Exploring Instructional Design Issues with Web-Enhanced Courses: What Do Faculty Need in Order to Present Materials On-Line and What Should They Consider When Doing So?

Training faculty to add technology to courses should begin with a needs assessment. Design considerations should be incorporated into training to avoid student confusion in using web pages and completing on-line quizzes. Generally, web-enhanced courses can follow a constructivist approach if instructors have the prerequisite skills in place to use the technology. Faculty may also want to consider the ethical implications in testing students on-line. When adding online technology to face-to-face (FTF) courses, the importance of addressing the instructional design issues can get lost in the bells and whistles of the new and improved course appearance. Much of the emphasis in the literature is focused on the technicalities of the course creation and, unfortunately, the outcome measurements are questionable because of the methodologies employed. Specifically, the instructor may also be the researcher for many of these studies (Heines, 2000). The general theme appears to be convenience for both the student and instructor and an improvement in the quality and timeliness of the communication and assessment resources. The following discussion will focus on several aspects of training faculty to web-enhance their FTF courses with instructional design issues considered when incorporating technology into a classroom. The recommendations for training faculty will include both direct instruction, characteristics of a behaviorist’s approach, and a constructivist’s model implemented with a project based assignment for instructors learning to web-enhance their courses. For the purpose of this discussion, the terms on-line, FTF, and web-enhanced require further definitions. An on-line class offers all of the course material, assessments, student interaction, and assignments over the Internet either using a software package such as Blackboard or WebCT, or the instructor’s web site. FTF classes are taught in a classroom with the instructor and students physically present together at a predetermined time and place. All projects, assignments, assessments and class discussions take place during the class time as arranged in a schedule. A web-enhanced class schedules class times for application, practice, student and instructor interaction. Subsequently, lecture information, textbook assignments, and assessments are placed on-line (Pallof & Pratt,

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