Converting to Online Courses

Well, this has been an interesting week or so...kinda where the rubber meets the road. As a former military instructor, I don't have what I can call a "traditional" course that I can convert to an online course, as we are considering in our Online Teaching course. I inherited a one-credit course that I facilitate in Blackboard, but as for developing a course from scratch, this was a new, and humbling experience for me. I decided to model a fictitious course Beginning HTML based on the first couple of weeks of my JavaScript programming class. The process went alright and I'm very thankful that I am a well-organized type familiar with Blackboard, because without that background, I would have found the whole process very time-consuming.
Ko and Rossen (2004) cover the topic of course conversion very well in Chapter 3. Since they are using Blackboard as an example LMS, their examples and discussion were very practical and immediately applicable. Their use of case studies was also especially helpful, based upon the nature of the course that was being converted.

Another very helpful conversion tool, using a different LMS, nevertheless made conversion a more straightforward process. It maps traditional classroom features to the corresponding online features in a tabular way. It can be found at: http://casl.umd.umich.edu/distancelearning/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=114.

One of more distasteful aspects of course conversion is the necessity to do all this development work in addition to your normal 8-to-5 (right!). At least one university (University of Colorado, Denver) sweetens the pot a little bit by paying selected faculty to do course conversions and provides the technical resources to assure that it is done in an efficient and timely manner. See more about this at: http://thunder1.cudenver.edu/CFD/webcamp.pdf. I get the sense from much of this reading that online courses are poised to explode as conversions from traditional classroom courses really gets underway. This whole process, though, needs to be guided by experienced instructional designers to avoid simply putting all the "stuff" from a face-to-face course into an electronic format. The electronic medium allows for much greater richness in features and content than that...