Planning for the Future

Online education is big business. Some virtual and traditional schools have closed their online education programs when they did not produce profit or remain manageable. With the introduction of more commercial vendors into what primarily had been an academic market, administrators have to ensure that not only do their programs meet students’ needs and high academic standards, but also can be competitive in an increasingly crowded market.

Updating and Developing Course Materials

As you develop the entire curriculum for a degree program, you want both uniqueness and similarity among courses. Each course should be unique, with its own purpose, objectives, requirements, content, and activities. It must have its own special place in a program.

Adding a Course to the Curriculum

An academic curriculum is a series of courses related by themes and skills development. The individual courses within the curriculum help learners progress from basic, introductory levels of knowledge and skills to higher-level objectives for critical thinking, mastery of skills, and demonstration of knowledge common to a discipline. Completing specified courses within a curriculum leads to a degree, and the degree program may involve courses in several different departments or disciplines.

Managing Programs and Faculty Concerns

As online education moved from being a fad to a money-maker, many institutions, businesses, and individuals jumped at the chance to offer online courses. As mentioned in previous chapters, not all courses are created equally, and not all curricula have been designed to work well online.

Developing Support Networks

Teaching online, as you have read in other chapters, is a collaborative effort, even though when you are teaching, you may feel “home alone” when you work online. When you are sitting in front of a computer screen, intellectually you may realize that you are connected to networks of learners, administrators, other teachers, and members of other support networks. However, those people often seem remote when you are working at home around midnight. You and your institution need to develop a series of support networks so that any learner or teacher working online at any time knows that she or he is not alone.

Facilitating the Online Curriculum

What is a “traditional” classroom? Many adults may still think of a traditional classroom as a room within a building, probably on a university, college, or other educational institution’s campus. It may contain computer equipment, but it may be pictured as an older, whiteboard-only classroom full of desks or tables, with a teacher lecturing students face to face. Indeed, this example is a traditional classroom for many learners today, and it is likely to remain one definition of a traditional classroom for years to come. However, as more learners grow up with computer technology, the definition of the traditional classroom becomes more diverse.

The Aesthetics of Teaching

Teaching, whether online or on site, requires a lot of day-to-day activities that make the course run smoothly, help learners solve short-term and longer-term educational problems, and facilitate learners’ achieving their educational objectives. Those tasks are important and immediate; they take up a great deal of your weekly teaching time. The success of implementing a class often depends on these daily tasks.

The Daily Work of Teaching

So far, you have read about the tools you will use on the job, a little bit of theory about how online teaching is supposed to operate, and the role of the facilitator/teacher. Another part of implementing an online curriculum is critically evaluating work tasks using these tools and planning how you want to approach online education. You evaluate how well your experience with online courses matches the expected outcomes for learners who take that course. At the completion of your course, are learners ready for the next part of the curriculum? Do you think that students were prepared to take your course—both in their knowledge of the discipline and their ability to complete course objectives online? Your daily work is a good measure of the curriculum’s strengths and weaknesses.