The Designing Virtual School Courses program prepares teams of participants to design and facilitate their own online courses for students. Through this training, participants are able to experience the online classroom as learners, gaining valuable experience necessary for effective online course design and delivery.
This program includes Designing Virtual School Courses, a semester-long online course in which participants are trained as Online Course Design Specialists and guided through the process of defining course goals, readings, activities, discussion questions, alignment to state and national standards, assessment, and strategies for building a learning community. This is a hands-on course, in which participants design their own online course based on local needs. Course participants are introduced to basic theories of online learning and to specific pedagogical approaches for exemplary online curriculum development. Participants also gain the necessary technical expertise to design effectively for the online environment as they are guided through the process throughout the course.
Course content involves online readings, multimedia, web-based activities and facilitated online discussions.
At the conclusion of the training course, your trained staff is eligible to run the courses they designed. ETLO provides the web hosting and workshop delivery software, through a partnership with Blackboard, Inc. Courses can also be exported into your compatible local course management system.
ETLO staff provide ongoing consultation and support to help you plan to make effective use of the program and successfully incorporate online courses into your curriculum.
During the year following the training course, your Online Course Design Specialists are supported in a national online Forum where they can share ideas, skills, questions, strategies, resources and techniques for effective design in the online environment with other trained online course designers and ETLO staff.
The online forum addresses specific issues related to implementing virtual school programs, including planning, policymaking, instruction and design. It also serves as a source of rapid answers to any questions.
Additional direct support and consultation are also provided by ETLO staff throughout the course delivery process.
Participants are eligible for graduate credit through a partnership with Antioch University Seattle.
