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| Collaborative Development. As the online education field takes off, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on developing thousands of courses at the instructor and class level. Yet, when we survey the courses in use and in development, a tiny percentage employ innovative learning theory, high production value, or interoperable technical specifications. Within this landscape, NROC has built a model that allows course developers to share guidelines and expertise, advise on |
Collaborative Developer Network
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| design and implementation, seek joint funding for collaborative development, and match-make institutions with the same needs to leverage existing resources into shared curriculum development. |
Flexible Barter and Licensing Model
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Global Distribution. NROC partners with academic institutions, publishers, teaching organizations, state and federal agencies, international distributors, social benefit programs and others to create a global distribution network to provide courses to student, teacher, and the general public at little or no cost. Courses may be licensed for use in a variety of ways, including barter (trading for contributing resources to the library), low-cost library licenses, and open access licenses. |
Development Guidelines. NROC guidelines provide a comprehensive framework and set of principles that synthesize what is known about effective online education. The guidelines were written to evolve as the marketplace of technologies, collaboration, investment, and learner and teacher experiences shift. They are designed to help bridge the gap between what research tells us about learning, the current state of the online learning marketplace, and the existing technologies. The long-term goal of National Repository of Online Courses is to create a robust digital library of online course content. A short-term goal is to disseminate the NROC guidelines to facilitate collaboration in the course development community.
Pedagogy and Content
Integrated Learning Theory and Development Guidelines
 
Design and Technology
Interoperability. NROC technical guidelines and development provide for as much interoperability as is reasonably possible in the current digital environment. The NROC team (re)develops courses and learning objects to fit
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into a flexible schema that keeps file hierarchies, content, activities and assessments organized for porting into the most commonly used CMS tools. To support a wide variety of delivery options, NROC provides resources, training and consulting services to aid course library implementation.
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OLI, continued from page 3 The traditional approach encourages students to employ learning strategies that enable them to perform well on traditional chemistry exams but does not support students to learn the relationship between the mathematical procedures and the chemical phenomena those procedures represent. Nor do most traditional approaches emphasize the relationship between chemical concepts and the real world. The OLI chemistry course is designed to address both of these educational challenges. The course connects mathematical procedures to real chemistry by supplementing traditional problems with activities in which students design and carry out their own experiments in our online virtual chemistry lab. The OLI unit on stoichiometry connects the chemical representations and calculations to the real world by situating the learning of stoichiometry in the real world problem of arsenic contamination of the water supply in Bangladesh . We are currently evaluating the effectiveness of our approach by studying how students use the course and the impact of their use on learning outcomes. As with all OLI courses, we will use the results of the study to inform the next iteration of the course and to inform future course designs.
OLI combines the research base from cognitive and educational psychology with content expertise from university professors and a process of use-driven design to develop courses. We believe this approach is essential to our finally achieving the long-held promise of using technology to transform both the quality of and access to post-secondary education.
For more information about OLI and to access the open and free versions of our courses, please visit our website at www.cmu.edu/oli.
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