Need for Course Re-design for Large Online Courses

As courses move online, faculty are faced with the daunting task of teaching large-scale online class, which can preclude or seem to limit personalized learning and interaction with the instructor. In order to provide engaging instruction and personalized learning, the instructors have sought to design their course syllabuses with techniques which foster peer interaction (e.g., discussion boards) and participation in real-time, large group webinars, among other instructional components. Both instructors regularly teach large online courses (100-200+ students in a course) at a large public university in the U.S.

In the session we will provide a brief overview of key concepts from research literature on teaching online and larger online courses. The framework we draw on includes the community of inquiry framework (e.g., Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007), as well as key concepts from mentoring (Daloz, 1999) and the scaffolding process in learning. We also introduce the ideas of networked learning and connectivism (e.g., Siemens, 2005) to show that knowledge sharing and learning can take place in more distributed ways rather than from the instructor as sole source of wisdom. We will share key ideas from how we structure our syllabuses to teach large online courses while engaging students in multi-modal learning, peer-based discussion boards, and web conferencing. We will also discuss ways a familiar online learning tool, the asynchronous discussion board, can be fully utilized to facilitate maximum learning opportunities, eg., by having students contribute resources, curated information, and other connectivist-based peer learning opportunities (e.g., as described by Matrix, 2014).