eLearning Short Courses

By Lisa Leach, Ed.D., Sr. Director, eLearning Academics and Curriculum

TTU eLearning has created two short courses that are available for all faculty and staff interested in creating and/or teaching online courses. Each short course takes about five hours to complete. You may, of course, break that time up any way you chose – that is one of the many advantages of online coursework! When you finish the course, you will receive a Certificate of Completion for your professional portfolio.

ELRN 100, Building Quality Online Courses, provides a step-by-step plan for course creation. You will follow a housebuilding analogy, divided into four phases:

1. Analysis: This is the goal-setting phase. What are you trying to accomplish? Who are your learners and what are their characteristics? What is the desired learning outcome? What types of learning constraints exist?
2. Design: This is the detailed planning phase. What will you be teaching, how will you be teaching it, and how will you know students learned it? What are your objectives, instructional strategies, assessment instruments, etc.?
3. Development: In this phase, you will create the actual learning environment that students will experience. You will assemble the content pieces that you planned in the design phase. You will connect the content with the technology through which the course will be delivered.
4. Evaluation: You will determine the adequacy of the course creation and review the work that has been completed. You will ensure that all necessary components are present and sound. This will be done on an ongoing basis throughout the course creation process, as well as at the end of the process. You will use a course quality rubric to analyze the components of the course.

ELRN 101, Teaching Quality Online Courses, provides introductory knowledge and skills for effective online teaching. There are two primary goals for this course. First, you will receive information about the best practices that you will apply in your online classroom. Second, you will experience an online learning environment as your students would. The course is organized into three learning modules:

1. Preparing Students for Online Learning: You will learn how to help your students navigate and succeed in the online learning environment. You will become familiar with common problems students may encounter, as well as strategies for creating a presence in the course and building a community of learners.
2. Classroom Management and Facilitation in Online Courses: You will explore facilitation strategies that create a natural flow for students as they work through the course content. You will explore classroom management tips that involve both organizational and procedural techniques.
3. Management of Special Issues in Online Courses. You will learn strategies for dealing with issues that may arise in the online classroom, including student privacy concerns and managing challenging students. These topics include FERPA and privacy issues, hybrid delivery strategies, and techniques for keeping interaction positive and effective for learning.

If you would like to be enrolled in either (or both!) of these short courses, please contact blackboard@ttu.edu.