This course focuses on developing interesting and effective online courses that align to standards and best learning practices. In this course we developed an online course while in the meantime we learned about different forms of online distribution, content organization and presentation, and graphic design principles. We also did a number of other interesting assignments. you can see some of them below:

This is my promotional website with all the necessary information about accessing the course I created on Canvas.

Throughout the course we were working on a design document completing parts of it each week and taking one step forward to completing our online course. This is my design document.

 We also evaluated two online courses using both the Quality Matters and the OSCQR rubrics and at the end we compared and reflected on each course and each quality assurance framework. I reviewed two MOOC courses from Coursera. The first one was “The Ancient Greeks”, a course offered by Wesleyan University that covered the same period (more or less) of ancient Greek history with the one I am building but it was geared toward adults and had heavy content. The second one was a course offered by the University of Illinois called “Instructional Design Foundations and Applications”. What surprised me the most was that the first course scored really low on both rubrics, since it lacked essential standards (e.g. learning objectives, getting started module, tech support, policies etc.) but it had a very high rating 4.7/5!! I found it extremely monotonous and bland full of boring lectures and multiple choice quizzes. I don’t know how people rated so high! Also, one other thing that I discovered — that I haven’t noticed before and I found extremely intriguing — is that the Quality Matters rubric has a highest score of 99%. In other words, perfect does not exist! This is my “Critique of the two Online Courses“.

  Finally, this is rationale and course reflection document. This course was a great experience for me and I feel that I acquired fundamental knowledge about course design and development.