by Mieke Caris

As the director of the Faculty Center for Professional Excellence for about three years, I interact with faculty from a variety of schools and departments. Due to increased use of the course management system Blackboard, professors are more inclined to seek support from our office for the design of electronic course elements and to seek answers on how to load publisher's material into the course environment. Consequently, our support of faculty has shifted from introducing instructors to the use of basic technology tools, towards the design of course content, specifically learning objects. As a learning object, you might think of any electronic resource like a picture, an animation, a video clip or audio explaining content concepts and to stimulate critical thinking.

As members of our team are 'invited' into courses, we establish an eclectic process for producing and adding materials. Anticipating the development and modification of course materials delivered in an online setting, the FCPE has scheduled workshops about visual learning and multimedia.

Current state of affairs

The choice instructors have for preparing teaching materials often relates as to how technology-savvy they are in using electronic possibilities to deliver their topics. As instructors have always used books to accompany their lectures, they often seek additional materials to enliven or bring more depth to their teaching. Publishers, aware of their changing market, are developing electronic materials like PowerPoint, streaming video and computer based assessments. Professional instructional designers and a selected group of content experts collaborate to develop these high quality publisher materials. The downside of this approach is that the content of published materials can quickly become outdated, since these materials take time to produce and are difficult to update.

Undergraduate versus Graduate Course Development

Many faculty on campus report differences in how graduate versus undergraduate courses are developed. For undergraduate courses, faculty mostly use the publishers' materials since the they are based on the educational standards, are easy to use, have no copyright issues to deal with and preparation time is minimal. The only issue for the instructor is to become familiar with the material before teaching the class.

For graduate courses, instructors tend to develop their own resources, sometimes working with online library materials and the Internet. Due to a flexible delivery (web-enhanced, hybrid or fully online), instructors are aware they need to focus more attention on electronic resources. With the new generation of animation and image software, instructors can develop learning objects themselves, illustrating difficult concepts in a visual way. Compared with the traditional delivery method, the visual electronic media eliminates repeated actions and is a logical extension of traditional face-to-face teaching tools like the chalkboard. Such learning objects can consist of an image, an animation or an interactive tool which the learner can use for exploratory learning, retention or as some kind of formative assessment.

However, professors are often hesitant to become instructional designers themselves. In this role, they will have to analyze the learner and define the learning problem at a micro level. S/he will have to understand the power of media elements, both singly and in combination with other media elements. This activity will take valuable time. Administrators assume that keeping teaching materials up to date is part of the instructors' job. They are therefore loath to allow extra time or incentives for the development of electronic teaching materials. With no external incentives, the motivation of faculty to develop these materials is primarily professional satisfaction, and the advantage of having course-specific, updateable modules. Adelphi's intellectual property document needs to be ready to address the concerns of faculty when they opt to develop their own course materials.

Ready Made Learning Object-Repositories

As standards for education become a national norm, more instructors might search for free access, peer-reviewed, discipline-specific, online learning materials. The databases, or learning resource repositories, depend on contributions from instructors. It can give one great satisfaction to donate to the community of learners, or to find the appropriate materials and exchange ideas with the developer, a peer instructor. However, an altruistic mind-set to share resources does not come naturally. It is an interesting contradiction; the Internet, was originally designed to share higher education materials and scientific ideas, yet instructors are not always eager to 'give away' their teaching materials over the internet. To the contrary, instructors often voice requests for stronger copyright laws and clear statements on intellectual property.

"Knowledge-bases" (or databases of learning objects) are a new and exciting way of exchanging teaching elements with some distinct advantages. Extensive and searchable metadata (a precise instructional breakdown of the content and design of contributions to a searchable repository) is in its beginning phase. This will make finding and utilizing content that has been pre-constructed around a learning object, easy to identify for a specific course. On the other hand, this might give restrictions for the design.

Currently, the only database faculty might have heard of is MERLOT. However, few of our faculty has actually used MERLOT. Others less familiar databases are WiscOnline (a project managed by the Wisconsin Technical College system and working with internal faculty to produce learning objects), and CAREO, a Canadian project sponsored by the University of Alberta. The repositories are unfamiliar to many instructors, even though MERLOT presents at many conferences.

Possible solutions

The first step is to raise awareness of learning object repositories. At the faculty Center for Professional Excellence we have every semester a workshop called "Multi media and Visual Learning", in which an overview of a learning repository is part of the workshop material.

Whether designing a course for online delivery, a hybrid modality or supporting traditional classes with Blackboard, the issue of granularity is important in the selection of pre-made media and resources.
Typically, learning objects in online databases cover particular topics, not an entire course. If faculty are encouraged to search for resources, not just at the overall course level, but also on a topic basis, they will no doubt find learning object repositories more useful. Use of these pre-existing learning objects can save faculty a tremendous amount of time, while also providing students with learning experience that tap into other modalities.

Looking for and selecting materials is a multi-step process which required asking several questions. How much can faculty rely on publishers materials? How much should they be involved with the custom design of learning materials? When is it effective to search for materials in a learning object repository?

After faculty become aware of learning object repositories, a next step would be attending brief workshops. The FCPE in collaboration with the library, can demonstrate how to conduct searches for course materials that go beyond the WWW and electronic journal databases, and be specific to your discipline and audience. Please look for our course schedule to determine the dates of these workshops.

Link to Explore: