Context & Conditions

“SOC 300: Sociological Research Methods,” was an online course I developed in the spring of 2007 in partial fulfillment of a course entitled: MIT 515: Web Teaching: Design and Development. Under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Summerville this course was developed using the Blackboard Vista learning management system as well as an online testing tool called Respondus. While I had full design and development control, Dr. Rob Miller from the Department of Sociology served as a subject-matter expert (SME) for this project. 

Scope:

The project objective was to design an engaging and interactive online learning experience for undergraduate students taking sociological research methods. Dr. Miller had previously developed and taught this course using WebCT Campus Edition. I completely redesigned his course navigation and content delivery to include an audio lecture specific to each newly designed module. I also redesigned the course assessments by giving more weight to discussion postings and workbook exercises and less weight to tests. Finally, I developed a test bank for each module so no two students would receive the exact same quiz. 

Role:

I designed and developed the project by myself with the assistance of a SME for content specific questions. I worked primarily as an instructional designer in designing the instruction but also worked as a web developer to ensure the course was easy to navigate and had an appropriate look and feel. 

Reflection:

This project was gratifying on a number of levels. While I have worked with faculty developing web-based courses for quite some time this was the first opportunity I had to work with the same faculty member from start to finish on a project. I was able to completely re-design the faculty member’s course. If I had it to do over again I would like to have included a little more multimedia and interactivity into the course. A number of the modules have scaffolding in the form of PDF documents that I would love to change to a more web friendly and interactive format.