The idea of best practices in online courses

[Caracal]

I'm taking an online class about "best practices" in online teaching and I don't think they have considered that their materials are internally inconsistent.
Last week, we were told to think about making a syllabus that's more like a comic book or post a video or make a "liquid syllabus".
This week, we are learning about how to make our course more accessible and checking for ADA compliance.
A video of your syllabus or a comic book of your syllabus makes your course LESS ACCESSIBLE.

What would a comic book or video syllabus even look like?  In most cases the video syllabus would probably just turn into a cumbersome show-and-tell talking head.  A comic-book syllabus might work for just the right class and instructor.  But that would surely be a rare combination.

Weird ideas.

Sure, if you're teaching a course on graphic novels and you have some artistic skills it might be a neat way to combine the themes of the course with the structure and organization.

For most of us, however, it would be a huge waste of our time and our students would probably feel the same way. A lot of good teaching is about figuring out how you can leverage your strengths and do less of the things you are bad at.

[jerseyjay]

I have been teaching online for more than a decade. I have been teaching in the classroom for more than two decades.

In this time, online teaching has evolved quite a bit.

I do not think there is really "best practices" but really "better practices". Further what these are depends on the subject matter, the institution, and the course. A graduate course in history at Harvard would have different practices than a remedial math class at a community college.

Furthermore, teaching trends keep evolving and changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes based on evidence, and sometimes for the worst, and sometimes based on whims. None of this is fundamentally different than classroom teaching.

Sometimes "best practices" is just jargon for whatever the norm is for a particular school. It is useful, as an instructor, to know what school policies are, and as a student, it would be useful to have a certain standard across classes.

I have taken several online courses (and also in-person workshops) on pedagogical "best practices", including learning about problem-based learning, collaborative learning, flipped classrooms, formative and summative assessments, accessibility,  etc. What I do is take note of what is required, what might work for me, and what I don't think would make sense.

In terms of improving my own classes, what I have found most useful is taking other professors' courses over the years and borrowing what I like from them.

[kiana]

I do not think there is really "best practices" but really "better practices". Further what these are depends on the subject matter, the institution, and the course. A graduate course in history at Harvard would have different practices than a remedial math class at a community college.

Absolutely agree.

I mean, there are definitely "bad practices". If you upload a link to the textbook as the sole activity of teaching, or if you don't grade anything until final exams, or if you don't reply to emails until a month later, I think those are pretty bad. But *best*?

[Vkw10]

I was on committee at FormerU that developed policy for assessing whether an online course employed best practices.  Took three months to come up with something we could all live with and get the policy officially adopted. Policy stated that an online course would be considered to meet best practices if the faculty member identified five practices incorporated into the course from the best practices for online teaching list, including at least one each from group A, B, and C. Also had some language about faculty being the best people to decide which practices were appropriate for meeting learning objectives given the faculty's subject expertise.

Attach a copy of the list to course documents, check items, and done. We still encouraged faculty to work with instructional design staff, who were quite helpful, but no more of this holding online courses hostage because the design didn't match cookie cutter specifications. Helped that committee included instructional designer who was tired of explaining to new hires that their job was to help faculty, not blackmail faculty into including their favorite practices by delaying sign off on online courses.

[marshwiggle]

I was on committee at FormerU that developed policy for assessing whether an online course employed best practices.  Took three months to come up with something we could all live with and get the policy officially adopted. Policy stated that an online course would be considered to meet best practices if the faculty member identified five practices incorporated into the course from the best practices for online teaching list, including at least one each from group A, B, and C. Also had some language about faculty being the best people to decide which practices were appropriate for meeting learning objectives given the faculty's subject expertise.

Attach a copy of the list to course documents, check items, and done. We still encouraged faculty to work with instructional design staff, who were quite helpful, but no more of this holding online courses hostage because the design didn't match cookie cutter specifications. Helped that committee included instructional designer who was tired of explaining to new hires that their job was to help faculty, not blackmail faculty into including their favorite practices by delaying sign off on online courses.

This sounds pretty sane. It requires that faculty actually think about how they teach, but still allows them to use their judgement.

[the_geneticist]

I was on committee at FormerU that developed policy for assessing whether an online course employed best practices.  Took three months to come up with something we could all live with and get the policy officially adopted. Policy stated that an online course would be considered to meet best practices if the faculty member identified five practices incorporated into the course from the best practices for online teaching list, including at least one each from group A, B, and C. Also had some language about faculty being the best people to decide which practices were appropriate for meeting learning objectives given the faculty's subject expertise.

Attach a copy of the list to course documents, check items, and done. We still encouraged faculty to work with instructional design staff, who were quite helpful, but no more of this holding online courses hostage because the design didn't match cookie cutter specifications. Helped that committee included instructional designer who was tired of explaining to new hires that their job was to help faculty, not blackmail faculty into including their favorite practices by delaying sign off on online courses.

