Developing courses for delivery at a distance is a costly and time-consuming process that is often taken on by faculty members who are not skilled instructional designers or curriculum developers. Additionally, some institutions offering distance education courses may get caught up in a course development cycle that may be unnecessarily duplicated, especially at the general education undergraduate level. For example, the same undergraduate-level United States History course or Abnormal Psychology course might have five sections taught by two or three different faculty, each of whom has put in the time and generated the cost to develop his or her own unique distance education course.

Distance education program and institutional administrators realize this kind of scenario is not a cost-effective way to build distance education courses.

The Dallas County Community College District’s (DCCCD) Dallas TeleLearning division has created a relatively new set of undergraduate-level interactive telecourses, which were first launched in 2001 and are continuously being built today. These telecourses are offered through licensing agreements and are being utilized as a solution for offering rich, dynamic, and highly flexible undergraduate distance education courses in a way that can save on course development costs.

About Dallas TeleLearning

Before describing what’s inside these courses and how they are made, it’s important to provide some historical context about Dallas TeleLearning. The first telecourse created by Dallas TeleLearning dates back to 1972 when it produced a successful American Government telecourse that enrolled about 400 students. Since then, Dallas TeleLearning has grown into an operation that creates integrated telecourse learning systems that use multimedia, and much more, to deliver courses that are available in a variety of video-broadcast-mode, computer-based and internet-based formats.

Dallas telecourses are created at the 28,000-square-foot LeCroy Center for Educational Telecommunications, which opened in March 1991 on the DCCCD’s Richland College campus. Dallas TeleLearning eventually grew into a leading supplier of programming for the Public Broadcast System (PBS) Adult Learning Service. “We were the first producer to sign on with PBS back in 1981,” says Pamela Quinn, DCCCD assistant chancellor and president of the LeCroy Center. “Five of their top ten courses were produced by us.”

However, the PBS Adult Learning Service recently closed its doors in September of this year. “With them leaving the marketplace, we have stepped up our marketing efforts by increasing our staff,” says Quinn. “We are currently marketing and exhibiting at dozens of national conferences. We are also making many personal visits to colleges who are using our interactive courses.”

The interactive telecourses are a big part of Dallas TeleLearning’s new marketing efforts. “They have really taken off in the last year,” says Valerie Cavazos, Dallas TeleLearning’s national marketing manager.

What’s Inside An Interactive Telecourse?

Quinn calls these “the next level” of Dallas TeleLearning’s offerings. An interactive telecourse is an integrated distance learning system that includes:
 
Videos - Anywhere from 22 to 28 half-hour videos, depending on the course (typically one for each lesson).

Textbook - A standardized, well-known textbook supplements each course. “We partner with major publishers in the development of a course,” says Quinn.

Telecourse Guide - Ties the textbook and the video together; guides students through the course material; draws attention to focus points in the text and videos; includes practice test questions that are aligned with a test bank, overviews of each lesson, reading assignments, and activities that provide students with opportunities for application of knowledge gained.

Testbank - Multiple choice, short answer and essay questions.

Faculty Guide - Provides detailed information for faculty to facilitate the course, including a customizable syllabus, lesson summaries and implementation strategies, and how to use the various courseware formats.

CD-ROMs - This is the add-on element that makes these courses interactive. Each course can include anywhere from three to eight CD-ROMs that feature shorter videos, plus lesson activities, interactive exercises, and pre and post assessments.

Internet Access - Includes getting access to the same content that is on CD-ROM with all telecourse video portions accessible through streaming media.

Videos may be broadcast over a local public station, cablecast or aired over an instruction television fixed service (ITFS), or offered by videocassette or DVD for students to watch at their convenience. The courses are taught by an assigned faculty member who guides students through the learning experience, grades examinations, and administers grades.

The interactive telecourses currently available, along with the years they launched are:

2001
Choices and Change: Microecoonomics and Macroeconomics

2002
Shaping America: U.S. History to 1877
Becoming Physically Fit
Exploring Society: Introduction to Sociology

2003
The BEST Mentoring Experience (professional development for beginning educators)
Journey to Health: Mind, Body, Spirit (Introduction to Health)

2004
The BEST Beginning Teacher Experience
Voices in Democracy: U.S. Government

2005
Transforming America: U.S. History Since 1877
Accounting in Action: Principles I
Nutrition Pathways: Introduction to Nutrition

Interactive courses that are currently under development include:
Accounting Principles II
It’s Strictly Business: Introduction to Business
English I
English II
According to Quinn, about 60 to 70 percent of Dallas TeleLearning clients are community colleges, “and we have plenty of four-year schools using these.” Currently, about 800 institutions are licensing at least one telecourse.

