Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities
Jesuit Distance Education Network
The JesuitNET online course design workshop for faculty at Jesuit colleges and universities is being offered this fall in a single section of up to 15 participating faculty. This free and entirely online workshop will be led by Dr. Kathleen Snyder, JesuitNET’s Director of Curriculum Development, as part of JesuitNET's Competency Assessment in Distance Education (CADE) Initiative.
The workshop will require about ninety hours of participant time over an intensive 8-week session from October 13 through December 7. A member of both the library and instructional technology staff will be available to assist their school's workshop faculty participant in course resources acquisitions, copyright clearances, multimedia selection, and related design services.
Workshop Participation Requirements
Faculty wishing to enroll in the fall 2003 workshop must be able to meet the following requirements:
· Personal commitment to using the CADE competency-based model and methodologies in their online course design.
· Personal commitment to working in an online asynchronous (anytime, anywhere) environment with scheduled deliverables over the 8-week workshop session.
· Agreement from a dean or appropriate campus administrator to provide sufficient resources for post-workshop course production and subsequent online course delivery to students.
Workshop participants should be able to fulfill all workshop requirements on schedule during the October 13 – December 7, 2003 time period. Those with greater than average professional (higher teaching loads, research and conferences, business travel) or personal (weddings, births, health care) responsibilities during this time are advised not to take the workshop. Those agreeing to these workshop requirements should discuss this document with their dean or appropriate campus administrator to ensure that sufficient institutional resources will be available for post-workshop course production and subsequent online course delivery to students.
CADE Course Design Approach
Working in close partnership with Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), the JesuitNET CADE team has developed an innovative instructional design workshop for developing competency-based courses. CADE-designed courses use a backward design process that develops a course from the goals for student learning backward to building the syllabus around instructional activities.
Many courses are developed with the primary emphasis on creating instructional tasks or activities, without an explicit emphasis on assessment or a clear sense of learning goals. The flow of the CADE backward design approach from competencies to evidence to tasks, however, makes the assessment of student competencies within designed tasks explicit from the start. This process organizes course design around three phases of development.
· The first phase identifies the specific set of competencies for students to master--
What do faculty want students to know, understand, or be able to do?
· The second phase identifies the evidence needed to indicate student mastery--
How will faculty know if students have attained these competencies?
· The third phase identifies the instructional tasks needed to reveal the evidence--
How will faculty create an instructional environment in which students interact
meaningfully with the content?
In addition to the development of CADE-designed courses within the competencies to evidence to tasks process, the workshop offers two supporting methodologies to help faculty in the process of identifying evidence and designing tasks—Evidence Analysis and Cognitive Apprenticeship.
CADE workshop participants will develop courses based on the goals for the course and desired competencies for students to master (i.e., What do I want students to know, understand, or be able to do?) What evidence, then, will faculty have to determine student understanding? And how will they obtain that evidence?
By conducting an Evidence Analysis, faculty focus on understanding how people use knowledge to carry out their tasks. Evidence analysis helps faculty to think deeply about assessment, and to identify student performance and differentiate among various levels of performance. Many academic disciplines are characterized by two broad categories of knowledge--domain and strategic. Domain knowledge represents conceptual, factual and procedural knowledge inherent in a field. Strategic knowledge represents the higher-level thinking skills, processes and methods used by experts to solve problems. Evidence analysis is a method by which to make a distinction between the two types of knowledge and how to use them effectively in courses.
Once faculty are equipped with a deeper understanding of the evidence needed to attain competencies, they need to create meaningful learning environments for students. Cognitive Apprenticeship provides a framework for both teaching and learning based on the traditional notions of apprenticeship where the expert (or teacher) transfers knowledge to the novice (or student). Experts do not simply know more than novices, they approach a problem differently. This framework consists of seven key concepts—modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, reflection, articulation, and exploration--that help to translate the best face-to-face teaching practices to the online environment. CADE-designed courses will enable students to work within an environment where they are encouraged to develop skills and competencies at an expert level.
A short multimedia introduction to the workshop is available at http://www.jesuit.net by clicking on Faculty and then clicking on CADE Intro.
Workshop Objectives
The CADE workshop helps faculty rethink course design for the online environment. The workshop focuses on building a course based on student mastery of competencies rather than just on content. The pedagogically-based workshop allows faculty to reflect on how they teach in face-to-face classrooms, and how their practice and goals for student learning translate into the online environment. The workshop’s process and flow begin with an inquiry into both faculty teaching and what student understanding means and how to recognize it online.
What the workshop is: This workshop offers an approach and set of tools (templates and worksheets) to facilitate the process of thinking about and developing an online course that is designed around competencies. The workshop materials are intended to adapt to faculty thinking and not the other way around.
