Collaborative online course development process

Challenges of eLearning providers, management institutes, and universities are mounting with the growing demand of quality online education. There is an intrinsic need to define a course development process that integrates quality assurance measures across all online courses.

In a typical traditional process, the course is designed by a faculty member without consulting with instructional designers, assessment experts, multimedia designers, software engineers and programmers. This process is inadequate because many aspects of instructional design and software implementation are overlooked. These breaches can be overcome by collaborative development model. In the collaborative development model the team meets on a regular basis and gets an opportunity to broaden their knowledge base through frequent information exchanges.

While implementing this model, additional faculty members should be trained as course developers and online instructors. We need more instructional designers to work in collaboration with the course developers and design experts. Such group effort will ensure smooth functioning between instructional designers, subject matter experts, and multimedia and course developers. It avoids the gaps of insufficient instructional design, poor course quality and course delivery delays.

Additionally we need to incorporate the concurrent course revision framework that enables the production team to efficiently measure the effectiveness of process framework. Flexible framework will make it possible to adapt to changes in technology, support scalability and meet users’ ever changing demands.  

The online course designed with such a collaborative approach encourages contact between student and teacher, develops mutuality and cooperation, uses active learning techniques, gives prompt feedback, communicates expectations, and compliments diverse talents and ways of learning.

Defining a more streamlined course development approach is all about realigning the development steps involved in planning, design and development, and course delivery with the collaboration mindset. In pursuit of an improved process, we have to build the efficient culture and inculcate these best practices.

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