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Educator's Voice

Volume 5, Issue 3
March 10, 2004

Successful Course Conclusion

Teaching and learning online can be a rewarding experience. To help ensure your success as an online instructor, and your students' success in the online environment, you should take steps to effectively conclude and assess your course. The process to bring your course to a successful conclusion will generally cover the final few weeks the course runs as well as a follow-up week after the course is finished.

There are administrative, facilitative and evaluative steps you can take to ensure that students complete the course satisfactorily. These steps also can provide you with valuable student feedback on the course, feedback that can assist you in identifying desirable changes to make to the course the next time it is taught.

There also are administrative steps you can take to identify the course's strong points as well as potential weak spots that you would like to improve before the course is taught again.

Note: Identifying areas for course improvement may result in modifying the course or presenting ideas for improvement to your institution's administration.

The Final Weeks

As your course approaches its final weeks, you'll want to make sure that students are able to complete the course successfully and have positive feelings about their online experience. This is an obvious goal for any good instructor. In addition, you and your institution would like to retain students and have them enroll for more online courses. Here are some final steps to take to ensure students' success--and yours.

Administrative

• In the final weeks of the course, communicate regularly with students who continue to lag behind. If you allow make-up work, ask students to commit to specific completion dates for missed assignments. Track these dates consistently. Ensure that students understand the consequences of failing to submit missed assignments.
• You and the student(s) may feel it's better to let them take an incomplete. Keep in mind that many students who take this option never complete the course. If you (or your institution) do allow an incomplete, obtain commitments for specific completion dates for all unfinished assignments. Make sure you and the student(s) understand your institution's policy regarding the assignment of an "Incomplete" as a course grade.

Facilitative

• Communicate with struggling students--for example, by individual e-mail. Provide needed help and additional resources so students can complete assignments and the course.
• Send a group e-mail to let students know that you enjoyed teaching the course, or post an Announcement to this effect on the Course Homepage.

Evaluative

• Remind students about due dates for any final assignments and the final exam, if one is required.
• Provide feedback to all students about their final projects/assignments.
• Thank students for their participation in your final evaluation comments.
• Ask students for honest feedback about how the course could be improved. Though you can ask an open-ended question, you should also ask some specific questions about the syllabus, assignments, etc.

The Next Time Around

How did your students react to the learning process in the online environment? How did you like being an online instructor? After you have some time away from the course, think about these important questions:

• If you taught the course again, what would you change? Why?
• If you taught the course again, what would you keep the same? Why?
• Were there policy/procedure issues that arose, which should be included or clarified in the syllabus?
• How could you improve content so that the course material would be more easily understood?
• How could you improve assignments so that they would be more relevant or useful?
• How could each area in your course be improved visually?
• Were there technical issues or problems that need to be resolved? If yes, who do you need to involve in the process?

Your course should evolve as you teach it, just as would your course in a classroom. There is no such thing as a perfect course, but after a few semesters, many courses can be outstanding for instructors and students alike!

       --Kenneth Switzer, Ph.D.

TIP

Using CoursePacks in Online Classes

You remember course-packs, don't you? If you're like me, you had to purchase several of these photocopied supplements to your courses, at one time or another. And, perhaps you even use them in your current, on-ground classes. CoursePacks can be very good additions to any course. If you’re teaching a wholly online course, you can still have CoursePacks!

XanEdu (a third-party CoursePack provider) has been integrated into the eCollege platform for quite some time, but you may be new to the platform, or maybe you just forgot about this feature, so let's take a moment to review it.

A CoursePack can include any number of things--full-text articles, case studies, literary works, explanatory notes, or even links to your own research materials on the Web. When you "adopt" a CoursePack, you are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and use the vendor's online course material and curriculum services in your course. The key is that anything you choose to use from XanEdu has already been copyright cleared! All in all, CoursePacks are a convenient and easy way to add content to your online course.

The XanEdu CoursePack tool is integrated into the eCollege platform as a Content Item type. You can view XanEdu's site and create CoursePacks right from this content item! Currently, when you link out to the XanEdu site you can:

• Create a CoursePack from scratch. With this option, you can search for and compile all of the content in the CoursePack, such as articles, cases, and original literary works.
• Select an existing CoursePack from the catalog. You can adopt a CoursePack as-is, or you can customize existing material and then adopt it.
• Have a CoursePack created for you. You can have a custom CoursePack created for you based on your own personal syllabus or reading list.

When you add a third-party CoursePack to your course, you follow essentially the same steps as you would to add a Text or Multimedia content item:

1. Add the Content Item shell to your course
2. Add the Content Item to a unit
3. Add actual content to the Content Item (in this case, associate a CoursePack with the Content Item)

As an instructor, access to view and adopt CoursePacks is free. Students, however, will be required to pay an access fee before they are allowed to view CoursePack content. The fee varies depending on the materials you include in the CoursePack. So, be sure you know your institution's policies on this sort of thing before you adopt a CoursePack into your class.

Perhaps you could have it as a purely supplemental reading list for students--then they can choose if they want to purchase it or not. Take a look at what they have to offer!

       --Errin Klein, MA