DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Online Course Development for Faculty

 

by Dana Doyle

 

 

Many MIT Faculty do not plan their course development and delivery in a cohesive manner to support quality online courses.

 

The idea behind this Problem of Practice is that many faculty are not following recommendations for managing their online course production project management. This leads to several issues that have come up repeatedly such as the course not being finished by the time it launches. This leads to a lack of beta testing and split attention between finishing the course build and running the course.

 

Overview

 

Provide your viewer with an overview to the professional setting, your role in it, the problem of practice, and your focus in the case.  This should be in multimedia format, such as a 2-3 minute video, and embedded in the page so that they viewer can watch it without downloading or going to another site.  The overview should be succint, substantive, polished, engaging, and unstilted.

 

Abstract

 

MITx is a team at MIT that supports faculty in making Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The challenges are many but, one specific one is faculty managing the building of their courses. Faculty are used to preparing their courses for on-campus use and being able to iterate while the course is being offered. With a fully online course, it is best if the course is entirely built and beta tested before it launches. There is a steep learning curve for faculty on how to do project management to be successful in course development. This case includes interviews with two MITx project managers and one faculty member. The main findings are that while some faculty see the importance of project management they want to depend on someone else to do it. Recommendations include messaging from other faculty to the importance of project management, better training and robust templates for faculty.

 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.