Delivering Courses Online

Setting up a school district’s online instructional program is undeniably a huge undertaking. In my work with Achieve Virtual, a public virtual school in Indiana run by the Wayne Township school district, I frequently field questions about the process from other district leaders. They want to know about content creation or purchase, data management, selection of digital tools, teacher payment and logistics.

These are all good questions. However, the often overlooked aspect of a successful online program is the ongoing and continuous supports that need to be in place to prepare teachers and students for this pedagogical shift. As demands for online learning evolve and grow, the ability for instructors to seamlessly transition between face-to-face and online environments is imperative.

The key factor in making this possible is strong instructional support and professional development that enables staff to design and teach for next-generation learners. Several strategies can support the beginning stages of an online program and help staff improve and grow once a program is established.

A Track Record

Wayne Township schools have a strong history of online learning, having introduced online learning in 1999. The district has multiple blended learning programs that provide multiple pathways for learning by our students. In 2011, we launched the Achieve Virtual Education Academy to serve students from across Indiana.

The virtual school has full-time students who attend Achieve as their high school, though part-time students are welcome. The latter students attend high school full-time elsewhere in Indiana but take individual classes to recover credits, to free up their daily schedule or to enroll in courses not offered at their own school.

Achieve Virtual serves approximately 500 students each semester, more than 200 of whom are full-time students outside of Wayne Township. During the summer semester, the school caps enrollment at 2,000 to provide an online summer school option for students in public schools all over the state.

My role with the school and its staff is to support the teachers as they design online coursework for the more than 120 courses and students they may not physically see until graduation day. I have learned a lot about providing the supports teachers need as they transition from a brick-and-mortar learning environment to one that is completely online.

Before Implementation

While the teacher always is the most critical aspect of any successful course, whether traditional or virtual, digital content can make or break an online course.

One of the biggest shifts for teachers as they move to online teaching environments is taking on the role of instructional designer. Designing online lessons and content is not the same as designing classroom experiences. It is easy to assume that a captivating and effective brick-and-mortar teacher will flourish in an online classroom, but that is not always the case.

Here are four tips for supporting your teachers in designing online experiences. Even if you are purchasing online curriculum to use, it is good to know what goes into high-quality online courses. It also is important to empower teachers to supplement the online courses, creating opportunities for differentiation and personalization for all students.

No. 1: Build in time.

This whole process takes a lot of time. A good semester-long course takes a seasoned instructional designer/teacher about six months to develop. In our district, we usually plan a year for most of our staff to design a course. This is not an activity teachers work on in isolation. They work with each other and with our virtual and blended learning staff to work through a structured timeline to organize the tasks and get assistance and feedback throughout the process.

No. 2: Rethink organization.

Just like all good instruction, proficient instructional designers know to create online learning experiences keeping the end in mind. Our teachers focus on learning outcomes first, design assessments to reach those outcomes and then curate and create content to provide the necessary instructional opportunities.

In Wayne Township, all of our 1,145 teachers, whether virtual or brick and mortar, are asked to teach using a guided release model. While the activities that allow students to practice and participate in formative assessments may look different online, having that interaction with teachers, students and content before a summative assessment is important.

However, online content is still organized differently than it is in a standard classroom. Classroom teachers structure their lesson plans on a daily and weekly basis, but in a self-paced online program, lessons are grouped by concept. Not all students need to do the same activities to reach mastery.

Using collaborative planning documentation can create high-quality online courses that showcase effective teaching practices and are organized in useful ways. A comprehensive design process creates consistency among all online courses, making it more user-friendly for the end user.

No. 3: Look closely at learning objectives.

When I work with teachers to design courses for the Achieve Virtual Education Academy, one of the first planning documents we work on helps teachers map out the units with learning objectives. They plan two types of learning objectives: what we want students to know and what we want students to be able to do. When creating each unit, we look specifically at those objectives and create assessments that match. Too often our online assessments don’t measure what we had wanted students to be able to know and do. While a multiple-choice test might be sufficient to help us measure what students know, a multiple-choice test does not show us what a student can create or do.

Planning for high-level learning objectives and then using those objectives to design digital experiences will help in creating high-quality online content. Even if you are just purchasing content, look at the assessments and activities. Is the publisher asking students to demonstrate mastery at a high level or is it only measuring a student’s ability to recite content?

No. 4: Reference the standards.

Great resources and standards are available for developing a district’s online instruction program. Two I recommend are Quality Matters (www.qualitymatters.org) and iNACOL (www.inacol.org). Both have a set of standards for instructional design and online teaching that can be useful for evaluating content for quality.

During Implementation

Even after a course is designed and built, strong instructional support contributes to successful implementation. Wayne Township’s schools have more than 15 years of online learning experience, but my role in providing professional development support and overseeing course design continues to grow. Even the number of participating staff increases. Getting started can be a daunting task, but successful and long-term success relies on continuous support.

No. 1: Continually develop and monitor courses.

Few great teachers do the same lessons year in and year out. The best teachers reflect, iterate and evolve their courses to meet the needs of the individual learners in their classrooms each year.

The same should be expected of our online courses. This can be accomplished with strong dialogue between the support staff and the administrative team. At Achieve Virtual, the principal and the virtual and blended learning team keep a detailed spreadsheet of all of the courses. Creation and revision dates, instructors, designers, highlights, needs and other course-specific information are organized in this living document. The detailed documentation enables us to make informed decisions about course revisions and new offerings. We do not want our courses to become stale. They evolve and improve continuously to meet the needs of our students. Once a course is created, it is taken through several rounds of the design process during its lifetime.

No. 2: Provide professional development, not training.

Tool training involves step-by-step instructions for how to use a tool, but doesn’t address the most important question: How do we use this tool to accelerate learning for students? When our professional development focuses on how online tools and resources can benefit teaching and learning and are embedded into authentic experiences for staff, understanding the ins and outs of the tool comes naturally.

The best way to do this is to integrate high-quality, collaborative digital tools into the professional development. When determining which tools are best for online blended learning, there are a few things to consider. In general, I always recommend if something can be accomplished effectively within a learning management system, use its functionality instead of introducing an outside web tool.

Additionally, tools that encourage creativity, collaboration and interaction (student-to-student, student-to-teacher or student-to-content) are important in any online course. Using these tools as part of the professional development instead of simply training “how to” use them helps me identify web tools that are accessible and easy to use.

No. 3: Model through online and blended professional development.

It is difficult to be an exemplary online teacher if the educator never experienced high-quality online learning as a student. The professional development opportunities for teachers mirror the best practices we expect to see for our students.

We reference the district’s online learning and instructional design standards when building online professional development. From experience, we have discovered online learning that enables teachers to interact with and use tools to further their own understanding of a concept is much more effective than any tool-centric training we have implemented. When teachers can experience firsthand how a strategy, a tool or a type of resource helped them as a learner, the transfer of those practices to their own online courses is much more likely.

No. 4: Create opportunities for teacher collaboration.

It is too difficult to improve if we are limited to only our own experiences as educators. The need for connectivity is easy to overlook. An online teacher can’t simply walk down the hall to chat with another instructor. Isolated silos can quickly be created if the support staff and administration are not intentional with modeling, teaching and creating digital environments for informal sharing and collaboration.

At Achieve Virtual, our staff has access to a virtual teacher workroom where we house ongoing conversations, all of our online professional development and all resources for staff. Our teachers are taught and encouraged to post questions and share ideas. Building a community of learners among the staff is one of the biggest parts of my job. This collaborative community did not happen naturally and required a shift in practice for a lot of teachers. However, the benefits of connecting in this way make the effort worthwhile. The best way to improve and grow is as a team.