A brief tour of an online business ethics course
Successful online teaching requires a different set of skills than successful in-person teaching. Some of these skills are related to how a course is organized and how students interact with a course. Having your course shifted online means that you lose all of the regular, impromptu, and informal opportunities to update your students on course logistics before class, after class, and whenever you handle housekeeping announcements like upcoming assignments. Functionally, this means you have to plan for your students to be able to access all of the course’s materials independent of your guidance, especially if your course is delivered asynchronously.
Having a well-organized course site can go a long way towards ensuring that students can navigate the course easily and independently. What follows is a brief tour of my business ethics course, which I’ve taught online for the past six years. Obviously, you might not be in a position to implement everything found in an online course that has benefitted from six years of iterative development, but having an example may be useful as you consider how to shift your course to online delivery. The good news is that many of the features of a well-organized online course mirror or closely align with a well-organized in person course.
My course is run through Canvas, so major course components are divided into modules. Similar divisions exist in other LMSes like Moodle or Blackboard, but the terminology might be different. The main point is that all of the major LMS platforms are capable of supporting courses broadly organized in this way.
Welcome and Start Here
The first thing that students see when they log in for the first time is a module called “Welcome (Start Here)”. This module contains all of the information you would normally cover on syllabus day. My course divides this into two separate documents—the syllabus itself and a page called “Welcome to [COURSE TITLE]”. This page contains much of the information I would share on syllabus day, like basic information about myself, a general overview of the course, tips for success, and the like. It also includes a section outlining the very first things students should do as part of the course.
Some of this information may be redundant if you are switching mid-semester, especially if you’ve already taken the time to get to know your students and communicate expectations. But a page like this could be a useful addition as a clearinghouse for all of the major changes you’re making to the course and how you expect students to proceed in the course. One of the best things you can do is be very clear not only about what you are doing, but why you are doing it. Students genuinely appreciate knowing why they are being asked to do something, and I suspect that will be especially true as we all try to navigate uncharted pedagogical waters.
You can (and should) include this information in an email, but you should also assume that students won’t have access to any emails at a moment’s notice. Redundancy is one of the keys to successful online course design. Online students really appreciate knowing exactly where to go for information they need, and having a centralized hub will be helpful, especially since major components of your course change in the migration to online delivery.
Weblinks
The next module I have is a series of links to every piece of technology needed to successfully navigate the course. This transition is taking place under unprecedented circumstances, and everything we can do to smooth this transition for our students will be helpful. A penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say. Plenty will go wrong and be beyond your (and the students’) control, but one thing you can control is making sure students have easy access to all of the technology associated with the course.
Units
Each unit in my class is divided into its own module, divided up into the readings, my lecture, a unit quiz, and any supplemental materials I also want to include. Whether you type out lectures like me or record video lectures, be sure to include something in your very first lecture reiterating what students should do to begin the course. Again, redundancy is the key. Most LMSes allow you to further delineate sections of each module. If you have several readings, supplements, or assignments, you may want to take advantage of this so students know where to go for required or optional readings, quizzes, and so forth consistently.
One useful thing I add to my online courses is an agenda for each unit that outlines everything I’d like students to do, from the readings to the assignments.
Because you’ll be online and won’t have as many opportunities to communicate upcoming due dates, I strongly recommend including due dates in the titles of any assignments (e.g., “Unit One Quiz (due March 12)”) if your LMS does not include a calendar feature. Canvas does include such a calendar feature, but Blackboard’s calendar is not as helpful. Having due dates in titles creates redundancy that will make your students better able to navigate the course. Yes, you can and should use your LMS’s announcements feature to keep students updated on their assignments, but such announcements should build on the backbone of your course site.
Availability, Consistency, and Due Dates
With the exception of the final exam, my entire course is available from day one. One of the advantages of asynchronous delivery is that your course can be radically flexible for your students. I’ve responded to this possibility by making everything available from day one. To keep students on track and in a rhythm, each unit in my class wraps up on Sunday at 10:00 PM. Students can complete anything in advance, but to prevent the entire semester from piling up in the last three days, one unit is due every week.
Of course, as we triage our courses, having everything available from day one may not be possible or advisable. But I include this bit of organization here in case some aspect of it would be useful.
What I don’t have: Discussion boards and other forced community interaction
Though the main thrust of this post has been a brief tour of my online course, I want to say a bit about what I intentionally don’t have as part of the course. I don’t have any discussion boards or other forced community interaction. This isn’t because community isn’t important; it’s vitally important, especially as students are suddenly expelled from their physical campus communities, and we should do what we can to maintain those communities. But what builds and maintains communities is authentic interaction with one another, and in my experience, forced online interaction doesn’t achieve that goal. Further, message boards don’t seem to do much to enhance student learning. Also, students hate message boards and forced social interaction.
In the best of times, I’ve found that courses are most successful when students see the value of what they’re being asked to do. In these uncertain times, it’s better to focus on genuine efforts to build community (e.g., emails checking in on students) than making sure everyone has responded to two other students’ posts.
Conclusion
As we rapidly move courses online, we will have to perform triage and make difficult decisions about how to organize our courses. This will be especially difficult if one is unfamiliar with how to organize an online course. Fortunately, many of the strategies that are useful for organizing the course site for one’s in-person course align neatly with best practices for organizing one’s online course. Upfront organization and clarity will make your students’ lives easier, which will make the course more pleasant and easier for all involved. If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Courage, grace, and good humor to us all!
Jake Wright is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester, where he researches the moral and pedagogical justifications for classroom practices at the introductory level. You can follow him on Twitter (@bcnjake) or email him (jwwright [at] r [dot] umn [dot] edu).
ADDENDUM: After reading several other pieces in this series advocating for message boards and similar forms of assessed communication, I think I would say the following:
1) Obviously, there is well-considered disagreement as to the usefulness of such tools. I don't see the value, but it's clear that other instructors have used such tools in a way they think is very productive.
2) If you're going to use message boards, do so for a clear educational reason that you understand and can articulate to your students. This reason should go beyond "replacing discussion" and "I need students to do *something*".
3) As others have suggested, consider grading for completion, rather than correctness (or at least greatly expand your definition of correct) to enable students to engage more genuinely.
Posted by: Jake Wright | 03/15/2020 at 04:41 PM