Unless you’ve worked for a company like LearningMate (which I do) and had the advantage of building online courses for a myriad of different colleges and universities, you probably don’t know that there are two distinct online course development models that are used by almost every college and university in the country. Why are there two models? What are the differences between them? Perhaps the real question is whether or not there should be two different models.
Model 1: Central-Design Model
Model 2: Decentralized Model
Let’s dig in.
What is the Central-Design Model Used by Large Online Colleges and Universities?
Online colleges and universities have been perfecting online course development for 20+ years. The central-design model was developed early on and has been adopted by almost all of the major online colleges and universities in the country.
How is Central-Design Structured?
In the central-design model, a course shell is created by a team, including a subject matter expert (who is typically a faculty member who teaches that course), an instructional designer, a media designer, a copy editor, a course builder, and a handful of other specialists.
Media
Most centrally-designed online courses will include both curated and custom-created media. As SMEs and IDs identify learning materials to cover learning objectives and course topics, they will use publisher-provided materials, library materials, open educational resources, or other videos and interactives available online.
If no existing materials are available or the team feels that it can create a better solution, the SME, ID, and media designer work together to create custom videos, interactives, and other activities.
Course Development Timeline
A typical 3-credit online course in the central-design model takes about 3 to 4 months to complete. Surprisingly, the length of the course, whether it’s a 6-week accelerated course or a 15-week semester-length course, only changes the course dev time by a few weeks either way.
What are the Advantages of the Central-Design Model?
This central-design method allows a university to scale, and it allows them to create and maintain high-quality courses (especially in terms of design quality, instructional quality, document quality, and media quality).
From a design perspective, the look and feel are the same from course to course, so both students and professors are able to learn it once and then focus on more important aspects of the learning experience.
Instructional quality is also paramount in a centrally-designed course as, more often than not, all of the content and assignments are mapped to learning outcomes and various learning strategies (e.g., authentic assessments, cognitive primers, etc.) are used to ensure the best experience for the students. This also means that the faculty are teaching to the same outcomes and offering the best learning experience to students, regardless of where or who they are.
Document quality simply means that the course has few errors (e.g., spelling and grammar, broken links, gradebook issues, etc.). Document quality isn’t the first thing you think about when talking about online courses, but it’s probably more important than you think. Nothing will change a student’s opinion of a professor faster than an online course riddled with spelling mistakes and broken links.
Media quality is one of the most important advantages of the central-design model. Typically, you’ve got talented IDs and media designers there to create custom media pieces in all kinds of authoring tools, from animation to talking heads to scenario-based interactives. These media pieces make a course come to life, and students love them!
What are the Disadvantages?
A typical 3-credit online course in the central-design model takes about 3 to 4 months to complete. Surprisingly, the length of the course, whether it’s a 6-week accelerated course or a 15-week semester-length course, only changes the course dev time by a few weeks either way.
What is the Decentralized Model Used by Most Traditional Colleges and Universities?
As more and more traditional colleges and universities have started to build their version of the online course (say over the past 5 years), they built out a different, decentralized model. The reasons for this are varied, but the role of the professor plays a huge part. Most large online universities utilize a significant number of adjunct faculty to teach their courses, whereas a lot of other universities still rely on a central core of tenured or full-time faculty.
How is the Decentralized Model Structured?
A typical 3-credit online course in the central-design model takes about 3 to 4 months to complete. Surprisingly, the length of the course, whether it’s a 6-week accelerated course or a 15-week semester-length course, only changes the course dev time by a few weeks either way.
Media
Faculty tend to create hours of videos in which they film themselves lecturing, sometimes with a whiteboard or slide deck. If they still need learning materials, some professors will utilize publisher resources, library content, or articles or videos they find online.
Course Development Timeline
A typical 3-credit online course development in this decentralized model takes about 10 months to complete.
What are the Advantages of the Decentralized Model?
Each course is unique and reflects the personality of that professor and each professor can design a course to fit her teaching style and research area. In addition, when you step back and look at the courses within a program, you’ll find a diverse range of teaching styles and strategies.
Think back to your college experience. Do you remember how well a course was organized or how well the learning outcomes were written (if they even had them)? I doubt it. You probably remember the teachers who left an impression on you, the good ones and the bad ones. So, if you’re building a course, what matters most?
What are the Disadvantages of a Decentralized Course Design Model?
Each professor tends to have carte blanche, which makes this model incredibly inefficient and results in big differences in course quality. In the central-design model, you can create three courses in the time it takes to complete one course. Don’t forget that in a central-design model, one course is used by everyone who teaches that course. In the decentralized model, one course is typically used by one professor. Uff da. That’s a tough pill to swallow if you have a limited budget, time, and resources and it severely hampers a university’s ability to scale.
Since faculty tend to rely on their own lecture videos, they don’t have time or the resources to create different kinds of videos. Are faculty lecture videos the best educational experience for students? Heck, do students even like faculty lecture videos? I realize that these talking head videos are ubiquitous on many popular learning platforms, but, raise your hand if you sometimes end up just fast-forwarding through the videos and reading the transcripts.
Creating a New Model
LearningMate is currently working with a traditional university in an attempt to merge these two models together to create an all-new model, one that can scale and maintain high quality, while also allowing each professor to put their own stamp on a course.
What is this new model? Stay tuned.