Doing Instructional Design for Distance Education: An Analysis of Design and Technological Issues in Online Course Management

This study analyzed design and technological issues encountered by online course instructors as they taught 120 online courses while working with a designated instructional designer. Having developed the courses and having had them approved in compliance with a set, standardized rubric, implementation of the 120 courses brought out issues that required the assistance of an instructional designer to be resolved. The study identified and analyzed specific issues that cut across most courses. The study presents implications to faculty, instructional designers and administrators.

With the rapid development of technology, online instruction has emerged as an alternative mode of teaching and learning and a substantial supplement to traditional teaching (Waits & Lewis, 2003). Edwards and Fritz (1997) determined that the effectiveness of online learning is influenced by student access to material, recommending that online information may replace the traditional text format for those students who accept and learn well from the online format. Coyner and McCann (2004) encouraged online course instructors to prepare, plan, and complete course information and materials before the start of a semester. Again, organization of content to adjust to the online learning environment is not an easy task, and instructors need to be extremely organized, dedicated, and committed (Reeves & Brown, 2012). As Almeda and Rose (2000) observed, even though many students who take online courses regard themselves as independent learners and would prefer to work individually, students’ reliance on the instructor is more intense in Web-based courses than in the traditional classroom.

Mupinga (2005) contended that one aspect online teachers may also struggle with is lack of technical support and/or resources to design appropriate materials. According to Mupinga (2005), both teachers and students are recommended to acquire adequate technical skills before they enter the online environment. In fact, as Coyner and McCann (2004) observed that to prepare students who are unfamiliar with the technology, teachers may find themselves at times spending more time in technological training than teaching the content material of the course.

Moore (2013) discussed three important factors in online course design. The first one, proposed Moore (2013), is dialogue. Dialogue, said Moore, describes the extent to which, in any educational program, learner and educator are able to respond to each other. This according to Moore (2013) is determined by the content or subject matter that is studied, by the educational philosophy of the educator, by the personalities of educator and learner, and by environmental factors, the most important of which is the medium of communication. The second factor according to Moore (2013) is structure, which is a measure of an educational program’s responsiveness to learners’ individual needs. It expresses the extent to which educational objectives, teaching strategies, and evaluation methods are prepared for, or can be adapted to the objectives, strategies, and evaluation methods of the learner. According to Moore (2013), in a highly structured educational program, the objectives and the methods to be used are determined for the learner and are inflexible. The third factor discussed by Moore (2013) is autonomy, which refers to the extent to which learners decide on certain factors such as “what to learn, how to learn, and how much to learn” (p. 68).

The present study put emphasis on managing an online course as it runs over the course of a semester in a learning management system. The study focused on how faculty deal with instructional design and technological issues that occur as a course runs asynchronously online and that would negatively impact student learning.

According to Simonson (2017), “one of the first decisions that online designers must make regards time: Individualized or personalized instruction holds learning outcomes constant and allows for variations in time” (p. 27). Simonson (2017) argued that since most often distance education is time bound, once the time issue is resolved, the structure of the learning experience is decided. Smaldino (1999) reiterated that the planning and organization for a distance education course is multifaceted and must occur well in advance of the scheduled instruction. In order to eliminate trial-and-error preparation, Smaldino (1999) recommended that courses previously taught in traditional classrooms need to be repurposed with the focus of the instruction shifting to more visual presentations, engaged learners, and careful timing of presentations of information. Savenye and Hong (2017) argued that when designing instruction for online learning, how to sequence instruction may seem to be a deceptively simple step. However, they observed, sequencing instruction for effective student learning involves a very important set of decisions that are made at several levels and stages of design. It is best to design online learning materials using a systematic approach overall. As Branch (2009) observed, while there are numerous models for designing instruction, ADDIE aids designers by suggesting five major steps to designing learning materials: Analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate. Again, Simonson (2017) contended that online course design and delivery must be instructional technology based (Dick, Carey, & Carey, 2015). Simonson (2017) further argued that the types of communication technology and instructional technology to be used grow out of a critical set of decisions that are made early in design process.

In as far as communication is concerned, Orellana, Hudgins, and Simonson (2009) argued that early on, the designer makes decisions about how communication between the instructor and students in an online course should occur and whether this communication should be asynchronous of synchronous. According to Simonson, Smaldino, and Zvacek (2015), the evidence available about making these decisions does support the trend that novice distance educators design their courses with considerable live communication, while more experienced distance educators opt for asynchronous communication (Simonson et al., 2015). It is arguable that asynchronous communication works better considering that most online learners are normally busy with work and other commitments and mostly prefer responding to communication from their instructor at their own convenient time.