How Interactive Telecourses are Made

Overall, interactive telecourses are extraordinary. These are extremely sophisticated learning systems that can cost up to $1.5 million each to produce over two years.

“The business plan we use for course development is very high end and detailed, with the end result being a product that can be used by a lot of institutions and then scalable within an institution,” says Quinn. “Multiple faculty can teach the same course.”

Courses are developed and produced by a faculty course developer contracted out on a two-year assignment who works with a team of script writers, producers, programmers, and instructional designers. Faculty course developers are typically hired from within the DCCCD, and they serve as content experts but do not appear in the videos (they also write the telecourse guide). The faculty course developer takes leave from his or her home institution and earns a salary identical to his or her regular job.

The video portions are documentary-style presentations based on interviews with scholars and experts from diverse backgrounds. The interviews are supplemented with voice-over narration and readings from primary sources. Where possible, first-person perspectives are provided. An impressive range of images and music is also included.
 
“We interview the best professors all across the country on whatever the topic is,” says Quinn. “When we are producing these video tapes, our crews are literally flying around the country. If we are interviewing someone who is an expert on the Civil War and they are based at the University of Tennessee, then we go to the University of Tennessee.”

The two-year course-production cycle starts with planning out the creation of course content and a production schedule over the first nine months. The next nine months are the actual production of the course, and the remaining six months are used for editing and pulling everything together, and adding the interactive elements that go onto the CD-ROM.

The academic integrity of the Dallas TeleLearning courses starts with a curriculum committee that is developed for every course. The committee approves every phase of the production cycle and ensures that academic objectives are met. Plus Dallas TeleLearning has a national advisory committee comprised of faculty members from around the country who meet twice each year in Dallas. “They fly in and our team here goes over everything with them, and we get feedback and input into whether or not we are doing the right thing, or if we need to change anything,” says Quinn.

An Instructional Designer’s Perspective

Janice Christophel is the lead instructional designer who plays a major role in the development of every Dallas TeleLearning interactive telecourse. She explains how the video elements of these courses are a big advantage, especially when one considers how modern students are becoming more and more visually oriented.

For each course, “we are essentially a video production house” comprised of the faculty course developer who is the content specialist, a video producer, and Christophel. In addition to spending “hours and hours hashing out what goes inside the video,” this team of three plans out and implements what goes inside the entire course. “Very few faculty members have the luxury to take advantage of all this,” Christophel says, adding that their philosophy centers around “letting the faculty do what they do best, which is teach, and letting us do what we do best, which is develop content.”

Giving Faculty More to Choose From

Christophel further explains how segments of these interactive courses can be used in fully online and blended courses, as well as in technology enhanced face-to-face courses, to enable faculty to increase learning effectiveness. “The lesson activities are a great way to provide a review at the beginning of a class; they are focused enough so that faculty can pick and choose what they they would like to assign,” she says. “The same is true for the telecourse guide. It is full of enrichment ideas and questions that students can use for guided reading. We also have a list of focus questions for the videos that help guide students as they go through the course.” An instructor can create assignments out of these questions and activities, having students expand on them for longer assignments.
 
The same holds true for the pre and post assessments. After students take these assessments either online or on the CD-ROM, they get a print-out that identifies what they have or have not comprehended. The print-out can then be shared with the instructor for more feedback. “What we have found is that immediate feedback is very helpful to the learning process, so we have built in these internal mechanisms that provide immediate feedback,” adds Quinn. “For students working at home this is a way for them to figure out whether or not they need to repeat a lesson, whether or not they need to review a lesson, or whether or not they have comprehended enough to feel comfortable moving forward.”

Production Bank Adds Value

Other features and elements of these telecourses can add more value to any distance or face-to-face course. Christophel refers back to the lesson activities and assessments, for instance, explaining how she can enhance lessons by drawing from an in-house “production bank” produced by a relatively large and sophisticated Dallas TeleLearning Information Technology (IT) Department.

As noted in an e-mail interview with Judith Makranczy, a Dallas TeleLearning web developer, the production bank is divided into the following categories: Flash, Graphics, Interface Design, Javascript, Audio/Video, and other technologies. Each category consists of objects that can be retooled to meet the needs of the current project. The category used most frequently is Flash, with Flash objects split into feedback quizzes and interactive activities that are designed to help students assess their progress as well as engage them in active learning.
 
Anywhere from one to three activities and quizzes are created for each lesson in a course. These activities and quizzes are basically recycled by altering their content, design and/or functionality to meet the needs of any given lesson provided in any given interactive telecourse. “New activities are created, as needed for the lessons, and added to the production bank for future use.”
 
