome a student can apply in a real life situation.
In conclusion I would comment that retrofitting an existing course with best practices and major revisions seems more difficult than creating a course from scratch. It would seem to be more preferable to establish cohesive content and synchronized outcomes and objectives when starting with a blank slate. Either way the effort is justified and results in a stronger, more focused and adaptable curriculum better for not only students but for instructors as well.