Dick et al. (2015) emphasized that online course design and delivery must be instructional technology based. They went on to point out that the types of communication technology and instructional technology to be used, grow out of a critical set of decisions that are made early in design process. In fact, Coyner and McCann (2009) observed that the explosion of technology has made teaching outside the traditional classroom possible for teachers and has also provided learners with easy access to course material. However, Clark (2012) had warned that media do not directly influence achievement. Nevertheless, Clark went on to elaborate that it is also a basic assumption that, without employing some medium of communication, it is nearly impossible to communicate at a distance. To that end, Clark (2012) contended that designers may make assumptions related to the literacy—both visual and verbal—of all learners involved in distance education.

On the technical side of it, Ko and Rossen (2017) stated that an online instructor needs little to start with. A very basic familiarity with computers and the Internet will normally suffice. According to Ko and Rossen, that means knowing to do the following: Set up folders and directories on a hard drive, use word processing software properly, handle e-mail communications including attachments and use a browser to access the World Wide Web. However, Ko and Rossen (2017) clearly caution that technological proficiency does not necessarily make the best online instructors; pedagogy should always come first and technology second.

So in essence, thorough preparation of a course with due consideration of the intended learners and medium of delivery becomes vital in making sure that the teaching of an online course is successful. Interestingly, while it is clear that significant upfront planning and organization is a vital component in teaching an online course, issues normally continue to occur while well-developed courses go live online. These issues affect online learners and instructors and it normally takes assistance from a designated instructional designer and technologist to allay course-impeding design and technical issues when they occur in a learning management system environment.

The study analyzed instructional design and technological issues that impacted the implementation of 120 courses that were created by online teaching faculty members, evaluated and approved using a university set rubric for evaluating online courses. As the 120 courses were taught, various issues would arise and normally, teachers would seek the assistance of a designated instructional designer who would work with them to resolve the issues. These instructional design and technological issues came in various types and affected the various components of an online course using Canvas’s learning management system. Specifically, the study sought to answer the following research questions:

• What instructional design and technological issues did faculty members encounter while teaching 120 online courses in a learning management system environment?

• How were arising instructional design and technological issues resolved while the 120 courses ran online?

• What implications did the whole process of resolving these design and technological issues have on future online course management?

In order to assure quality in online learning, a state university in the Southwest developed a rubric for evaluating online and blended courses before they would be approved to go live in a learning management system. The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning was charged with the development of the rubric and using it to evaluate online, blended, webinar, and self-paced courses to make sure that they were designed and developed to the level of quality required by the university. This level of quality would also have to satisfy requirements for membership to State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA, National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements, 2018). SARA is an agreement among member states, districts, and territories in the United States that establishes comparable national standards for interstate offering of postsecondary distance education courses and programs. It is intended to make it easier for students to take online courses offered by postsecondary institutions based in another state (National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements, 2018). The present study focused on 120 online courses evaluated and approved by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Faculty members teaching the approved 120 online courses built them in Canvas learning management, the official learning management system used by the university. These courses would therefore run asynchronously and during the course of a semester, issues would arise either from the point of view of the instructor or indeed students. When students encountered issues in the online learning interface, they would naturally contact their instructor who would normally work on resolving the issues right away or if the instructors found them complicated, which is usually the case, they would contact a designated instructional designer and technologist for assistance. In the same way, if instructors encountered while teaching the courses online, they would contact the instructional designer and technologist for assistance in resolving the issues. Over time, certain issues occurred more frequently than did others and indeed occurred across many courses. These issues were identified and analyzed and formed the basis of the present study.

The study employed qualitative content analysis to collect data. Originating from the communication sciences, content analysis is used to examine text and images in order to identify messages and meanings (Hartley & Morphew, 2008; Krippendorff, 2013). A more modern definition of content analysis terms it “a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns” (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005, p. 1278). Krippendorff (2013) went on to state that content analysis is often used for the exploration of trends, patterns, and differences among similar components. Again, Fraenkel and Wallen (2015) argued that one of the major reasons for using content analysis is to formulate themes out of large amounts of descriptive information and obtain information useful in solving educational problems. In this study, content of 120 online courses taught over a period of one year was analyzed for issues that instructors encountered in the process. These courses were taught asynchronously in the Canvas Learning Management System. These issues or problematic areas were based on various aspects of the of the course interface in Canvas. For example, design and technological issues would arise from aspects of the course such as grades, modularization, quiz administration, external application integration, discussion topic administration, broken links, accessing instructor feedback, and other areas. Content analysis identified common issues that online instructors encountered while teaching the 120 online courses in Canvas’s learning management system. A Google document was purposefully created to provide space where all identified issues were systematically recorded.

