IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

University of Missouri-St. Louis Addresses the Growing Need to Develop Online Courses

Keeta Holmes created Online in 9 to be a cohort-based, online course design process that has met with considerable success.

In 2012, Keeta Holmes, director of Learning Innovation and Design at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, addressed the school’s growing need to develop online courses. Her effort, known as Online in 9, answered the need for faculty trained in the best practices of instructional design and, in particular, online pedagogy. “We recognized the need to provide training in the technology tools, depending on which tools the faculty needed to meet their course goals,” says Holmes.

As with other universities across the country, the faculty at the University of Missouri-St. Louis participate in many professional development activities each year, but none are quite like Online in 9. “We do all those other professional development things,” says Holmes, “but this is different from those. Online in 9 is cohort-based and runs over an extended period of time. We’ve intentionally designed it to be product-based. Participants are required to be working on a specific course that will be offered online, so they can’t just sort of come and dabble and sit in the room and learn. They have a course that they’re incrementally building each week. And, at the end of nine weeks, their course is completely designed.”

Holmes characterizes the course design process on campus prior to Online in 9 as “the wild west,” describing how many professors would actually develop their online courses as they were teaching it, a nightmare for professor and student alike. “That’s like teaching, while running on a treadmill, while alligators are chasing you,” she jokes.

But it’s easy to see that her analogy isn’t really far from the truth. The idea of helping the faculty understand that they needed to build their courses before they were offered was, in reality, culture changing on campus. Until recently, faculty members self-selected whether to participate. But, due to its overall effectiveness, it’s now a requirement.

The Online in 9 team is full of instructional designers who facilitate the program. There are two versions: a face-to-face version that meets every week for two hours, as well as a fully online asynchronous cohort. 

“Each week,” Holmes describes, “we model the best principles of instructional design. In the beginning, we help (faculty) understand what teaching online is. We give them experiences. Then we immediately start building their courses by starting first with what their goals for the course are and what the learning objectives for each module or unit will be for their course. Once we have that structure, and their vision for the course in place, we start just tackling each week thereafter. Some weeks we’ll be focused on collaborative learning and group projects. Others are focused on assessments, different ways to assess students.”

One of Holmes’ objectives is to help faculty realize that there are a variety of ways to assess students to meet the objectives. The course also explores accessibility and packaging content in bite-size pieces, so that no matter who enrolls in the project course, it’s ready for them. Each week has a specific focus, such as lecture recording, giving feedback, being present in the course or packaging content with assignments. According to Holmes, some people take an assembly line approach to building their course, while others prefer to think about it module by module. “And we allow that,” she says. “We aren’t dictating what they produce to us, as long as they’re working on their course.”

One element of the program that excited the administration was the idea of bringing faculty together to promote a culture of sharing their ideas about teaching online across disciplines. Like many institutions, the University of Missouri-St. Louis is full of silos. Much of the faculty didn’t even know each other, and the course has allowed them to meet and establish a conversation about teaching online.

“There are some fun byproducts that came out of the faculty’s participation in Online in 9,” explains Holmes. “Some members even began doing research together. It’s also served as kind of a formal vehicle to help support faculty as they’re designing their courses. The process ends with a formal course review. We go through the course from basically soup to nuts to really thoroughly review it and make sure it’s meeting the identified instructional goals, that everything works as expected, and that it lines up with the syllabus. And all of that is done before the course is offered to students.”

In the end, the results of Online in 9 have been impressive. “We’ve been doing a lot of student surveys and student focus groups,” says Holmes, “and the feedback we’re getting is that students are saying, ‘These courses are great. Why can’t the other courses be like that?’ Student success rates are increasing. Retention rates have increased because the students are happy. They have what they need. It’s structured. They know what’s expected of them. They don’t have to go searching through this course. They don’t feel isolated and lonely. In our program, we do a lot of emphasis on student-to-student interaction and study groups. And that has increased interaction and engagement in the courses in really cool ways.”