Module 2, Unit 1’s Reflections (2)
May 24th, 2009 by Ed Leung
A One-Term Course Requires One Term to Develop… At Least
While I have never designed a course online or face-to-face, I have tried to prepare the teaching materials for a course I have never taught before. From that experience, I would say that, for each week of lessons (two or three lessons at 80 minutes each), I would need about the same amount of time (i.e. 4 hours) to prepare the teaching materials.
Translating that to Benoît’s scenario, assuming that the business writing course is a 3-credit, 13-week course, I would think Benoît would need about 13 weeks of preparation time working at 5 hours a week. At first glance, the estimate may seem a little conservative because university lectures are only 50 minutes in duration, generally speaking, so Benoît technically only needs to prepare the equivalence of 150 minutes of teaching materials per week, and yet he has 5 hours of time to do so. However, this estimation does not account for the additional time of technology-related work that Benoît must do, which I believe, in the developmental stage, would take substantially longer to put in place than a face-to-face course.
This is of course not to say that the development time is not worthwhile. Similar to a face-to-face course, where once the materials are developed, the subsequent implementation would require a shorter amount of time, I see the same thing happening to Benoît’s business writing course. Once the foundation of the LMS is in place, future delivery of the course should be much easier.
Finally, a “curve ball” that may be thrown in is the delay that Benoît would need to endure for technical support. If he uses WebCT/Vista and has to wait for the very sparce technical support, a little glitch can take him hours to fix. If using Moodle that is not supported by his institution, then the research he needs to do to find the solutions to any technical problems can take hours to deal with… In short, I think a term’s worth of time to develop a one-term course may even be too generous of a timeframe to give to Benoît.