That sounds very reasonable indeed!  And like your instructional designers may actually be helpful and useful. 
Ours are pretty darn useless.  I already know about pedagogy/backwards design/learning goals/active learning/etc. etc.  I teach workshops on this stuff!  I teach classes on it too.  I've won awards & fellowships for my teaching.  I don't need to be asked if I've heard of Bloom's Taxonomy.
What I want to know is "How to do task [whatever] in the LMS".  Or "Is it possible/practical to do [this thing] in the LMS?" 
Do they offer workshops? No
Training videos? No
Links to online materials?  A few.  Many are broken.
Create new features in the LMS?  Said they would, but I've yet to see any progress on requested deliverables.

[Hegemony]

Amen to everything The Geneticist says. It infuriates me that we have to jump through umpteen hoops to design an online course from the ground up, as if we've never taught before and have no idea how it's done. What I most urgently want to know is how to make Canvas do X and Y, how to get the computer to automatically close-caption the videos, how to edit the close-captioning when it gets wonky, etc etc etc. Instead I'm commanded to fill out innumerable worksheets on backward design and my Learning Goals.

This is the kind of thing that makes the rest of us feel that instructional designers are exasperatingly out of touch, and to be avoided and lied to whenever possible. "Yes, I did fill out the three-page backward design worksheet for each of my fourteen assignments, and I'm just about to fill out the three-page backward design worksheet for each of my six quizzes. Now do you know how I can edit this video? No? I have to consult some office but you don't know which office it is?"  Stop wasting my time.

[kiana]

This is the kind of thing that makes the rest of us feel that instructional designers are exasperatingly out of touch, and to be avoided and lied to whenever possible. "Yes, I did fill out the three-page backward design worksheet for each of my fourteen assignments, and I'm just about to fill out the three-page backward design worksheet for each of my six quizzes. Now do you know how I can edit this video? No? I have to consult some office but you don't know which office it is?"  Stop wasting my time.

Oh my God yes. ID originally told me they wanted every PROBLEM on every assignment linked to one of the course learning objectives in a way that was visible to students. What a complete and total waste of my time that would have been -- producing a separate set of documents that needed to be updated every time an assignment was modified and that absolutely none of the students would ever read. Fortunately they backed down on that, but the whole experience was one of the most frustrating, ridiculous exercises in time-wasting I've ever done, and a lot of the stuff they pushed me into doing I've ended up un-publishing from the final course because the students simply don't read it and all it is to them is clutter.

[downer]

Fortunately I haven't been asked to do anything like that yet.

My time is limited, and so the more time I had to spend on busy-work, the less work I give students and the less feedback I give to students.

That sort of approach would seem to push departments to just buying pre-made online courses that has all of that stuff sorted out. Except that they probably don't have the money for that.

It is obvious that in actual practice it is not going to improve the student experience.

[Aster]

Pre-made, 3rd party purchased online courses are in many ways superior to a lot of the "slap it in a can and leave it alone" model that is extremely common in a lot of online education.

At least with the vendor-purchased stuff, you at least know that the course is being occasionally updated and at least marginally cared for. Heck, in some cases when you "buy" an online course, you're also buying access to what is functionally an outsourced Instructor of Record. These folks tend to be sweatshop academics, but they do provide minimum services to students, like actually responding to student emails. Thus, 3rd party online courses have a higher minimum level of quality control. It is not a big thing, but it is a thing.

Within contemporary Higher Education, we've transitioned from the very worst practice of being "the classroom professor with old yellowed notes" to "the online professor who put their course into a can and who only logs in a couple times a month". We found that with the right technology and applications, we could dig the hole a little deeper. Yay.

There are also complications with the outright "buying" of pre-made online courses. Oftentimes, it's actually a temporary license that you're purchasing. And then you have to see if your institution will even allow use of these licenses, which are basically outsourced courses. Most public institutions are a lot more ethical/regulated about this than private institutions.

I'll settle for "best practice" in online courses to just have the professor investing as much clock time per week as they would in an identical conventional course. At least 80% of my colleagues who teach online courses will tell me straight to my face that they mostly only teach online so that they can "free up more time to do other things". Barf.

I think about this scene from the movie "Real Genius" all the time now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o

[Hegemony]

I find teaching online — asynchronously — does save some time over teaching in person during the term. But this is only because everything needs to be up and ready before the term starts. So there is an enormous amount of time spent preparing all the materials, PowerPoints, videos, and all, and then wrestling with the LMS, which is a whole nother level of time-suck. But then when it's all up, I can just hang out on the discussion boards and discuss, send the emails and updates, grade the assignments, and know that the rest of the work is already up and ready.

