April 2001 — Features

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Designing and Delivering an Online Course for K-12 Educators

by Joshua D. Baron, Mercedes M. McKay

  • Peer-to-Peer Collaboration : Students were encouraged to interact on a regular basis with each other on the topics that were discussed in the course.
  • Instructor Feedback : Much time was spent supplying instructor feedback to both individual students and the class in general.
  • Grader Feedback : Along with the instructor's feedback on content issues, detailed critiques of each assignment were supplied by a course grader.
  • Student-Centered Learning : Because of the range of student abilities and experiences, the lectures were designed to support advanced, intermediate and novice users.
  • Authentic Learning : Students were immersed in realistic situations in which they had to apply what they had learned to solve real-world problems and deal with authentic classroom situations.
  • Critical Thinking : Students were challenged to form their own opinions concerning a range of topics that pertained to the use of the Internet in science education.
  • Project Based Learning : Students developed a management plan to implement an Internet-based project in their own classrooms.

The learning environment had to support this diverse set of teaching and learning strategies. At the same time, it needed to address the needs of a diverse group of learners. The core elements of the learning environment included a set of dynamic course notes, a course discussion area and e-mail exchanges.

A set of course notes was developed for each session of the course and formatted as HTML documents so that they could be accessed easily from the Web. These were primarily text-based, but included some images and sound where appropriate. Hypertext was used extensively throughout the course notes to allow students access to both remedial and advanced supplementary materials. This created a student-centered learning environment that encouraged students to find the learning path that best suited them.

The learning environment also had to support authentic learning, critical thinking, and project-based learning strategies. To meet this requirement, the following were embedded in the course notes: