November 2004 — Exclusive

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Designing Distance Delivery Courses

By Dr. Arlyn R. Rubash, Bradley University, Illinois

  • For successful distance delivery courses, suitable recommendations should be adopted. Students in distance delivery classes need the same feeling and welcome of traditional classes. For advance insight, post a syllabus on an unrestricted server so that prospective students can make informed decisions.

  • Require a course reference in any e-mail subject line. Given the junk e-mail crowding mailboxes today, serious messages can often be accidentally discarded unread.

  • Distance delivery also accommodates individuality and excellence. In traditional settings, professors focus on the average student; thus, the poor and excellent suffer. Design distance delivery courses with attention to individuality. Courses delivered at a distance should excel beyond traditional courses.

  • Frequently asked questions should be compiled and available. This file logically evolves over time as new and generally relevant questions emerge. Some highly visible pointer should take confused students there.

  • A practice experience should introduce students to the course structure and critical components. Questions can ask about the information contained in the welcome, the general instruction and the frequently-asked-question files. Some questions can even be contrived to guide students into actions that produce problems. Students will then have less chance of committing a grievous error.

  • Assigned page lengths confuse students due to font size, spacing, etc. A better solution is to specify a word count.

  • While the asynchronous structure encourages individual rates, goals benefit people. Semester or similar structured courses without intermediate steps allow participants to delay until ultimate deadlines; eventually, accumulated tasks become insurmountable. Intervening deadlines give participants manageable tasks. Rather than cramming learning into a course’s waning days, work is distributed. Allowing early completion reduces deadline conflicts as well. Alternately, use makeup assignments on a delayed schedule. To discourage makeups, penalize them with reduced scores or greater difficulty.

  • It is inevitable that students will experience computer and connection malfunctions, so it’s unfair to penalize students for external factors. Grace periods can accommodate most corrections. Scheduling deadlines one day early allows instructors to resolve any crashes during the grace period.

  • Exam completion time should be limited. A penalty can be assessed for going over time or a more readily received reward can be given for timely completion of an exam. Instructors must remember that modest delays in system responses occasionally occur.

  • General interest questions should be submitted to public forums to exchange information. E-mail exchanges are repetitive and reluctant students often miss e-mail explanations.

  • Since quiz discrimination is lost when students take identical quizzes and collaborate, random questions should be generated from a database whenever possible. However, it’s important to remember that collaboration is still possible and that previously completed assessments can be used by later participants. Reduce this problem by preventing assessment pages from being copied or printed.