Effective 02/2022

For those who choose to engage in online asynchronous instruction, following are expectations and timelines for development and review by an instructional design team that includes the faculty member and others. Course content remains subject to approval by the academic department and Curriculum Development Committee.

Each course must include:

• Use of the Albright College Online Template.
• A syllabus, which is due at the end of the development cycle. This includes completing a “What’s Due When?” or similar document and Instructional Equivalency charts.
• Instructor Introduction, Course Overview, Course Tour, Syllabus Orientation videos along with student introduction and Q&A forum.
• Rubrics or specific grading criteria for all major assignments and writing assignments.  Rubrics and specific Grading Criteria are most helpful to students when performance levels for each criterion is explicitly stated.
• All pages, assignments, discussions, videos, quizzes, etc. must be made accessible using current WCAG Guidelines and the Albright College Accessibility Policy.
• Each module includes the following items:
  • A text/audio/video module overview laying out the overall theme or main ideas of the lesson
  • A list of module-level objectives along with their associated course-level objectives.  Designed in a conversational/student-centered tone which communicates the objectives in a meaningful way for the students
  • Varied required and supplemental resources, to include three to four types (PowerPoint, textbook, website, journal articles, instructor video along with other videos with closed captioning, handouts)
  • Instructor video with transcript and/or closed captioning (Best practice says no longer than 15 minutes. If there is a need for long video clips, breaking it into topical clips.  Best practice recommends including some type of assessment in videos
  • A discussion forum, or other means of student-student and teacher-student engagement in each module of the course that shows regular and substantive interaction
  • Varied assessments to address the objectives (writing, project milestone, formative/summative assessments, discussion)  Create assessments that span across multiple parts of Bloom’s Taxonomy
  • An ongoing assessment, with multiple steps, milestones or submissions for students to receive feedback on their progress toward the final assessment objectives.  This can be achieved in many ways and up to the course developer on how to best implement in the course
• Course must include 15 hours of instructional equivalency per credit.
• Courses must meet federal guidelines on Regular and Substantive Interaction (July, 2021)

Courses should consider:

• Varied supplementary resources to help students further their learning, but that are not directly tied to assessment
• Facilitator guide for faculty teaching the course instructors other than the course developer teaches the course.  Additional student-to-student engagement besides the discussion forum (posting projects for review, group projects, etc.)
• Interactive learning elements (Flipgrid, H5P, etc.)
• Open Educational or Low-Cost Resources
• For courses that are heavy on publisher material, additional materials and class activities to support the publisher material.
• In these courses, personalization is emphasized.   Examples include icebreakers, peer review assignments, weekly review sessions, pre-tests, providing timely feedback, etc.

(Note:  electronic copies of the former versions of the policy must be maintained within the unit, department, or division)