Although it is an experiment, I did learn something from the practice of designing an online course. I have four points of my first experience of doing a pure online design.
Firstly, taking the learning outcomes into account at the very beginning of instructional design is very important, because it connects to various important elements such as assessment rubric and methods, developing activities, the logic of the structure and the choice of materials.
Secondly, getting used to an LMS is really a time consuming, not only to teachers, but also students. I believe an LMS has potentials to help create amazing courses that beyonds the capability of a traditional way, but it needs a hard work to achieve it. A teacher is required to renew some strategic paradigm to keep the quality of teaching online. On the other hand, the technological barrier might shut students out of the online learning, especially to adults who are not comfortable with digital techniques.
Thirdly, making clear navigation is a real challenge to a beginner. Even the platform provides the tools, limited knowledge to its functionality and the skills might leads the course to be a mess. This is why I have to consider seriously about learning outcomes at the beginning. That helps me to shift my scope to a student. However, even I have the student-cantered thinking, technological barrier is still one of the major challenges.
Last but not least. Platform does provide lots of tools and wider possibilities for instructional design. It also restricts a lot to teaching methods. Especially to the methods of presentation and communication. Face-to-face kind of teaching is almost impossible to achieve, I believe lots of information will be lost in terms of mainly text-based instruction. Also, teacher-student relationships and student-student relationships are difficult to develop either.