What the workshop is not: This workshop is not a prescriptive, step-by-step program but rather a conceptual framework in which to think about design and assessment related to an online course. The workshop’s intent is to introduce ways to rethink current practices and capitalize on what faculty do well and how that will translate online.
At the conclusion of the workshop, participating faculty should be able to say that they
· Saw the importance of teaching for understanding in the online environment
· Used new concepts and ideas to enhance knowledge about teaching and student learning within their disciplines
· Developed an understanding of the teacher as a facilitator of ideas and thinking processes
· Reflected more explicitly on teaching practice and student learning and the relationship between the two
· Conceptualized the design of one course using the CADE methodology
· Developed an understanding of the commitment and resources required to develop, produce and deliver an online course
Workshop Requirements
Portfolio Assignments: Each workshop participant will prepare a 15-page portfolio that consists of six worksheets and accompanying narratives, and a concluding Next Steps narrative. The completed portfolio will be a professional piece of online course design documentation. The portfolio will be developed throughout sessions 2 through 6, becoming a cumulatively more detailed document that is purposeful and useful at each stage of preparation. Completion of the portfolio’s worksheets and narratives will reinforce the CADE design process, and provide an excellent building block for subsequent course production and implementation.
Discussions: A major workshop requirement will be active and ongoing participation in the workshop’s two discussion spaces. While all discussions are asynchronous (anytime, anyplace), each participant will average one discussion submission every other day—a total of 40-50 discussion documents over the eight-week workshop. There will be two discussion spaces in the workshop:
The Main Discussion Board is used for topic and summative comments from the facilitator and participants (e.g., what they have learned, something that is useful to think about, something they want to share). This board is the electronic equivalent of the normal give and take, Q and A in an on-campus course.
A Group Discussion Board is also available to participants. Within each workshop section, participants are grouped into 2-3 member working groups. Each working group has a discussion space and file-sharing area. The instructional technologist and librarian also has access to this board. The Group board primarily supports peer-reviews of group members’ portfolio work.
Workshop Sessions
Session 1: Introduction to the Workshop (October 13 - 19)
The first week of the workshop is devoted to ensuring that participants have received their Net IDs and passwords, and that they are able to connect successfully to the Blackboard site. They begin using the Discussion Board to communicate with their workshop colleagues. Introduction objectives are to:
· Resolve any technological issues that might hinder your participation in the workshop
· Become familiar with the main features of the Blackboard learning environment
· Become familiar with the protocol for using the Discussion Board to communicate with colleagues
Session 2: Introduction to the CADE Methodology and Competencies (October 20 - 26)
In this session, participants are introduced to the CADE Methodology, a competency-based approach to course design. They also begin identifying competencies that they want students to develop in their online courses. Session 2 objectives are to:
· Develop a clear understanding of the CADE methodology: Competencies to Evidence to Tasks
· Understand the role of strategic knowledge in competency-based instruction and be able to identify the pedagogical concepts that form the basis of this methodology
· Be able to identify the major competencies for students to develop in the online course
· Establish a working relationship with the local campus instructional technologist and librarian
Session 3: Evidence of Student Mastery (October 27 – November 9)
This session begins the Evidence Phase of the CADE methodology. In this phase participants focus on 1) identifying what they will accept as evidence of student mastery of the competencies; 2) the learning situation that will enable them to collect evidence; and 3) the characteristics of student behavior for three levels of mastery. Session 3 objectives are:
· In thinking about evidence, be able to identify a representative situation, problem, or case study in which students will most likely demonstrate mastery of competencies
· Be able to articulate the evidence that will indicate student mastery of the competencies
· Be able to articulate the characteristics of student behavior for three levels of mastery: novice, graduate, expert
· Be able to develop a competency-driven course outline
Session 4: Instructional Strategies and Course Design (November 10 - 23)
This session is dedicated to thinking about course design--in particular the learning activities in the course and the strategies participants will use to teach their online courses. Session 4 objectives are:
· Be able to design learning activities which incorporate the instructional design strategies recommended in Cognitive Apprenticeship (CA), and which facilitate the development of higher-level thinking processes (strategic knowledge)
· Develop an understanding of how to apply the CA techniques when teaching online
· Be able to envision the use of various types of media in the design of online course activities
Session 5: Course Production (November 24 - 30)
This session focuses on the planning activities required for the production of media elements in participants’ online courses. Session 5 objectives are:
· In collaboration with the local instructional technologist and librarian, be able to identify a detailed inventory of resources, tools and services, cost and requirements for developing the media components for the online course
· Have an understanding of the various types of media that can be used in an online course
· Develop a working knowledge of how to create a storyboard for a multimedia element
Session 6: Next Steps (December 1 - 7)
This final session reviews the contents of participants’ portfolios, and discusses participants’ plans for completing the development of their online courses. Session 6 objectives are:
· To understand what the next steps are for completing the development of the online course.