What are the main steps to redesign your existing course in a blended learning course?
There are different course design and development approaches. Which approach is appropriate depends on the experiences of the (teacher-) designer, the complexity of the design task, or both.
1. Design Situation 1
How to introduce your ideas to use IT in (a part of) your course
Suppose you, as a teacher designer, have specific pedagogical wishes or problems that you need to address, and you already have a limited number of new ideas for implementing IT in the current course without changing the learning objectives. In this design situation 1, you must finish some design and development tasks
The 6-stage course design and development (DD) process can be used for this design situation.
2. Design situation 2.
The teachers have several new ideas for crucial pedagogical changes in their courses.
A development process can follow the nine-stage course design for this design situation. An important characteristic in the design situation is that the teacher designers start thinking about a regular course. There is no need to start with pedagogical analyses like formulating learning objectives or analysing the topics. Besides selecting IT options, the teacher designers are interested in other pedagogical options of modern higher education. For this, they have to re-analyse the diamond diagram.
Of course, the teacher designers have to adapt the pDD process to their specific situation.
Design situations 3, 4 and 5.
The teacher or a teacher team should prepare an entirely new course or a design situation 5 in which a ‘sticky’ (very complex and difficult to solve) problem has to be solved.
In design situations 3 and 4, I advise following the design activities described in the master course design and development process. These design situations are more complex compared with design situations 1 and 2. The teacher designers select the necessary design tools and adapt their personal course design and development process carefully.
Design situation 5 is about problems with no clear answers: the wicked problem. Teacher designers will work together with managers and supporting staff to find answers. The problem of wicked problems is that involved faculty should develop new opinions about education. Examples are the idea of active learning, first-year student selection, competency-based education, personification curriculum or course, constructive use of the formal assessment and new developments in the professional field. Below, the stages of the master DD process are described. A short characterisation of the basic six stages of the DD process is explained in a separate post.
The first design activity in the basic DD process is to formulate a personal DD process that matches the participating teachers’ IT knowledge and work experience.
