Background
Having an established design system with Professor Raquel Lodeiro, she reached out to me in Summer 2020 to prepare a brand new course for Spring 2021. The LING 1 course exists within our University system, but it had never been taught at Penn State Harrisburg before. Professor Lodeiro wanted to achieve two primary goals with the development of this course: an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook with a fully online learning experience. This course is the first course she has created from scratch for online learning.
Design Considerations
This course is required in a new major at Penn State Harrisburg. To that effect, we knew that many students would be taking this as a required course, but it is also a general education course that others may find interesting. With an audience with mixed motivations, we wanted to find engaging learning content that would help all students become familiar with linguistics terminology without requiring a high level understanding of psychology, anatomy, or sociology.
- Adopting an Open Educational Resource (OER)
- Adopted an OER textbook for the first run of this course.
- Designed the Scope & Sequence of Learning
- Created a week-by-week structure to help facilitate the new content and guide the learners through a chronological approach.
- Unintended Consideration: International Students
- Given the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our international students are in their home countries studying. We needed to adjust our content delivery strategy to ensure that all of the learning materials were hosted on servers accessible to all students.
Development
The development process involved using the Canvas LMS to create course experiences involving the replacement for the conversation corners and then revising the learning sequence. I managed our team including the faculty member and student worker through the process of developing the modules, writing instructions, and creating assessments. I assisted the faculty member with the review of the OER textbook and managed the adoption process including reviewing copyright needs, integration into the learning management system, and assessing the learners’ interactions with the text. I switched the hosting provider for our OER video content and provided instructions on how to use Virtual Private Networks (VPN) for our international students.
Examples
