Essential design elements for successful online courses

Journal of Geoscience Education, Mar 2003 by Powell, Wayne

In Fall 2001, the instructor/designer again redesigned the Landforms of New York City module. Content was exchanged between the pre-existing maps module and Landforms of New York City module (e.g., discussion of geological maps was moved from the landforms module to the map module) in order to improve the logical progression of concepts. In terms of the structural design, the main change was the introduction of a third hierarchical level in the landforms module (Figure 3c).

Although the architecture style of the two modules was similar, the use of a third hierarchical level resulted in an alarming rise in student frustration and dissatisfaction. In the first three offerings of the course, student concerns with navigation continually decreased. Only 2 out of 12 interviewed students from the Spring 2001 class expressed any concerns at all regarding navigation. However, 5 out of the 6 students interviewed after the Fall 2001 offering considered navigation to be among the most problematic issues encountered in the website. Specifically, this frustration was focused on the landforms module as the following statements indicate:

1) "The landforms assignment was really difficult for me. I had to go to him several times to find out exactly what the hypotheses were, like differential deposition and all those things. It was kind of difficult for me to understand from the website. I kind of understood the rollovers but a lot of the requirements for the assignments were things that were located inside the website, that you had to go all over the website to search for, rather than having them clearly defined."; 2) "I just have a big problem with the navigation. I just felt there should be a navigation bar so you could constantly keep going back and forth. It was too much. I had to write down where I went and where I saw something and then I had to try to go all the way back there."; 3) There was a lot of back and forth. I couldn't follow it. I was like `where was that?'. I had to go back 16 times and go forward to try to find things. It was so difficult."; 4) "The worst part was that I kept getting lost. There were so many different places you could go to. I was like 'is it this one? Is it that one?'. I wasn't exactly sure where I had to go for certain things."; and 5) "The New York City land orms one was a little tricky in finding certain things like certain rollover images."

Interestingly, the instructor/designer appeared to have intuitively predicted the problems that would result from the addition of a third content level. In the Fall 2001 maps module, a third hierarchical level was added for only one topic, "Labeling Contour Maps". The "Maps Homepage" linked to the "Contour Maps Menu", which linked to the "Labeling Contours" pace. This page then linked to two additional pages, ' Choosing a Contour Interval" and "The Rule of V's". However, when designing the "Contour Maps Menu" Leveson described the nested links in the menu and even provided direct links to the third tier (Figure 4).