Content in WVU Online Courses

Instructional content includes all materials used in the teaching of a course—syllabus, quizzes, exams, assignments, and discussions. For WVU Online courses it is that, but with a few more specifications.

It is the content that provides

• context,
• information,
• guidance to students about what to focus on within the subject, and
• a path to successful accomplishment of the intended learning outcomes.

Instructors who work with WVU Teaching and Learning Commons always get this list of points as they prepare their online content for WVU programs:

• PowerPoints are not online course content. They are in-person visual aids. The PowerPoint is not the content — the talk is the content.* 
• If you are the subject matter expert who is developing the course, your content should be your original work.
• Borrowed or copied segments must be credited, and permissions to use those segments must be documented. Likewise, you must provide the source of each image so readers can see its copyright status. 
• Videos should be short (5-15 minutes at most) and must have either closed captions or a transcript. Closed captions generated automatically in YouTube are not acceptable until you edit them to correct spelling and add punctuation.
• All audio files must also be accompanied with written transcripts.
• The State of West Virginia now requires all online classes to meet the standards in the Quality Matters Rubric for Higher Education. 
• Federal law requires all online materials be made Accessible to those with disabilities. This includes HTML pages, MSWord documents and PDF documents as well as any text created inside the eCampus LMS. All required documents from outside sources must be accessible, too.

Any surprises in there?

How much content should a lesson, or learning module, have?

Consider this: WVU Faculty Senate requires 45 contact hours (in-class time) for a student to earn 3 credits. Homework and other activities that students do outside of class are expected to total twice that amount of time.

This means that in a 1-hour course, like this one, students are expected to spend 15 hours class time with an instructor and have 30 hours work outside the classroom. It is not always clear what "time with an instructor" means in a virtual classroom like eCampus, but often course reviewers will consider the instructor's original written content as part of that figure.

We know students don't read word by word so there's really no point in adding any more words to your copy than is necessary. Our goal is to get them to read what they DO have to understand and do to meet those learning objectives.

Note: You will find when you begin developing any kind of course that you know a whole lot more about the subject that you can stuff into one course. As you write what some might refer to as the "online lectures" it becomes critical that you stay on track and not veer off onto related topics that don't apply to the course outcomes and objectives.

If you'd like to see the process WVU Online's Teaching and Learning Commons instructional designers follow when working with faculty, you may download  the stages in course development that goes into one learning module (PDF).