Your role and responsibilities
Like Paul Revere and his midnight ride, we're in the midst of a revolution—an educational revolution—with its beginnings in Boston. As an online educator, you're leading the charge for change, with edX as your weapon of mass instruction! As you begin your march forward, consider keeping the cadence outlined in the following best practices:
- Allocate sufficient time and resources; it will take time to conceptualize and create the curriculum and instructional videos for your course.
- Assemble a team of instructional designers, graphic designers, software developers, student volunteers, teaching assistants, videographers, and other skilled professionals to help you develop curricula, review exercises, and manage your course.
- Convert a typical 8- to 16-week on-campus course into several smaller units.
- Develop your curriculum in modules. Doing this integrates your course with the structure of edX sections and subsections, while aligning your instruction in a way students prefer to learn. This also makes it easier to revise, rearrange, or remove content when you update the course.
- Leverage edX's functionality to enhance the interactivity of your curriculum, while making it as rigorous as an on-campus course. Just because your course is online doesn't mean it should be less academically intense.
- Limit your videos to 3 to 5 minutes in length. According to StatisticBrain.com, the average length of time people will watch an Internet video is just 2.7 minutes. Therefore, shorter is better.
- Participate in the user community. There are three online resources: edX Author Support, the edx-code Google group, and the XBlock Google group.
- Replace your classroom lecture with a learning sequence. Interweave what edX calls finger exercises within a video lecture sequence. This translates into short assessments usually with one to five questions.
- Select subject matter experts for your team whose expertise you can integrate into your curricula. Have them review your material for accuracy and rigor.
- Teach in the same student-centered way as you've always done. Although edX is unique, the andragogical principles you've used when teaching adults and the pedagogical approaches you've used when teaching kids still apply.
Note
You can access edX Course Author Support at http://help.edge.edx.org, join the edx-code Google group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/edx-code, or participate in the XBlock Google group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/edx-xblock.