All this is “simply a way for us to become more efficient and effective in our work,” adds Makranczy. “Instructional designers can look at the various items, determine which one(s) they want to utilize for each specific lesson and communicate that to the web developers. The production bank is also an effective way for IT to explain their capabilities and show what has already been developed and what can be retooled and reused for new courses under development, rather than having to recreate activities and quizzes.

“The web developers are skilled at graphic design and coding. When time permits, they design new quizzes and activities. For instance, a recent quiz developed by one of the designers utilizes 3D technology.”

Not Really a Course in a Box

“Although some people might see an interactive telecourse as kind of a course in a box, it really isn’t,” says Christophel. “It is more like a cafeteria. Instructors really have to pick and choose what they want to emphasize. What we tried to do is provide a whole platter of things that they can choose from. We are not trying to impose any particular way of teaching.

“The videos can also be used in a wide variety of ways. They are produced in segments, and the number of segments per course varies according to the discipline. With history and social science courses, for instance, we found that brief introductions work well, followed by three segments of maybe five to six minutes each, followed by a summary. For English composition (currently under development) we are finding that to have three narrative segments with a couple of transitional segments in between, along with a brief introduction and a brief conclusion, works best. All of these segments are things that can be pulled out and used by an instructor in a variety of ways in terms of what they decide to assign their students (both at a distance and in a classroom).”

Getting More by Offering More

Overall, interactive telecourses require significant amount of time to train faculty how to use them effectively, says Quinn. Using all the interactive elements, in addition to using all the half-hour lesson videos, increases the workload. But, at the same time, it is good for the student. So, if faculty can learn how to use all the CD-ROM enhancements, they can get more from the students, and the students can get more from the course. Hopefully, in the end, by keeping the students engaged, they are more likely to be retained in the course, as well as perform better.”

Efficiency, Scalability and Cost Questions

Quinn goes on to explain how telecourses can be a means for institutions to more efficiently offer undergraduate distance education courses. For instance, she refers to the League for Innovation in the Community College’s 2005 Information Technology conference she attended in October. “One of the big things that was being asked (at the conference) was why are we duplicating the development of courses? We still have a lot of faculty members doing their own thing, developing the same course over and over again.

“The Dallas TeleLearning courses can address some of the issues that are on the minds of educators everywhere. Maybe we should have one master course that is developed once, and developed well by multiple faculty, that also allows for scalability (such as increasing the number of sections offered).”

“You can ramp up pretty quickly if you have a well developed course in place,” she continues. “You can hire faculty and train them how to teach this developed course as opposed to hiring faculty and saying to them that they have to develop their own course.

“These are issues that are coming up everywhere because it is not cost effective to duplicate course development. Even if all I am doing is providing a faculty member with release time to develop a course, there is a cost involved. How many times are you going to do that? Plus, in the end, you may not have anything that is scalable, or the quality may not allow you to demonstrate if the course is actually working or not.”

Faculty Still Needed

Regardless of what faculty fears might come up when deciding on whether or not to license pre-packaged courses, Quinn says that “a good course by itself is not going to have a good success rate, especially at the community college level. You can’t put up a good course without it being facilitated by a teacher who cares and works hard.”

When it was suggested that these kinds of courses can be perceived as catalysts for making teachers facilitators as opposed to actual teachers, Quinn notes that “we have been moving from sage on the stage to guide on the side for a long time in education. This is really the application of that.”

She also explains that having instructional designers and IT professionals do the course development in partnership with faculty content experts results in higher quality courses. Faculty members know what they know, but do they know how to actually structure that knowledge into a high quality course? Can they structure a course that really guides the student through the learning process? The odds of producing high quality distance education courses are obviously increased substantially when faculty have top notch instructional designers and information technology professionals, as well as the most innovative tools and software available today, at their disposal.

Remaining Challenges and Issues

However, at the end of the day, many faculty are and have been apprehensive about teaching a course in which they had no input in developing. There are many attending issues in this kind of environment, including the fact that teaching these kinds of courses are typically not considered in faculty promotional decisions. Plus, perhaps it will be suggested that a teaching assistant should take over course responsibilities in order to save dollars, resulting in earning-power diminution for regular faculty.

Administrators of distance education programs obviously need to take a closer look at all these issues and challenges and come up with a middle ground that benefits both faculty and students. Faculty need to be independent and involved with sharing their knowledge; institutions need to be cost effective and more able to expand their offerings quickly; and students should be offered the best courses possible.
 
“I think distance learning on the web has grown up enough that we are now asking questions that we did not ask five of six years ago,” Quinn notes. “ And a lot has changed in the last several years. We have to ask if we are really doing the best that we can by having everybody develop courses?” In short, are distance education providers effectively meeting the challenges and issues concerning distance education and blended course scalability, cost effectiveness and quality? Only time will tell.

For more information, visit http://telelearning.dcccd.edu/