Building Better Online Courses (Invited Talk)

We now have many choices in designing a course, whether it is in the classroom, online, or a hybrid. This talk will cover some of the mechanics of running an online course, including the factors involved in building a community. And we will discuss whether building a course is like building software: in the early days, software was crafted by individuals, but over time we established processes that enabled large groups to build much larger systems. Today, courses are still crafted by an individual teacher — if we want to build a larger class, serving more students, and more potential paths through the material, do we need a new set of course building processes? How can we assure that our courses will continually improve in quality?