Teaching of the 120 online courses brought out numerous issues that faculty members had to resolve for course success. The study analyzed issues that commonly cut across all the 120 courses as they asynchronously ran in a learning management system interface. It must be pointed out that these issues were resolved with assistance from an instructional designer and technologist who closely worked with online teaching faculty members and walked them through the process of finding solutions.

To begin with, the data clearly indicated that administering online quizzes brought out the most intriguing issues to online teaching instructors. Issues emanating from quiz administration included challenges with creating a multiple choice quiz for test preparation purposes only with grades unrecorded, embedding a picture into a specific quiz question, printing out quiz items from Canvas, exporting a quiz in Canvas and having the export converted into a Microsoft Word file in the process, creating a bonus quiz and also giving true extra credit in a quiz. Whenever these problems occurred, the affected online instructor would contact their designated instructional designer and technologist who would work with them to resolve them. It can be argued that one of the core philosophies underlining instructional design is problem solving. And so the designated instructional designer and technologist would make sure that a solution was found based on their knowledge and experience. In the event that issues to do with quiz administration could not be rectified between the two parties, Canvas engineers would be contacted who would most likely resolve such extreme case (technical) issues.

Issues from other areas of the online learning interface included enabling students to view and openly analyze a video in Canvas, removing unpublished assignments appearing below the syllabus without deleting them from the course, having students create a podcast, listen to each other’s podcasts and post constructive comments on their classmates’ podcasts. The instructor wanted everyone in the class to be able to access each other’s pod-cast and make comments bit could not find the best way to do this. More common issues across the 120 online curses included an assignment not allowing the instructor to add a grading rubric, students failing to make a discussion post that require them to upload a picture, weighted grades not tallying correctly in the gradebook, instructor looking for a way to create an attendance column in the gradebook, the Attendance feature marking students absent when they were actually present for a class session, issues identifying pedagogies for teaching Mathematics online and also course validity dates not showing in course details.

Other issues from teaching the 120 online courses emanated from using applications that work in a learning management system like Canvas. In this category, instructors experienced issues using the applications VoiceThread and Turnitin. A VoiceThread is a dynamic living conversation space that can be altered anytime. Basically, the application is about creating collaborative space with video, voice, and text commenting (VoiceThread, 2018). Turnitin, on the other hand, is an Internet-based plagiarism-prevention service which enables submitted essays to be checked for unoriginal content. It normally integrates with Grademark, which enables instructors to grade students’ written work online by providing them the ability to add comments within the body of a paper and point out grammar and punctuation mistakes or works of art (Turnitin, 2018). Issues to do with Turnitin included the application not processing students’ submissions, assignments imported from a previous semester showing broken links when launching in the application, students not being able to see instructor feedback layer on their Turnitin-processed papers while feedback was given and could be seen in instructor view and also students experiencing issues printing Grademark/Crocodoc comments which their instructor required them to review on paper. Common issues emanating from using VoiceThread included students being asked to log into VoiceThread first before accessing a project and students experiencing issues making video comments on a VoiceThread project created by their instructor.

As the 120 online courses ran in a learning management system interface, instructors naturally encountered instructional design and technological issues. In order to have these issues resolved, the teachers engaged the services of their designated instructional designer and technologist who would walk them through the process of solving the problems. While working with faculty to resolve the issues and rather than work alone to resolve the issues on behalf of the affected faculty members, the instructional designer and technologist employed the strategy of doing it together in instructional design (Dick et al., 2015). This process involved analyzing the issues together with the affected instructor and identifying and discussing a solution together before implementing it.