In an in-person term, by contrast, I'm always scurrying to find my notes for week 3, remembering that I meant to put together a PowerPoint for week 4 but then got distracted and now I need it for Wednesday, scanning my notes frantically before each class because I looked at them last week but then two dozen other things intruded and so I've forgotten them entirely — and so on. It's always seat-of-the-pants trying-to-keep-up. In an online term, all the instructional stuff is already in place, because I set it up before the term started. (Because not to do so is to ask for major trouble and stress.) Then the term itself is devoted to responding to students, not frantically preparing for the next week.

So in a sense I could say that I'm saving time by teaching online. Overall I think the time commitment is actually greater than in-person teaching. But during the term itself it is less, and therefore it is a whole lot less stress and a whole lot more actually responding to students. I know some online instructors don't respond to students during the term, just register a grade silently, but that's what I would call worst practices. I suspect they're not very involved in their in-person classes either.

[marshwiggle]

I find teaching online — asynchronously — does save some time over teaching in person during the term. But this is only because everything needs to be up and ready before the term starts. So there is an enormous amount of time spent preparing all the materials, PowerPoints, videos, and all, and then wrestling with the LMS, which is a whole nother level of time-suck. But then when it's all up, I can just hang out on the discussion boards and discuss, send the emails and updates, grade the assignments, and know that the rest of the work is already up and ready.

In an in-person term, by contrast, I'm always scurrying to find my notes for week 3, remembering that I meant to put together a PowerPoint for week 4 but then got distracted and now I need it for Wednesday, scanning my notes frantically before each class because I looked at them last week but then two dozen other things intruded and so I've forgotten them entirely — and so on. It's always seat-of-the-pants trying-to-keep-up. In an online term, all the instructional stuff is already in place, because I set it up before the term started. (Because not to do so is to ask for major trouble and stress.) Then the term itself is devoted to responding to students, not frantically preparing for the next week.

But I think this gets to Aster's point. Teaching remotely, all asynchronous, this past year has required an incredible upfront investment, as you say, compared to in-person. However, teaching the same course in Fall and Winter meant that I spent much less time looking at the materials for the Winter version. Teaching in person, on the other hand, means that I see as I deliver each lecture, or supervise students in the lab, so  I'm automatically aware of any snags and so am motivated to fix them. With the LMS, I would have to force myself to navigate through and go over each item in it to try and look for potential improvements. It's harder to do, and less obviously necessary than face-to-face, so less of it is likely to get done.

[downer]

I tend to be less enthusiastic than most about the wonders of classroom teaching versus online. I am pretty sure that my online students do more work than my classroom students and learn more. There is a higher fail rate, and that's partly because students who are bad at time management are at particular disadvantage in online classes.

I don't know whether it would be possible to get beyond impressionistic evidence, but my guess is that there just as many faculty phoning it in in the classroom as there are in online classes. I know I walk by classrooms sometimes seeing faculty reading directly out from the textbook or something equivalent.

I have mixed feelings about returning to the classroom in the fall. I'm not scheduled to do any evening classes, and I"m glad about that. I am increasingly motivated to do a flipped classroom.

[kiana]

I have mixed feelings about returning to the classroom in the fall. I'm not scheduled to do any evening classes, and I"m glad about that. I am increasingly motivated to do a flipped classroom.

Definitely looking at at least a partial flip. I'll probably continue to do instruction for topics that I know they find very challenging, but for things they need to learn but don't usually struggle with, if I can move that out of the classroom we can spend a lot more time practicing the harder stuff, and I can cut some of the homework to make room for it.

[jerseyjay]

I agree with hegemony. I view that online teaching (asynchronously) resembles the way that Deism is generally described. I need to spend quite a bit of time setting up the classroom, writing the assignments, going through the links, etc, but once it set-up, it requires less day-to-day involvement beyond checking in to make sure everything is going smoothly (both in a technical standpoint and that the students are doing well). So online teaching is quite a bit of work, if done correctly, but beyond grading and checking in, much of the work is done before the class begins.

Classroom teaching requires less pre-semester time (assuming that I am familiar with the material), but requires more ongoing work. Even if I have taught a course before, I tend to spend several hours before each meeting reviewing the material (at the least reading the assignments), and then there is the time in the classroom itself.

There are, of course, professors who "phone it in" for either type of course. In fact, they often are the same professors.

I find that there is a higher fail rate for online courses. Once I had a course where out of 15 students, 13 failed. This is in part because I think, from a student's perspective, taking an online course is harder. It requires more self-discipline; it is easier to "coast" through a course that meets on Monday and Wednesday by going to class and paying some attention, even if you don't read, than it is do so for a course that has no real lectures and no meeting times.

As I stated, this is for asynchronous courses, which I prefer. The past year, I have been teaching online, but this really means that I am teaching a class-room course, except that on Mondays and Wednesdays we do it via zoom instead of in the classroom. Of course there are tweaks that are required, but it is closer to classroom teaching than it is to asynchronous online teaching. Early in the pandemic, I tried to modify my classes to include more asynchronous components (discussion boards, etc), but it ended up being just more work piled on (for the students and for me) and didn't go well.