31.5: A Story of Online Instruction

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An example of the online course continuum type is a project for the Naval Officers Training Centre in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Working with their development team, our task was to create an online course for Naval Reservists to prepare them for the hands-on portion of their training. The target audience was university age, and the expectation was that they would complete the online course over the school year.

The course content itself was predetermined, but the way in which it was structured and combined with multimedia assets was up to the project design team. Due to budget constraints and the adoption of a phased approach to incorporating online learning into the Reservists suite of course offerings, online facilitation was confined in this pilot phase to ensuring access and troubleshooting technical issues. The assessment was based on a standard multiple-choice examination conducted face-to-face at Reservists locations nationally. It was essential that participants complete the course and pass the examination to participate in hands-on training. So while this example was not conducted inside a postsecondary institution, it did include a formal evaluation aspect in which grades were assigned.

Given these parameters, the design team needed to address any potential motivational issues that could affect the learning. They also designed media elements to support the learning. The resulting courseware was a mix of instructional strategies enhanced with multimedia components such as opportunities to check progress and learning, short video clips of on-ship procedures, audio files of past course participants and instructors, scenarios and case studies depicted via video or still images, matching games, etc.

The resulting courseware provided the students with flexible access to multimedia-enhanced content in an organized, predetermined manner and allowed the teacher to use the limited face-to-face time for other content considerations.