Reflection on Online Lesson Creation

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For me, getting this assignment to create an online lesson was a blessing in disguise. In my regular job I was going to have to take a face-to-face workshop about social media in the Common Core that I had done a few times and turn it into an online min-course anyway. So this assignment gave me the kickstart I needed to get that work done that I was going to have to do anyway. So I started transforming the content of my day-long face-to-face workshop into a three-week online professional development experience.

One of the concepts that I struggled quite a bit with from the beginning was trying to decide how much content was the right amount for this short online course. I had a full day's worth (7 hours) of content for the face-to-face course ready to go. But not all of that content translates well into an online course. So I decided to chink the content into three sections, or modules, and prepare approximately two hours worth of content for each module. Not that I care so much about the seat time. I am more interested in the mastery of the content. But having an approximate target helped me organize the content.

I have some experience creating online courses for adults. But I had never created one that was going to be reviewed by my peers and evaluated my my instructor. I found the readings and the evaluation criteria posted by Dr. Ching to be of great value as references for the mini course I was creating. More than once, I thought I was ready to submit this assignment only to review the criteria again and realize that I had not addressed something important. In the end, there turned out to be two great benefits of doing this assignment at this time. First, as I already mentioned, I was going to have to do this anyway to have this online course ready to go in September. Second, it was a great opportunity to actually put to use immediately all of the things we had been learning during this summer course. It is always important for my learning to have some timely, practical application for something I have been studying.