Search

Universities everywhere are rushing to upgrade their digital learning capabilities -- and, more so now, in response to COVID-19. Long term, large-scale development of online courses requires investment in digital infrastructures and collaborative curriculum design involving educational, technical, and subject-matter experts. However, compared to the resources invested in course development, there is relatively little investment in researching such development processes. Drawing on findings from a study of a strategic initiative to rapidly develop 12 fully online undergraduate degree programs in one Australian university, this paper reports on a study that aimed to capture the experiences of academic course writers. Findings show broad satisfaction with the production processes, courses created, and knowledge acquired - although also demonstrating key differences between senior, junior and casualised staff. This empirical case study contributes to knowledge about capacity building arising from large-scale, in-house development of fully online degree programs.

Transformations in contemporary higher education have led to an explosion in the number of degrees delivered online, a significant characteristic of which is the incorporation of multimedia to support learning. Despite the proliferation of multimedia and growing literature about the affordances of various technologies, there are relatively few examples of how judgements are made regarding choosing and actioning multimedia development decisions for educational developers. The case study presented here is framed within an institution-wide project for the development of fully online degrees that utilised a collaborative approach to curriculum and multimedia development. This example focuses on the establishment and operation of a collaborative approach to curriculum development in which multidisciplinary development teams invested considerable resources in researching improvements to their multimedia practices and processes. This article reflects on the collaborative team approach to multimedia design and development by examining the team's experiences and practices through the lens of existing multimedia research, in order to understand the convergence between multimedia theory and the practicalities of developing multimedia within the constraints of large-scale online curriculum development. Through these reflections, four lessons learned will be explicated which will inform those engaged in employing similar approaches in other contexts. These lessons learned identify the benefits and potential issues associated with: (1) the approach used by the collaborative development team to support the production of multimedia; (2) the practices and process used by the collaborative development team to facilitate the creation of concise multimedia presentations; (3) the impacts of establishing teaching presence through videos created by the course writer and online course facilitator; and (4) the presentation styles used by course writers and the tools they used during multimedia production.

How do we make judgements about the quality of online courses? Checklists and rubrics are commonplace in higher education for establishing and measuring design features of online courses. They are created and used by institutions, academics and educational designers to standardise measures for quality online course design. Despite an intensifying spotlight on quality learning and teaching in higher education, no large-scale review of course quality instruments has occurred. This scoping review aimed to ascertain the conceptions of quality being promoted by course quality evaluation instruments and the capability-building resources that underpin these instruments. Seventy-five instruments used to measure quality in online course design in higher education were identified via a systematic search. These instruments were charted and coded. This paper reports on findings that summarise the key attributes of the course quality evaluation instruments, conceptualises a shared definition of course quality and proposes specific core criteria for measuring course quality under the domains of learning design, assessment and evaluation, usability and accessibility, social interaction and technology. The findings indicate that course quality instruments and their support resources have capability-building potential; yet, mostly this potential is not fully realised. We recommend shifting the capability-building potential of these tools from checking compliance to enabling skills development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]