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Course designs

Course design is a highly custom process and depends on the target student audience, chosen pedagogy and instructional design. Whether the intention is to build a bricolage for tutors in Moodle, or to engineer an entirely consistent programme of distance learning, Courseworker can accommodate the chosen course design.

The flexible learning spectrum

Designs usually fall somewhere along the flexible learning spectrum as illustrated below, depending on how significant the pure face-to-face or distance learning requirements are.

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To meet the need for more flexible learning delivery, many education providers are moving towards establishing reusable sets of materials that can support all blended forms of teaching and learning. Some are creating repositories of object based content, while others are adopting a more flexible approach that can accommodate more familiar course components.

For a one-off engineering set-up fee, Courseworker can be extended to support the batch production of any custom course design. This flexibility is useful when you wish to support a particular online learning environment or interactive design feature.

Creating a student centred learning process

People learn in different ways depending on their individual preferences, available time, chosen subject and motivation. To accommodate these different learner styles, flexibility is needed in how they can access the content, human and technology resources your courses offer. If we look at a typical "MACE"1 based learning process representation, then we gain an appreciation of where human resources contribute more, and where content and technology resources might contribute more.

Motivation the step of inspiring students to study a particular subject is something people do well, particularly when backed-up by samples of good quality course materials.
Acquisition choosing to absorb knowledge from a particular source is a very personal preference. Offering students multiple study modes to acquire knowledge from is very attractive. Good quality course content that has been written in support of self-study enables this choice. It also makes scaling delivery to larger numbers of students more affordable.
Contextualisation applying and customising knowledge to particular situations that are relevant to students is something people do well.
Evaluation Assessing whether knowledge is properly understood is something online assessment technologies and self-assessment contents greatly support.

You can use this simple classification to consider where in your course design you want people to contribute, and which tasks are better suited to content or computers to do. Courseworker's component flexibility accommodates any course design you may choose, and excels at producing the high quality content components you need.

1 - http://www.erisa.be/Lists/Round%20Tables/Attachments/2/eris@%20White%20Paper%20Prof.%20Roy%20Leitch%20Liberating%20Teachers.pdf