Online Course Development

If you have questions about the OOL course development cycle or next steps, please contact KC Coburn. You can take a quick look at this sample Course Development Agreement for answers to the following questions:

• When does the cycle start?
• What is the workload like? Note: the project will be built around weekly tasks for all team members – expect to spend at least three hours per week for the duration with some weeks needing a little more time than others.
• What happens if I miss multiple deadlines?
• How is my course reviewed upon completion to be sure it meets required standards, and my stipend is paid?
• When and how are the stipends paid? How much is paid?

A few common questions about the development cycle:

Is the online course development something that all courses offered online with have to go through?

No, but those that do receive the stipend get about 50% of the work taken off their plate and leave the development knowing their course is accessible. They also receive devoted time to complete the course improvement/development, not just doing parts semester-by-semester which can make it feel like the course is never really at its best.

What type of implementation plan should we expect?

The Office of Online learning offers two cycles per year: Fall (July-Dec) and Spring (Jan-July). Faculty can expect to spend 3-5 hours a week to successfully complete a course.

How long should faculty expect there to be stipends available?

Stipends will be available indefinitely however, the amount of the stipend may vary. Funds for stipends are generated by the student online education fee and budgeting varies with enrollment.

Will all faculty teaching the online course be required to use the newly-developed shell?

Yes.

Do individuals usually teach the class being re-designed in the same semester while going through the development cycle?

It’s a big undertaking to get a course built, and it becomes stressful, often overwhelming, to build a course at the same time as teaching it. If possible, consider developing a course in a semester you are not also teaching it.

Have faculty received a teaching release to account for the additional time spent on this work?

Yes, some have. This has primarily been for faculty who are also taking on a number of other projects, service, or research responsibilities at the same time and is completely at the discretion of the chair.

Here are some important considerations:

• Are you still comfortable invest a minimum of 100 hours of your time to develop content, learning objectives, record multimedia, prepare assessments, etc. in collaboration with the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Design instructional design team? These hours are spread throughout the entire development cycle, averaging about 3-5 hours per week.
• Doing a course-development project with the CTLD Instructional Design Group means working weekly, over several months, at about the same level as teaching a 3-credit course that you’ve taught once before. Thinking about your upcoming schedule, does that still sound feasible?
• A course-development project means working with a team of experts in instructional design. Your design partners have many years of experience in online course development. Instructional Designers rely on you as a subject matter expert and require an equal amount of trust from you in terms of their expertise when considering online content delivery. Have you ever worked with an instructional designer to create a course before? How you feel about a partnership with a course design expert who can help you explore options for delivering course content will have a big impact on the success of the development project.

The CTLD ID team will:

• Provide 120+ hours of Instructional design staff support in an effort to align with MSU Denver Online Course Design Standards
• Create or migrate the course into the Institutional Template
• For existing courses, conduct an informal review
• Create multimedia presentations to accompany chapters, core concepts, as well as instructor introduction and course overview videos
• Develop an alignment map for all SLOs, instruction, and assessments/assignments
• Chunk material into learning modules and add graphical representations to enhance the student user interface
• Develop a communication strategy to enhance a sense of community and engagement