In Fall 2015, CIT partnered with Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON) to develop a strategy to bolster support of DUSON online courses. DUSON offers “both its Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) and its Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree programs using distance-based and online technologies.” CIT consultants Sophia Stone and Haiyan Zhou, along with Online Course Builder Nick Janes and Video Producer Mich Donovan, worked with DUSON staff and faculty to begin a redesign of the course N580: Nurse as Scholar I.
Our approach and outcomes included:
Evaluate course feedback and indentify needs
CIT staff worked with the course instructor, Tony Dren, to review Dren’s notes regarding online teaching (a valuable perspective as Dren is a veteran of online teaching), student feedback and previous Sakai course usage statistics to identify gaps, needs and successes.
Design recommendations
Working with Dren, CIT staff created a set of recommendations addressing overall course organization, student engagement and learning community building.
Visual re-design
CIT created a template/mockup of the final visual course design in a Sakai site. This also helped guide communication about the overall course design during progress meetings.
Video examples
CIT staff applied several of the lessons we’ve learned over the past four years to developing a new set of instructional videos that could be used as a style guide for future content.
Building in-house capacity
During the redesign process, CIT also offered assistance with recommendations on how to build up DUSON’s in-house instructional design challenges to help them continue to maintain their online course excellence.