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1、1Quality In Online Learning()Abstract: We are now delivering thousands of online courses to millions of students around the world. We have progressed beyond the early explorations into “how to teach online,“ to the more complex challenge of “how well?“ This paper summarizes the results of a nationwi
2、de empirical study performed in the United States, in an effort to systematically identify the factors that determine the quality of e-learning courses. Our investigations sought how to design quality into web-enhanced courses, how to ensure delivery of a quality support system for online learners,
3、and how to assess the quality of online courses. This is the first in a series of reports on the outcomes of this investigation, and how to use what we learned about how to ensure and assess quality in web-based learning. This first report focuses on instructional design of quality courses.Introduct
4、ion After reviewing hundreds of studies on education, Lion Gardiner concluded:“When we subject the quality of our collective work as educators to the same close examination we demand in our disciplines, we find a substantial body of evidence that clearly demonstrates a crisis of educational quality
5、in our nations colleges and universities. We need to begin immediately to assess, evaluate, and improve the quality of our work.“Gardiner further explains that, by combining best-practice instructional design methods with Internet technologies, it is possible (but not necessarily true) that much gre
6、ater higher-order learning and higher-value educational outcomes can be achieved.One contextual challenge course developers face is that quality is not solely an intrinsic feature of a course; but is expressible through the viewpoints, values, and needs of the course consumer, whether he is a studen
7、t, an instructor, a department chair, an academic vice president or financial officer, an institutional planner, or a corporate human resources director. There is no one checklist by which we can design or evaluate quality in a course. We must make explicit the viewpoint from which the course is bei
8、ng assessed. In the second section of this paper, we will summarize the criteria for quality native to these different consumer viewpoints and thoroughly analyze course quality as viewed from the perspective of the student consumer.Simply put, it is very difficult to design and judge course quality.
9、 We know this from the proliferation of thousands of mediocre online courses. From the educational research literature, we are often given guiding principles that are too general to be 2instructive at the level of classroom practice and course design. Making class “happen“ in a web-based environment
10、 is so new, and different, that neither broad principles nor narrowly prescriptive practices are helpful when we sit at a computer and try to reinvent our teaching in this new environment. After all, if an instructor who undertakes to design a web-based class is told “Follow the principle of giving
11、frequent feedback in the form of formative assessments,“ he will say “You havent helped me a bit; I already apply that principle to my classroom- based class. If, on the other hand, you tell him “Require students to e-mail you a synopsis of each weeks reading,“ you havent helped him either because t
12、hat course process may neither apply to course nor complement his course design. If the concept of designing and evaluating a course by narrow prescriptive formulae is misguided, whats an instructor to do? In our investigation, we found many categories of good experience-proven practical ideas that
13、seemed to sort themselves into three basic levels of guidance for quality online pedagogy: principles of learning science; practices in instructional artistry; and applications of online systems. The instructors best strategy is to arm himself with a few sturdy principles, to be guided by a translat
14、ion of these principles into practices effective in a web-based environment and to think creatively all the while using specific application methods as a point of reference. At some level, the instructor must do precisely what each student must do and teach himself by drawing inferences and extendin
15、g from the known to the unknown. The quality of the inferences and extensions, however, can be positively influenced by the solidity of the principles and the quality of the illustrations used as guides.Principles, practices, and specific applications sort themselves out along a scale of specificity
16、: A principle is applicable to nearly any formal learning situation, independent of the delivery medium. That is because these “principles of learning science“ derive primarily from characteristics of learners and the functions of human brain-learning, and not from the specific course nor the medium of course delivery. A practice is manifests the “art of instruction“ within and suited to a specific mode of delivery (e.g., class b
