Designing for co-horts

I don’t want to say that designing for co-horts is in the past like it means it won’t happen again. I believe co-hort based learning has a strong place in distributed and distance education, and I hope to do more in the future. It’s just that designing courses for co-horts is where my journey as an ID started.

Designing for co-hort courses is part of my practice prior to joining TRU – OL (OL) and in the instance of HLTH 3101.

Prior to joining OL, I held positions at:

  • Mission Community Skills Center – Executive Director. We developed on-line electrical trades courses for the Industry Training Authority of BC

  • Sprott- Shaw College – Lead Instructional Designer for Business, Heath and Internal PID equivalent courses.

Courses delivered at these institutions were co-hort based courses using synchronous and asynchronous technologies to enable students and instructors to engage with each other. This is the same as HLTH 3101 – Client Directed Care Management, one of the first courses I worked on after joining OL

The learning design philosophy was founded in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model.

Community of inquiry framework.

 

HLTH_3101

 

What I became aware of was twofold:

  • With all our design intentions, where the students are motivated, by interesting content and engaging activities, the outcomes will be better.
  • And secondly, that in our design, we must account for institutional constraints on the course development process.

While not empirically proven, my belief is that student outcomes were best in those courses where motivated students worked with interesting content that provided variety in learning activities and authentic experiences – Electrical, PID and HLTH 3101.

What I learned through this experience was different institutional contexts affect the design.

With my previous employers, on-line learning was a new delivery format and our main goal was to demonstrate that this method could provide an equivalent education to the class-room based courses. Bench marking this was a condition of accreditation.

We felt a strong Teaching Presence would support and sustain a strong Social Presence that would ultimately drive some of the Cognitive Presence. Instructors therefore were visible in discussion forums and were joined by co-facilitators delivering synchronous sessions to ensure that chat comments were addressed.

However in both institutions, we neither had the resources or the time to invest in content production. We were limited to publisher material or instructional manuals. It felt like we were missing an important part of providing the best educational experience.

 I contrast this with the process and delivery at OL. The investment in content means that we are able to develop courses fit our ideas of what is important in this topic. We have more freedom to explore current issues and can create more breadth of discussion. There is arguably a more rich Cognitive Presence

However, the manner in which OLFM’s are compensated and the Collective Agreement drive other aspects that can limit the effectiveness of CoI process. For example, OLFM’s find monitoring and grading Discussion Forums cumbersome and may not to be happy when they are included. This affects the Teaching Presence.

In the end, these experiences provided perspective on motivating students through course design, while being cognizant of institutional requirements.