Week 4: Instructional Design

A couple of things struck me about the reviews of different courses in terms of instructional design. The first was that there are now far more courses up there to look at than there used to be. The second is that a single provider might have both good and bad courses--it seems very hit and miss, but it may be that they are gradually upgrading, so the newer courses are better. Another was that K12, Inc. courses were pretty universally criticized--this is a surprise because they do a huge job of self-promotion. It also seems that all of the schools do better at laying out the course expectations, content, etc., than they do in actually delivering the course. I was also struck by how much the need to have multimedia has infused these courses. I think next time it would be good to go deeper on this one, to see if the multimedia is really used well or is just there to engage students (not that that's bad, but as an example, I don't think simulations work without really good scaffolding and structuring). And last, it was interesting how few of the examples were from state schools, which takes us back to the need to sell--state schools have less need to do this.