Online Course Development Process

The analysis phase seeks to determine:

• Who your learners are
• The overall goals you are trying to achieve
• The overall knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that need to be taught
• The amount and level of content needed
• Resources required/available

You will notice that this stage mirrors the first few session of our course, in which we focused on definitions, goals of the instructional design process, and audience issues.

PROCESS:

• Assess needs & audience
• Determine overall content and goals
• Specify authoring and delivery systems
• Plan overall project scope
• Plan overall evaluation strategies

TEAM:

• Administrator (person responsible for institutional/company vision for instruction)
• Project manager
• Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
• Instructional designer(s)
• Project evaluator(s)
• Programmer(s)

PRODUCTS:

• Needs assessment report
• Learner profile
• Content outline
• Learning hierarchy
• Design approach
• Technical specs.
• Evaluation strategy
• Project timetable

• Graphical Process Map-NYU. (Online image format) A graphical flowchart of the course-development process for content-rich courses in the Virtual College.
• Sample Agenda. This is tool I adapt to perform both Analysis and Design. The entire process is good for a large course-development project for an institution/organization that has never created online courses before (usually in several meetings over 2-5 days). For a single course at an institution that has developed courses before, this could be done in less than a day.
• User Characteristics Checklist. A clear description of the salient characteristics of the users.
• Task/Content Analysis Tools. Used to define detailed content to be included, or for gross sequencing and segmenting of content. If your project is intended for training, conduct a "task analysis." If it is aimed at education/instruction on specific content or subject area, conduct a "content analysis."
• Analysis Report Template. A tool designed to help you prepare a clear, readable, and concise presentation of the results of your analysis activities.