Reflections on Designing and Delivering a DE Tutorial

Date: 02/07/2013

Topic:  Designing and Deliverying a DE Tutorial

Author-editor model, course team model and the "lean" model are the three most common approach to designing  DE Tutorials in practice.

Regardless of model, general principles of DE tutorial design and delivery include;

• Good structure: The organization of the course and its components must be well defined and understandable for the student;
• Clear objectives: Only when a course has clear learning objectives—unambiguous statements of what the student should be able to do as evidence of having learned.
• Small units:    The content of the course should be broken down and presented in small units, each of which might correspond to a single learning objective.
• Planned participation: A fundamental mistake made by inexperienced educators who become involved in distance education is to assume that students will participate
• Completeness: Course materials are far more than a textbook or informative Web site, and should contain instructional commentary, activities, and illustrations similar to those that would be provided, often extemporaneously, in a traditional classroom setting.
• Repetition: Unlike some other media applications, in teaching it is acceptable for the text, audio, video, or computer-based system to sometimes repeat key ideas and information (e.g., in online closure summaries) to provide reinforcement and to compensate for distractions and memory limitations.
• Synthesis: Important ideas expressed in the materials or contributed by students should be woven together (especially in summaries).
• Stimulation and variety: Through the use of interesting formats, content, or guests, course materials need to capture and hold the attention of students.Information should be presented in a number of different formats and by different media to appeal to varying interests and backgrounds of the students.
• Open-ended: Assignments, examples, and problems should, where possible, be open-ended to allow students to adapt content to their own interests or situations.
• Feedback and evaluation: Students should receive regular feedback on their assignments and general progress in the course