November 2004 — Exclusive
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Designing Distance Delivery Courses
Lectures. Second to reading for imparting new knowledge is the lecture. Before books and printed material were generally available, individuals lectured to groups about the content of an assortment of books. Today’s lecturers offer their dimension to the material through video. In addition to the punctuation and diacritics employed to convey meaning around words in text, a lecture includes volume adjustments, timing, tone, emphasis and various other enhancements to restructure and shape that meaning. Spontaneity is also possible. An excellent lecture conveys substantial amounts of meaning often not found in reading.
Problems. Distance delivery experiences must foster problem-solving skills. Well-designed problems can be delivered by distance as in traditional classes. The complexity can extend from simple to complicated procedures. Frequently, final answers are relatively simplistic. After many steps, the final answer is a mere number. Automating evaluations is confounded by rounding differences. You can resolve this by structuring questions in multiple-choice formats. Incorrect answers are obvious when the answer matches no listed alternative. Including “none of the above” options helps to alleviate this problem. Another resolution is calculating the result by mistaken procedures. If all answers reached by erroneous sequences are included as alternatives, the student’s error is apparent to the system. By including explanations of what would lead to a particular wrong answer, students are guided to a better understanding of the problem.
Research. Research opportunities have dramatically changed with pervasive Internet use. Previously, there was a scarcity of available information. Researchers would spend a considerable amount of library time finding, ordering and waiting for information —typical delays were days or weeks. That paradigm has been replaced with a plethora of information. Rather than struggling in a wilderness, today’s student is burdened with vast quantities of information needing analysis and organization. Research assessments require exploring a topic and writing a report. Spelling, grammatical and style problems in these reports can be detected automatically, but in-depth assessments require human intervention. Perhaps the greatest benefit available for reports through distance delivery is the interactivity of returning Post-it notes or audio comments directly with a paper.
Assessment
The immediate outcome of any course, whether online or traditional, is an evaluation of the results. Two important evaluation dimensions are reliability and validity. An assessment’s reliability relates to its consistency with other assessments of the same content. A highly reliable assessment is one that closely matches equivalent evaluations. Obviously, an assessment with low reliability provides an erratic outcome that fails to inspire confidence. The reliability can be likened to the standard deviation of outcomes measuring the same objective. An assessment’s validity relates to its ability to measure the understanding possessed about the topic. Those with a sound understanding of a topic should score highly on an assessment, while those with poor topical understanding should score lowly on that assessment if it has high validity.
