What does instructional design look like? Post #7 – Connecting across Distance

This is the 7th in a series of blog posts outlining the collaborative process of designing an online course for the first time from scratch. You can read the other posts here.

Photo by Fernando @cferdo on Unsplash

The first item on our agenda was to iron out details about the grading scheme and assignment category setups to make sure that they would function as Anne was expecting. We found that Canvas grading schemes work very well with traditional percentage ‘buckets’. Below is an example of percentage buckets, however please note these were not used for Anne’s course:

  • Papers = 20%
  • Exams (3) = 60%
  • Participation = 20%

However, faculty who are interested in offering extra credit, the opportunity to drop the lowest grade in a category, or any other adjustment that would not necessarily apply to the full class will not find this functionality within the Canvas gradebook. In these instances we suggest faculty use an outside tool for grade calculations. (DLINQ staff are happy to consult on this topic.)

The team also continued to discuss a weekly communication plan and Anne decided that using announcements would work well. Rather than preparing weekly communications ahead of time, Anne would prepare a template and would write the contents of the message as the course proceeded. Anne felt that this would provide the most flexibility which would be helpful since it will be her first time teaching this course. The team agreed that being able to respond to unexpected inquiries and questions in the weekly announcements would be the best experience for the students and would increase the effectiveness of this modality. Canvas would still allow us to set up multiple announcement messages ahead of time (based on the template) that could be adjusted (but not need to be created) on a week by week basis.

In the next week the team planned to collaborate on a Zoom testing session that would allow Anne to test out different functionalities that she hoped to use as a part of her synchronous sessions. Heather planned to incorporate the outline for this testing plan into a template that is being designed to help structure the development of hybrid course spaces. Some of the items to test included: