Faculty: Course Design Workshop Improving Face-to-Face Instruction

The Summer 2018 Course Design Practicum closed July 25 not only with 14 new Certified Course Designers, but also new faculty partnerships.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette Office of Distance Learning holds this workshop, among others, to support and train faculty who teach online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses; provide tools and training to assist faculty in creating online courses and programs; and facilitate student success in online courses and programs.

Completers receive a certification to teach and design online courses at UL Lafayette.

Hospitality & Management Instructor Lisa Bowles will be leading her department’s foray into online course delivery with her course, launching Spring 2019.

As part of that course, Bowles intends to team up with chemical engineering instructor Ashley Mikolajczyk to bring added value and a new perspective for her business students.

“We would have never connected any time on campus had we not been in this class together, and then we just happened to be in the same (Moodle) sandbox,” Bowles said. “She’s going to do a Zoom-recorded guest lecture specifically about hazardous materials in the hospitality industry because I’m hospitality and she’s all about hazardous waste.”

Other instructors, including Mikolajczyk, say the course is already paying off for their face-to-face courses.

“I’m getting certified to teach online; I don’t currently teach any online classes,” Mikolajczyk said. “But taking the workshop has improved my face-to-face classes significantly just because of the things I was able to apply to my face-to-face classes.

“I’m already getting comments from students on how good my Moodle looks, and it has a lot to do with the HTML blocks I put on the side in bold letters with “exam is on…” whatever date. Just a lot of the student-instructor engagement online has improved the quality.”

Senior Instructor for Computer Science Jason McNeely said the workshop has given him tools to immediately deploy while he’s building up to a fully-online course delivery.

“I won’t be teaching online anytime soon, but as I was doing it, I was thinking about using any content I create,” he said. “I can use some of the content and prepare it slowly in my face-to-face course and say, ‘here’s some supplementary material that you can look at home,’ in some other format.

“I’m also going to have better learning objectives. I had some, but I realized they weren’t as good as they could have been so I’m going to take what I’ve created in terms of learning objectives and bring it into my face-to-face course.”

Nursing instructor Sharonda Johnson said the design workshop helped her understand the “why” behind certain elements and best practices.

“I already knew some of these tools, but this class has helped me understand how to build the class, understand the layout,” she said. “I had been learning on my own, but this course has opened up so many more possibilities. I’m more prepared now.”

A major component of the 10-week workshop is the peer review process where participants critique one another’s course design from the perspective of a student.

“We want to facilitate student success because that’s pretty much our bottom line,” said Instructional Designer Angela Lee. “If you’re looking at (a course) through the eyes of a student, it can only get better.”

She said it’s also a good opportunity to gather new ideas.

“We all design differently,” she said. “Everybody has a different design in their course. Some of the elements are the same, but you’ve delivered them in a totally different way.”

In addition to their certification to teach and design online courses at UL Lafayette, participants walk away with their sandbox course and CDP resources at their disposal.

“We hope that our celebration is not the end of our relationship, that it’s really the beginning,” Senior Instructional Designer Carey Hamburg told instructors during a ceremony July 25. “We don’t expect you to remember everything. That’s why we’re here to support you going forward.”

Congratulations to Lisa Bowles, Brooke Breaux, Stacey Chamberlain, Jennifer Dailey, Robert DiFabio, Tara Horsley, Aminul Islam, Miao Jin, Sharonda Johnson, Arun Lakhotia, Helen McCloy, Jason McNeely, Ashley Mikolajczyk, and Lena Suk.

If you’re interested in learning more about professional development and certification opportunities through the Office of Distance Learning, visit our website or email us at distancelearning@louisiana.edu.