Chapter 4: Creating Online Lessons

Sleight, D., Reznich, C., Yelon, S., & Williamson, J. (2003) Creating online lessons: A faculty development seminar series. Med Educ Online 8(7), 1-7. http://www.med-ed-online.org/f0000061.htm


The authors describe a seminar series developed and implemented to teach medical faculty to create educationally sound, well-designed online instruction. Medical students in family and community practice are often geographically dispersed for their clinical placements. Online education is a valuable tool for bridging the distance between their placements and their academic center. Participants in the workshop were taught basic instructional design concepts and focused on developing a complete online lesson to develop skills which could later be applied to the design of an entire course. Similar to the UofT workshop, faculty were provided with learning design templates based on the skills and knowledge to be developed. Contrary to the Gold article, this workshop did not attempt to expose faculty to different theories of learning. Rather the content focused on the principles of instruction and the conditions required to elicit certain kinds of performance. What differs from the approach taken at UofT, is that this group of educators also included training in administering the technical aspects of web site and course shell development. This aspect of the course focused on content layout, navigational and compatibility issues using commercial webpage design software. Of particular importance is the changes that were proposed as a result of the course evaluation. Based on the feedback obtained from participants, the authors decided future iterations of the workshop would concentrate on pedagogical issues and that it would be better for support staff to attend to the technical issues of online course development. They also determined that the structure and timeline for the workshop and senior administrative support were important considerations in undertaking such training.

This article serves as a valuable resource as it describes a faculty development program delivered in a medical education context (same participants as the UofT workshop) and provides an alternative method for delivering this type of training. The lessons that were shared by the authors convinced us not to include technical training as part of our online workshop.