Developing an Effective Online Course: Review

Author Valerie Landau is very thorough in helping you to develop and evaluate a successful online course. Each topic comes complete with goals, objectives, warm up activities, famous quotes, instructor's notes, student assignments and a list of resources.

Topic 1: Course Introduction
A discussion of the production process of online media (Web sites and multimedia) pros and cons will be the crux of this topic. Features of the online medium and the four stages of it, namely, concept definition, design, production, and testing and quality assurance phases will be discussed in detail.

Topic 2: Evaluation and Criteria
How to find review and evaluate existing online courses will be shown. Included are links to sample courses and a list key questions your course needs to be able to answer.

Topic 3: Survey of Online Courses
The objectives in this topic include: reviewing existing online courses related to your topic, using "Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain" to identify levels of cognition, analyzing the advantages and drawbacks two different approaches the student-centered approach and the teacher-centered techniques

Topic 4: Goals and Objectives
You will learn to write a broad overall goal for the course you are developing, measurable objectives for the course, a broad goal for one module of instruction and measurable objectives for the module of instruction. You will also learn to categorize each learning objective according to "Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain".

Topic 5: Developing the Course Outline
Learn just what a course outline is and how to write one using your goals and objectives discussed in the previous topics.

Topic 6: Developing Assignments
Here Ms. Landau teaches the most difficult part of developing an online course - how to developing engaging assignments. She also discusses how to describe the type of feedback students will receive, categorize the assignment according to Bloom's Taxonomy and describe how the assignment leverages the Internet.

Topic 7: Developing Instructor's Notes
This topic shows how to create properly developed instructor's notes in order to close the gap between what people already know and what they need to know in order to perform the module objectives.

Topic 8: Web Design
The goal in this topic is to draft a plan outlining the guidelines you will use to design your course so it is accessible and easy to read and navigate. You will also learn to identify basic Web design principles and accessibility requirements.

Topic 9: Course Management & Planning
Here you will define a policy for group work, 'netiquette', and student expectations, along with developing a plan on how to complete your course

Topic 10: Planning a Formative Evaluation
Prior to publishing a course, two basic types of testing is recommended: Quality assurance and Formative evaluation (usability studies). This topic will walk you through both of them. Learn when to test, what a test plan should include, examples of commonly used testing methods and formative evaluation reports.

Topic 11: Conducting a Formative Evaluation
Once you have developed a plan for formative evaluation, the next step is to test your course via the target audience. This topic will show you how to conduct a successful evaluation of your course. The 8 top priorities in doing this will be discussed so that you will know what to do with all the useful information that you've collected to your course's benefit.

All in all, a very detailed and informative writer's guide to developing an effective online course.

Title: Developing an Effective Online Course
Author: Valerie Landau
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
ISBN-10: 0072587024
ISBN-13: 978-0072587029
My Rating - 4 out of 5