Tips for Exemplary Course Design (but watch out for the limitations of your VLE)

Over on the Blackboard Blog I have just tripped over a post on "6 Tips for Exemplary Course Design", which contains some interesting points, and some good advice, and is worth a read. However, I would suggest it is missing some key advice.

I would argue that one of the biggest handicaps for designing an effective online courses is a subtle combination of the web-browsers available to the students and staff (which can limit some of the things you can do due to browser/browser incompatibilities) and what the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) you have available can offer. So, even before you start to think about the course you would like to design, how you and the students would like to interact online, and how you want to deliver the material, my advice would be to get to know your local VLE, and check which browsers your students are using.

An example of this type of problem I encountered a few years ago.

A new VLE had become available and I decided to move a number of student assessments on to the system as I thought it would give a better student experience in that I would be able to provide better feedback. However, what I had not realised was that the system only had three modes of operation for an 'open book' assessment:

1. Give back nothing - no mark, no feedback.
2. Give back just a mark.
3. Give back everything - the mark, the right answers and the feedback.

Ideally I wanted to go with 3., but there was no way to delay the feedback, so students would be able to 'gift' answers to classmates.

In the end I went with 2. and the net result was some very negative feedback from the students on the experience.

So, when designing an online course make sure you check out thoroughly what your local VLE can do.