Lately through my consulting work with building courses and working with teachers in educational technology, I've been able to preview quite a few LMS modules.
For the most part, I've been pretty impressed with how teachers set up their LMS modules with the essential information.
On the other hand, I have run into some "sloppy online houses" and some outright humdingers! Every time I see a humdingers, it amazes me how the teachers think that the students are ever going to find what they need each week. So, in this article, I want talk about what I think makes a good LMS module.
Let me frame the rest of this article by saying that a good LMS module should answer/address the following questions from a student's point of view. (I've also included the same question italicized which presents the corresponding teacher point of view.)
What are the students working on this week?
What will students be able to do after completing this topic?
* Why should I care about this topic?
How will this information help students in their personal and professional lives?
* What activities will I do to complete this topic?
What do students need to do this week?
* How will my professor know if I have mastered this topic?
How will you assess the students on this topic? In other words, ask "if a person knows this topic, he/she should be able to do what?"
What deadlines are you giving the students?
I must admit for the first decade of my career, I built my courses from the teacher point of view. I felt that I was in tune with my students and was the "students' professor" which was evidenced from all of my evaluations and relationships with my students. In recent years, I've begun to tweak my online courses, by integrating technology and really reworking over the content for my courses and how I present them.
I started talking to the students directly about course design and learned an interesting thing. They relayed to me that although my courses were great and they learned a lot, they still need certain questions to be answer by the course material itself and not by me standing in front of them. When I started teaching online and couldn't stand in front of my students, the gaps between what I intended and what I was presenting in my courses became more apparent! From my experience, I've learned that while the subject matter is mine to design, the course and the way I deliver it must be developed from the students' point of view. In other words, what would a student want to know, learn and use in life from this course. This point of view in developing courses (especially online ones) has greatly improved my courses.
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