Open and Distance Education/Course Design/New Course Design

Suggestions

As explained in the previous section of the Wikibook page, the theory "Instructional Systems Design" model is useful for designing effective online courses.

Since we could learn a lot about course designs from the previous studies, we would like to suggest the following things to design effective courses for self-directed online learners.

At the Analysis stage, course designers should analyze learners' characteristics regarding media (such as their levels of media literacy and openness to use new technology). One of the course objectives that designers design at the Design stage should be helping learners to become more self-directed learners. At the Development stage, designers/instructors should develop course materials which have interactivity of course content and opportunities for human interactions. At the Implementation stage, designers/instructors should provide a short orientation for using media for learning and self-directed learning strategies depending on the learners' readiness. At the Evaluation stage, designers/instructors should check what kinds of challenges the learners are facing.

New Course Design

The model of a three-dimensional lens (Preference, Characteristics of self-directed learners and Classification) is designed as a suggested improvement of the analysis stage in the ISD (ADDIE model) for the purpose of selecting the right choice of media and technology in the course design of self-directed learning. The preference, characteristics of self-directed learners and classification are linked to each other. Preference for self-directed learners assumed that the course designers should understand or recognize what self-directed learners' media or technology that they preferred. So, course designers should choose the right media and technology based on the preferences of self-directed learners. At the same time, the course designers should know by identifying the characteristics of self-directed learners (using Takabayshi (2015) and Kobayashi (2017) approaches) as being media literate, innovative and self-regulative that are linked to the type of media that they preferred. When the preference of media and characteristics of self-directed learners are matched, course designers should classify accurately the preferred media using the Bates's classification model. That is, course designers must be careful to classify the preferred media as either falls under asynchronous, synchronous, communicative and broadcast. Because there is a link between each of the dimension, course designers should ensure that the preferred media is accurately classified and matched with the quality of the learner.

Although this course design is for self-directed learners, the media or technology must be classified (under Bates's classification model) as asynchronous and with one-way interaction. In addition, this model is flexible to be used in the course design not only for self-directed learners but for all online learners in distance education, and course designs like MOOCs and JMOOCs.