IU faculty are the lifeblood of IU Online programs, and we are always excited to partner with, and learn from, IU's best and brightest. This fall, instructional designers from eLearning Design and Services worked with Dr. Heather Taylor from the Fairbanks School of Public Health on her course about US Healthcare Systems.
At first, Taylor was hesitant. “When I began working on the course,” she admits, “I struggled with how to conceptualize an online course that would ensure that graduate-level students could apply and synthesize the material as opposed to just gaining knowledge through memorization.” However, Taylor’s commitment to intentional course design as a means of enhancing student success was clear.
She used scaffolding—a technique that creates an integrated series of assignments over the course of a program—to engage with students and to get them to think critically about challenges in the US healthcare system while also comparing the US system to public healthcare systems in other countries.
Rather than assign a single massive paper at the end of the course, Taylor used the scaffolded design to prompt students to complete and integrate smaller assignments that then became sections of a final project.
For each of the smaller sections, Taylor helped students succeed by providing instructional videos and visual aids showing how each piece would fit into the final project. Each assignment included a separate custom rubric with well-defined criteria.
The scaffolding also helped Taylor’s lectures. Rather than rely on long traditional-length lectures, she broke them into smaller, topic-specific lectures that were 10 to 15 minutes in length. Because the shorter lectures were more in line with how students typically consume information these days, the students were more comfortable listening to them. The scaffolded design also made it easier for students to return to prior topics for a quick review later in the course.
Taylor was delighted with students’ responses to the course, which focused on how well materials and videos flowed together and how the shorter assignments made creating a final project both meaningful and manageable. She says, “The instructional design support I received was pivotal to the obvious empirical success of the course.” She adds, “As another measure of success, I had seven students in the first semester. This spring, I have 44 students enrolled!”
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