Basic Classroom Design and Construction for Online Education


There are three things to consider in designing an online classroom:
  1. Pedagogy
  2. Design
  3. Mechanics

These goals are offset with some limiting factors:
  1. Time
  2. Support
  3. Hardware and Software

In this workshop, we will start to consider the goals and how we can best meet those goals given certain limitation.

Pedagogical Goals

Designing an online course is slightly different than designing a webpage. In designing a webpage, the primary issue are design, content, and mechanics. In a classroom, you have to go beyond that and consider the pedagogical issues. What material is going to be learned? How can I present that material? In other words, in designing an online course we have to consider our students and what we want them to learn. There are of course problems with this, students cannot be approached as a mass market, nor as a selected audience, however, those are the paradigms often used in web design. If they do not fit into either of those categories, then we have to particularize the course to our specific audience, one that we cannot assume is unified in any single fashion. Indeed, students vary in some very important ways related to online education. Before one goes too far, we need to consider those differences a bit. The following list is not complete, but does give a place to start:
We should consider:
  1. Students Technological Prowess
    1. Are they familiar with Computers and the Internet?
    2. Do they see the technology as valuable?
  2. Students Learning Type
    1. Are there differences in the way they learn?
    2. Are there differences in the way they recieve the website?
    3. Are there any specific ability groups that you need to address?
  3. Students Relationship to the Class
    1. Is the class primarily Core Curriculum?
    2. Are students highly motivated?
There are many more considerations to consider in terms of Pedagogy.
Those concerns are address around Campus via a wide variety of workshops:
FDI
Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
Cybertools

Design

 On the topic of design there are many things to say. However, the first thing to consider is probably if you are using a courseware system, like Blackboard's CoursInfo or WebCT, then much of what I mention in this section will not apply.

Designing a website is first and formost a pedagogical concern, secondarily a pragmatic concern, thirdly an aesthetic concern. As we have already considered the pedagogical issues a bit, we should now turn to pragmatic concerns. By pragmatic concerns, I mean the ease of use of the website and what your students can get out of the website.

First we should consider how easy we can make it for our students to use. How does one do that though? We do it by being as explicit in web design as we are in book design. This is not to say that we should follow the book paradigm, not at all, but we should use certain ideas from that paradigm to enhance our website.
Things we can take from books are:
A Table of Contents
Clear and Precise Titles


Other general ideas to consider are:
The rule of 3's and or odd numbers.
Horizontal versus vertical listings.
Object placesment for prioritization.
Change of design/color to signal area change.
depth versus width In other words number of mouseclicks to get to any page from the top or any other page.
universal design
liquid design

Traps and Dangers to be aware of:
Complexity
Uniquenss to the point of unusablity
Putting aethetics before use.

Even if you do consider what I mention above, you might want to follow some basic steps that I follow.
Using Paper or a sketchpad:
  1. Sketch the front page layout.
  2. Outline the organization of the pages.
  3. Make note of stylistic changes that you want and when they should happen.
  4. Only after you have done that, should you really go one to the implementation state.


Where do I look for ideas, and help relating to design? I surf the web. I look at other designs. I consider my audience. I consider what I like to look at. Some sites that give good to great advice are: I use the first two sites primarily, though the other ones are great resources.
  1. Project Cool
  2. Webmonkey
  3. Web Reference
  4. Web Design Resource
  5. design-o-rama
  6. Designers on Design
  7. reallybig
  8. Builder

Mechanics

The above sites are excellent also on the topic of mechanics of the webdesign.
In this section, I will cover what I believe and what i have surmised from the design community to be the best tools to do the work. The tools that one needs to make a good class website are:

a good editor

a graphics program

Luckily we all have servicable editors, and access to graphic programs at Virginia Tech. Most of us have BBEdit, or Netscape, Microsoft Word or some other servicable editor on our computers.

Some people also are luckily enough to have access to a good graphics program in their department. Photoshop, Corel Draw are perfectly servicable.

Of course, learning these programs takes time and energy. That is why many people use wysiwyg site editors like Homesite, Dreamweaver, or Netobjects Fusion. Some people also use Microsoft Frontpage, However, that is not a good idea unless you can guarentee your audience uses only Microsoft Products to view the page. Then there are the stalwarts that still handcode HTML, this is alway and option and can be done with any text editor. I hand coded this page in very little time. However, the reason that I handcoded it was that i wanted to know exactly how and where the code in the page is laid out, in case i later want to change it. Nonetheless, we are going to go through a brief tutorial on making a webpage using Netscape, and converting files to html using Microsoft Office