How Scalable is Your Online Course?

Online course scalability—the degree to which an online course can be designed to accommodate larger or more sections of online courses without sacrificing quality—depends on how expert-dependent the course is, its delivery methods, and the amount of resources available to support the unbundling of the instructor’s roles, according to Suzanne Dunn, director of product design at the R. Jan LeCroy Center for Educational Telecommunications of the Dallas County Community College District.

In general, graduate-level courses are more expert-dependent than undergraduate courses. Courses that are expert-dependent are less scalable than introductory-level courses. “If it’s a graduate-level course, obviously the course content is very dependent on that instructor’s expertise. That’s why students take graduate courses from a particular instructor—they want the benefit of [the instructor’s] particular areas of research and publishing. At the undergraduate level, when you’re talking about intro-level courses where the content is fairly static, it’s less instructor-dependent. It’s not dependent on anyone’s areas of expertise or specialization. English 101 is the same across most institutions. There are just certain elements that you are going to have to cover in that course. Those are the courses that are probably the most viable as far as being scaled, and those are typically your largest enrollment courses,” Dunn says.

Courses that are delivered using cohorts are probably not as scalable as open-enrollment courses. In other words, the less self-directed a course is, the less scalable it is, Dunn says.

With adequate support from the institution, online courses—like face-to-face courses—can accommodate large numbers of students. One of the challenges of offering high-enrollment online courses is finding ways to unbundle the instructor’s roles. With adequate institutional support, such things as technology support, student advising, and grading could be performed by support staff rather than the instructor, giving the instructor the time to focus on facilitating learning, coaching, and dealing with content issues.

Making this adjustment can be difficult for some instructors, Dunn says. “The online learning environment is a real paradigm shift in education, and you can’t do the same thing online that you do in the classroom. All of a sudden, you’re leveraging technology to have a one-on-one relationship with students. In the classroom you have a group relationship with students.”

Dunn encourages instructors to be open to this paradigm shift to meet a broadening variety of learners’ needs. This may mean working in a team environment to develop courses that can be taught by multiple instructors. “It’s difficult because in the old paradigm there’s a great sense of ownership, but that changes in the online environment. There needs to be an openness and flexibility and willingness to embrace that change. The real focus is on meeting the needs of a changing group of learners. When you’re using technology to develop a course, you take yourself out of the picture. The course doesn’t depend on you coming to a classroom, standing up and giving a lecture. In developing a technology-based course, you’re the content expert, but your particular delivery, personality, style, and off-the-cuff anecdotes you bring to a classroom probably will not be visible in the online course, except through the interaction you have with the students,” Dunn says. That’s why it’s important to free up the instructor’s time.

For instructors who are new to the online classroom, making the shift to focusing solely on instruction can be confusing or threatening, Dunn says. “But I think you’ll find that the more experienced online instructors, as their enrollments grow larger and larger, actually welcome that assistance, and they understand the importance of being able to focus on interacting with students.”

Contact Suzanne Dunn at sdunn@dcccd.edu.