Course organization for Distance Education

Abstract

Distance Education literature has clearly indicated that the design and organization of an online course are predictors of course effectiveness—poorly designed and organized courses often fail and well designed and organized courses are almost always effective. In other words, the student in a course delivered at a distance should be able to quickly understand the scope and sequence of the contents of the course, including assessment strategies used to determine if learning outcomes have been met. This chapter proposes a field-tested approach for designing and delivering an effective online course called the U-M-T approach, where U stands for Unit, M for Module, and T for topic. Courses are designed around units that are divided into modules, and modules are divided further into topics. Thus, a typical course might have 3 units, each with 3 or 4 modules, and each module might have 3 important topics. This chapter expands on this basic design approach and discusses assessment strategies and student time allocations in order to produce the perfectly designed online course.