Recurring challenges with creating a multiple choice quiz for test preparation purposes only without recording grades were resolved by the designated instructional designer who walked the affected instructor through using a practice quiz. With a practice quiz, it was pointed out, students would not record a grade but quiz results displayed the number of points earned by each student. Again, the issue of embedding a picture into a specific quiz question brought out a solution that required the affected instructor to upload the picture into Canvas files first before— reuploading it in a quiz question by editing the quiz. Issues with printing quiz items had the instructional designer and technologist proposing pointing a cursor inside the quiz in preview mode, right clicking and selecting print from the menu. Issues to do with exporting a quiz into a Word file were perhaps the most recurring. And so whenever these issues came up, the affected instructor would be walked through going into Respondus, importing the quiz, going into preview mode, going to print options and selecting Microsoft Word. That would convert the quiz into a Microsoft Word file. With creating a bonus quiz, the instructional designer would thrash out modalities that involved creating a quiz, giving it points, and letting students take it. Once students take it, the next step would be editing it and changing it to a graded survey worth zero points. The students would then receive whatever extra credit value they earned. In the event that grades disappeared while converting the quiz, grades would have to be entered manually. Finally, giving true credit in a quiz would mean adding extra points in the gradebook or using fudge pints in speed grader. As pointed out earlier on, these issues were solved between the affected instructor and their designated instructional designer and technologist while working together.

Issues with Turnitin not processing students’ submissions would be reported to Turnitin engineers outright who would work on resolving them. Normally, these issues affected the whole world. In cases where assignments imported from a previous semester showed broken links when launching in Turnitin, the instructional designer would show the affected instructor that assignments had been created in the previous Turnitin Learning Tools Interoperability interface and when imported, Turnitin had transitioned to an application programming interface (API), which is a different interface. These assignments would have to be recreated in API. Issues to do with students not able to see instructor feedback layer on their Turnitin-processed papers while feedback was given would normally be solved by switching to a different browser that allowed printing annotated comments. Issues with students being asked to log into VoiceThread first before accessing a project would be resolved advising affected instructor to advise students not to use the application when off campus. Normally, as long as students are logged into Canvas on campus, they do not have to log into VoiceThread again. Finally, cases that saw students experiencing issues making video comments on a VoiceThread project created by their instructor would be resolved by conducting rigorous testing that would indicate that students were using Internet Explorer to make the comments, a browser that did not integrate well with Canvas. A switch to Google Chrome or Firefox would solve the problem.

First of all, the whole strategy of working together to resolve problems of instructional design and technological in nature was a success in the sense that unlike the designated instructional designer and technologist solving the issues on behalf of the affected instructor, solving the problems together meant that when a particular problem recurred in the future, an instructor would be able to solve it on their own. So, the whole process made faculty members familiarize themselves with different issues that would impact teaching of their online courses and ways in which they would solve such problems in ways that saved time. However, it must be pointed out that considering that the process did not necessarily make online instructors experts in solving design and technological issues, they were free to contact their designated instructional designer and technologist even when the problem affecting their course was previously resolved jointly. Another implication worth mentioning was the benefit that the designated instructional designer and technologist actually went away with. Sometimes these issues were reported over the telephone and the affected instructors expected their partner instructional designer to solve the issue right there and then. And so the instructional designer and technologist had to be ready at all times because most of the time, faculty members could not get things done until the problems were resolved. So on the part of the instructional designer and technologist, the process was challenging due to the amount of competence and adaptation for educational technology that it demanded. The whole process therefore, required continuous technology training, testing, researching and application. It must also be pointed out that the fact that the instructional designer and online instructors solved the issues together meant that gradually, the latter was able to gain some proficiency in resolving low-level issues and would engage the instructional designer only for help with more complicated issues. In the end, the whole process was beneficial to both parties in the way that problems impacting the teaching of an online course were timely solved and the experience of solving such problems also meant the designated instructional designer and technologist researched into new knowledge that would be of a lot of use in the future.

Indeed, while upfront planning and organization of online course content is such a vital component leading to the success implementation of an online course, issues of instructional design and technology in nature will always occur when the course is taught. The teaching of the 120 courses reviewed in this study brought out interesting issues that were solved jointly between instructors and an instructional designer and technologist. Also, it was interesting to note that among a myriad of issues that impacted the teaching of the 120 online courses, certain issues occurred more frequently across the courses than others. The process of solving such issues and indeed all issues brought out the advantage that when they recurred, it was easier for the instructional designer and technologist to solve them with the affected online instructor. In the same way, in the event that the same issue affected an online instructor for another time, the fact that they were involved in the process of solving such issues previously meant that solving them another time became easier. Also, it should be mentioned that the importance of having steady learner support in an online learning setup cannot be overemphasized. Finally, considering the success that it brought to both parties, going forward, the strategy of doing it together would continue to be employed in solving such instructional problems.