Design Practice: Online Courses
I have designed in collaboration with faculty and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) multiple online courses for undergraduate and graduate-level students. In designing online courses, I ensure the following:
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Developing high-quality instructional materials that do not stereotype, shame or degrade people
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Designing interactive components that allow the learners and the instructor to engage in civil and fruitful dialogues about the topics presented in the class, though multiple modalities (synchronous and asynchronous)
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ADA compliance to allow the design of the class to be inclusive of diverse learners' needs and capacities
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QM compliance to ensure a level of acceptable quality of the course design where learners are engaged in the application of what they learned, not just root memory and repetition
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Alignment between learning objectives, instructional materials, learning activities and assessments to afford learners take ownership of their learning experience and increase their motivation
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Designing activities that are both engaging and challenging for learners, and where the instructor is visible and active
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Designing a smooth overall learning experience for the learner to bust the myth that an online course is less worthy than a traditional face-to-face course
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Designing areas to gather feedback from learners beyond what the university requires to introduce design iterations as needed that responds to students' feedback
I believe that these qualities are not unique qualities of good online courses. They are also qualities of any good courses, regardless of their format.
Examples of Online Courses I designed
Assessment & Planning in Public Health
This award-winning course provides graduate students in Public Health with knowledge and skills essential to the community assessment as well as public health program design and evaluation. Upon completion of this course, students demonstrate their ability to apply key principles in practice via the development and presentation of a community needs assessment on a specific topic and an intervention proposal based on the assessment. A particular emphasis is placed in this course upon a social-ecological analysis of factors contributing to the understanding of, and response to, community health issues. This course is also focused on the development of competencies as proposed by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH).
Instructional Strategies & Tactics
The purpose of this course is to provide doctoral and master's students in Instructional Systems Technology with a vehicle to expand their personal theory of instruction—that is, to deepen their understanding of when and how to creatively generate and apply instructional strategies and tactics that you believe will best facilitate learning. Through this course, students develop the ability to
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1. Select instructional strategies and tactics
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2. Apply instructional strategies and tactics to their appropriate contexts
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3. Design instruction guided by a specific instructional theory
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4. Defend their design of learning experiences against critique
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5. Establish a stronger negotiation position to get their ideas used/adopted
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6. Enhance their ability to make good design judgments
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7. Reduce the chance their learning experience will fail
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8. Enable learners to learn the most in the shortest amount of times
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9. Develop learning experiences that have a positive impact
Public Health Policy & Practice
The course provides graduate students with an orientation to public health policy, politics, and processes in the United States and select countries across the globe. Students in this course examine and critique current public health policy issues at the federal, state, and local levels using several policy models and theoretical lenses. As the course is designed for the MPH practice degree, students produce policy analyses and briefs for use in the public health policy process.
