A new service for instructors building or updating online and blended courses

SFU instructors are developing more effective and interactive online and blended courses with support from the Centre for Educational Excellence’s (CEE) new collaborative course development service.  

The service provides instructors with a one-stop access to learning design, technology and media development support aimed at addressing their teaching and course goals.

Redesigning a face-to-face course as an online course

For sociology and anthropology professor Maureen Kihika delivering a course online that she previously taught in-person, LBST 201, was a daunting task. The support she received through CEE's new service meant being able to successfully navigate the complexities of this new and surprisingly different teaching space.

“At first my plans were to reuse my lecture slides but I quickly learned that you can’t just transfer everything over from what you did in person and make it work for online teaching. CEE helped me understand the unique needs of online learners and apply specific technological solutions to meet those needs. It was a new landscape for me to navigate and so of course I had so many blind spots. I appreciated was having a someone helping guide me through them.”

Redesigning an online course into a blended course

For linguistics professor Henny Yeung, redesigning LING 350 as a blended course was an opportunity to address some of the challenges he had encountered when teaching it as an OL course. Working with CEE’s collaborative course development service meant he could design informed solutions to those issues much faster, as well as develop the skills to implement them.

“One of the challenges I was facing was how to create online content that students actually engage with. I had heard there was a tool H5P that I could use but I had no idea how to integrate it. What was really valuable for me was that I also got support to think about the pedagogical goals, alongside the technical piece, and that the support was tailored to my course. I don’t want to know the million different ways that something can be done, I want to know makes sense for my context, and how it can be broken down into manageable steps, and that is the support I received.”

Rebuilding an existing online course

Contemporary arts instructor Janet Danielson knew her online course, CA 104, needed some major updating. Collaborating with the CEE team, she made small changes that have had a big impact on the usability and effectiveness of the course.

“My main concern with the course was that the software that students had to interact with was out of date and clunky. Yes, I needed help figuring out what could be done to address that but along the way we also tackled a number of other things that were getting in the way of learning. For example, adding short-answer or multiple-choice quizzes in place of “yes or no” questions; making the interface much more seamless for learners; and creating low-stakes assessments to encourage more skills acquisition.”

Instructors interested in accessing support for the design/redesign of all or part of a blended or online course can visit CEE’s Blended and Online Course Build page. The deadline to submit an expression of interest for the next full course build intake is September 30.