November 2004 — Exclusive
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Guidelines for Selecting Quality K-12 Online Courses
To deeply explore content for mastery, and to enrich the curriculum, resources might include grade-level appropriate research sites for students, student search engines, online libraries, access to museum holdings, exposure to primary documents, use of real data, communication with experts in the field, and online bookstores (NASBE 2001). Students for whom English is a second language might benefit from resources in their native language. Resources provided should comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, such as described by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Students should be taught research skills and provided with guidelines to assess the validity of Internet resources they might find (Phipps and Merisotis 2000). Optional assignments for extra credit also might motivate students to explore additional resources.
Tests and course activities should promote abstract thinking and critical reasoning (National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine 2004; SREB 2000). Assignments that include student reflections on course work (e.g., readings, projects, labs, online discussions and collaboration with peers), peer review and revision help students acquire those skills (Deubel 2003b; Fulton 2002). This recommendation is also in line with quality assurance benchmarks for distance education at the postsecondary level, which call for students to engage in analysis, synthesis and evaluation activities as part of course requirements (Phipps and Merisotis 2000). Developmentally appropriate course objectives designed using Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain help ensure this quality standard. Students remember more when they have learned to handle a topic at the higher levels of the taxonomy because more elaboration (Huitt 2004) and in-depth engagement with the content is required. To provide students with relevance for learning the content, activities should also connect to other knowledge domains.
Supportive personal relationships are critical for promoting and maintaining student engagement and motivation to learn (National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine 2004). Therefore, courses should feature a high degree of student-teacher and student-student interaction and feedback, including teacher communication and feedback to parents (Deubel 2003b; SREB 2000). Collaborative assignments such as discussion groups, role-plays, seminars, sharing assignment solutions, collaborative compositions, debates, simulations, case studies, brainstorming, forums, and group projects help build a community of learners (Pitt and Clark 1997). A page of class photos with short student-submitted bios and optional chat discussion threads might help students to connect with peers, assuming that the technology infrastructure supports a Web environment to protect student privacy (Deubel 2003b).
Courses should be field-tested and revised as necessary to ensure content accuracy, realistic completion times for assignments, and that all navigation and functional aspects of the instruction delivery system of choice are working properly (Deubel 2003b). Local and state education departments also should have endorsed the course.
Instructional Design
