Educator's Voice

Vol 9, Issue 2
April 14, 2008

Perspectives from eCollege’s newest academic trainer and consultant

It’s been a couple of years or so since eCollege has hired a new Academic Trainer and Consultant (ATC) and, consequently, it has been a couple of years since the Educator’s Voice has seen an article from “the new guy’s perspective.”  That’s where I come in—hi, my name is Stephanie Pfeifer, and I’m the newest addition to the Academic Services team at eCollege.   

Most recently I’ve been working at eCollege, in Client Services, as the trainer for new Consultants.  For those of you who may not know, Client Services Consultants are an industrious group of people who need to know a lot about everything; they’re part financial guru, part technical troubleshooter, part problem solver and each of them provides superior operational support to program administrators for our eCollege clients (or “Educational Partners” as we call them).  Client Services Consultants are more than cogs in the wheels of eCollege—they are the go-to individuals when you need to get something done!

When I first took on the position as Client Services Trainer, I inherited a training program filled with oodles of content.  The course was a purely on-ground venture in which students patiently attended 3 weeks of hour long lectures which were peppered with the occasional opportunity to practice what they had learned.  Having been an elementary teacher in a previous life and never having taught online, it simply never occurred to me to use my own backyard (eCollege) as a tool for teaching.  

Fortunately the light kicked on one day and I decided to create a companion course to complement the on-ground material.  Although I’ve taught before and have no qualms about getting up in front of a group of students, I panicked at the prospect of converting a three week training course into something meaningful on an e-learning platform.  Where would I begin?  What did I need to do to get started?  How would I make the course interesting without being able to sing and dance for my students?  With a general lack of direction, I decided to focus on content organization, course activities, and design elements.  

Getting organized

Over the past year, I have been organizing and rewriting content for the course, so I had lots of material from which to choose.  I figured the best way to begin would be to start with what I knew.  I went straight to my Training folder in My Documents—fortunately I had a computer to help organize me.  Once I had gathered all of my training documents, activities and notes, I had pages and pages of material.  

The list of topics, at first glance, was daunting.  Did I really intend to train on everything I had listed?  How would I determine what went where, and in what order?  Would I be able to group the information in the course so that it flowed logically?  After a few attempts at structuring the units using various visual organizers, I determined that a trusty old outline format, complete with objectives, would be most comfortable for me.  The list I created eventually turned into the units and content items on the left-hand navigation.  

Creating meaningful activities

So there I sat, admiring my work, when I realized I had only created a bunch of blank course units and blank content items.  Now came the really hard part, creating content for the new items.  Fortunately for me, I have an incredible group of Academic Trainers and Consultants readily available.  I made the trek over to Academic Services and asked for any suggestions that they might have.  It turns out that they had created an abbreviated version of the training course for one of my predecessors.  I had hit the jackpot!  They directed me to a course complete with Flash images as unit headers, relevant icons for each topic and even a couple of practice quizzes for self assessment.  This was great!  Five minutes earlier I had nothing; now I had actual content items I could copy and reuse, with minor edits, in later units.  

Additionally, I wanted to make the unit activities substantial and relevant.  Not only did I want students to demonstrate understanding of the material, I also wanted them to practice navigating the eCollege system.  I was able to accomplish this through a series of assignments, which ultimately directed the student to use the course tools (E-Mail, Dropbox, Webliography and so on).  I had figured out how to kill two birds with one stone!

Design elements  

Now that I felt like I was getting somewhere with the content, I thought about entering the course as a student.  What makes one course better from another from a visual perspective?  This question, although seemingly innocuous, had a great deal of importance.  Think about it…as an on-ground student, most of us know what to expect.  You know your course will most likely be in lecture format with the instructor standing at the front of the room, and you’ll most likely sit in the same seat you have since the beginning of the semester.  Then, I tried to think of my online course in a similar light.  What elements could I make predictable for the students?  After tapping my resources, I included an overview, a discussion, a practice activity and a self assessment for each unit.  That way, the students knew what to expect for each topic.  

Other design elements that I learned can be equally important are font size, color and effect.  Early on, I used multiple colors and fonts on the same page.  My ATC friends suggested that it is easier to read a “serif” font (a font with tails, such as Times New Roman) on paper, but it is easier to read a “sans serif” font (one without curlie-q’s or tails, like Verdana or Arial) on a monitor.  Additionally, I occasionally use color to emphasize a point.  While this is a great idea, it is also important to bold or italicize the colored font so that a disabled student, using a screen reader, will be cued to the emphasis. Screen readers indicate font attributes (bold, italicized, sub or super) but not font color.

Lessons learned:    
All in all, I’m thrilled I have had the opportunity to create an online course.  I’ve grown as a teacher and think that getting out of my comfort zone has taught me to be a better teacher.  Below are a few lessons I learned along the way.

1. Have fun!  You’re already an expert on the content you’re about to create in an online environment.  All you need to do now is look at it from another vantage point and present it in a new manner.
2. Organize your thoughts.  Take the time to write out how you plan to design your course.  This will give you a structure and a jumping off point and could help prevent having to fix errors in organization later.
3. Create engaging activities.  No one wants to read pages and pages of lecture notes and all the bells and whistles in the world can’t make up for a course which is lacking in substantive content. 
4. Ask for help. The eCollege Help pages provide step-by-step instructions for many types of content items.  Also, many institutions have a team of instructional designers or you could always check with a colleague. If all else fails, find someone under 20 to assist you.  They’re certain to be able to navigate the system quickly.
5. Use your resources.  If I had not asked around for help, I would never have found the material I used to structure the course content. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
6. Prepare for evolution.  At the outset of this project, I had no idea of the magnitude of change I’d experience as an educator.

Ultimately, I encourage all teachers to try a hand at teaching an online course.  I found that the process of developing an online course helped me grow as a teacher.  I feel like I am, again, a first year teacher—intimidated, nervous and excited.  Just like a new teacher, I still have a lot more to learn.  

– Stephanie Pfeifer, MA
eCollege, Academic Trainer and Consultant

Instructor’s Tip:

Course Homepage Tools: Ensure Instructor and Student Success

From the Archives:
Volume 5, Issue 12
December 8, 2004

There are three useful tools available on the Course Homepage that will help ensure your success as an instructor and also help ensure student success in your course.

Announcements, posted at the top of the Course Homepage, help ensure that learners see important information relevant to their success in the course. Announcements help achieve redundancy in presenting information to students. It is recommended that a Welcome announcement always be posted for a course. In addition, you can post announcements any time you need to provide additional information to students or to reinforce information provided at an earlier time. For instance, post an announcement reminding students of a special course event, such as a guest speaker in a Chat. The judicial use of announcements will increase your effectiveness in managing your online course, help ensure student success and reduce your course management workload.

What's New, located at the bottom of the Course Homepage, lets you monitor student activity in your course by seeing when individual students contributed to a select area of the course. Therefore, you don't have to search through every unit or content item to see which students have contributed to various course areas. For example, if you wanted to see if there were any new postings to the Unit 1 Threaded Discussion, you could sort your What's New list by content item and see that the threaded discussion for Unit 1 had 5 new responses and 3 new postings. Similarly, if you wanted to see how student Jill Hill was participating in the course, you could sort by name and see that she had posted 2 responses in the threaded discussion and a site to the Webliography. This is a great course management tool. If you haven't used it in the past, try it the next course you teach. You'll find it very useful.

Course Checklist, located beneath What's New, is more helpful for students than for instructors. From the student view, the Course Checklist section displays a list of all course assignments and their associated due dates, as well as a check box for each item so students can monitor their progress in regard to assigned course work. Ideally, this course "task list" will help students be aware of assignment due dates and prompt them to complete assignments on time. Students can sort their list by Unit or by Due Date. Remember, too, that (except for exams) students manually check off the items in their Course work checklist. As a result, a student may check off an item that is not necessarily complete. Remember, this is a useful management tool for students only if they are aware of it and if you, as the instructor, set it up through the use of the Scheduler. It's a good idea to mention this tool in the Syllabus and in an Announcement on the Course Homepage.

– Ken Switzer, Ph.D.  
Sr. Academic Training Consultant

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