Faced with a 30-40% increase in the use of part-time faculty and a lack of instructional design and technical support services within the department for existing full-time faculty,coupled with a university-wide move to an open source learning management system (LMS) known as Moodle, there is a need to discover the most critical issues that face online instructors and their students in order to improve success,satisfaction, and retention in a fully online masters degree program in the College of Education, Master of Education in Training & Development (TDZ).
The research questions guiding this work were:
1. What are the best practices in course design for Moodle that allow for maximum modularization and reduce the steps to get a course ready for the next semester?
2. What are online graduate students expectations from the technology and from the instructor that will contribute to success and satisfaction to lead to academic persistence?
3. What job aids can benefit part-time and full-time faculty to get courses ready for the next semester and meeting student expectations so they can be more successful and satisfied with a desire to remain teaching in the online environment?
Data was gathered through a series of informal interviews that took place during the Spring 2011 semester with the Program Director, a random selection of students in the TDZ program, full-time and part-time faculty teaching in the TDZ program, instructional designers at DELTA, library support services, and through a limited review of the literature.
Instructors best suited for teaching in the online environment require skills beyond pedagogy to include technology, managerial, and social abilities. This an area that would benefit from future research. With the rise in the use of open source learning management systems, it is more important than ever to develop a continuous improvement approach to course design that will refine and improve the experience for administrators, faculty and students that will lead to the greatest success, satisfaction, and retention.
The poster will display the needs revealed from the research conducted and suggest strategies for addressing each of those need within the Moodle learning management system. Special attention will be paid to development of design practices for working with part-time faculty and for student-centered teaching. The goal is to present these best practices and give insight into designing Moodle spaced with leaner-centered approached to maximize learner success, satisfaction, and retention.
