Review by: Schönwald, Ingrid (2007-05-05)

This study explores a collaborative planning and development process of online curricula and examines the roles assumed by team members based on a literature review and a case study.

Findings from the literature review

Many research reports suggest that the development of course goals and objectives and the selection of content for an online course do not differ greatly from the process for face-to-face courses. However, the development of online courses needs to focus on interactivity more so than content in order to replace discussions taking place in face-to-face learning environment. In this sense, the authors deduce that online course development should be conceptualized as a process of transformation rather than simply translation of lecture content to another medium

As a relatively new course development model, a team approach in course development poses several challenges to both faculty and instructional technologists, e. g. the different knowledge domains among the team members, increased workload, the difficulty in keeping a project on schedule, limited resources, and a traditional institutional reward system that undervalues online teaching.

The case study

The purpose of the case study was to gain an understanding of how online course development involving multiple faculty members actually works in practice. Using Berge’s (1995) study of the roles of online facilitators and Stark and Lattuca’s (1997) model of an academic plan, the roles that faculty assume during the planning and development process were analysed and the curricular decisions were examined. The course development team consisted of four faculty members, one project coordinator, and one web instructional designer. The course under study was an undergraduate humanities course to be delivered in a asynchronous environment at a large university system in a southern US state. Data were collected through observation of face-to-face planning meetings, document analysis of group postings at the online site, and interviews with the team members.

The authors present the research findings in three categories:

• Roles assumed by the course development team members,
• curricular decisions during the collaborative planning and development process,
• the perception of the collaborative process.

Some interesting findings are:

• Content was the primary focus at the course development website, garnering far more postings by the team members than any other element of the academic plan.
• There was more collaboration in the first phase of course development than later on. Once the content was divided among faculty members, there was limited discussion and review of the content which was posted at the online site.
• Decisions related to evaluation were minimally discussed at the online site because of time constraints at the end of the course development process.
• There was a fierce debate over consistent structure, suggesting that it is still controversial to what extent the project coordinator should exert a curricular role and whether some curricular decisions were sacrificed to technology or vice versa.
• The roles of faculty and the project coordinator were interwoven and interdependent.

Based on their findings the authors map out several recommendations. For example they suggest that faculty members may benefit more by working with a peer in the same discipline who has expertise in developing online courses than from partnering with an instructional designer.

In spite of the limitations of this study that the authors mention at the end of the paper, this study offers many suggestions for teaching practice and links to further research.