1. Programme and course content writing and design
We can:
1.1 develop new fully online or blended courses from basic curriculum documents (i.e. ‘from scratch’)
1.2 adapt an existing face-to-face course, designing an exciting, interactive blended or fully online offering, or
1.3 collaborate with subject experts (as much or as little collaboration as the lecturer desires) to design courses in a variety of content domains.
Each of these options may entail:
2. Online course production
Course options 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 may be rendered as:
– text versions in MS Word or pdf, for conversion by a third-party service provider or providers to a SCORM or Moodle package, or
– interactive SCORM or Moodle packages, which, with the addition of required videos, audio or multi-media, will be suitable for uploading on to any of the learning management systems (LMSs) used in SA universities.
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Background
Up till the mid-1980s, thinking about teacher knowledge tended to focus either on teachers’ content knowledge or on their pedagogic knowledge. In 1986 Shulman introduced the helpful idea of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), which ‘exists at the intersection of content and pedagogy’, rather than viewing them in isolation. PCK represents ‘the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular aspects of subject matter are organised, adapted, and represented’ in teaching, with an eye to rendering specific subject content teachable as well as accessible to learners.
Since the late 1980s successive waves of new digital technologies including hardware, software and the internet, have exerted an increasing influence on teaching and learning, and on pedagogical content knowledge. Some two decades after Shulman, Mishra and Koehler pointed out how these new technologies have the potential to change not only the nature of teaching and learning, but even the nature of the subject content itself, as well as the social context in which learning takes place.
One example which they provide illustrates how subject matter itself can be changed by the application of technology. A particular software programme designed for teaching geometry
"allows students to play with shapes and form, making it easier to construct standard geometry proofs. In this regard, the software program merely emulates what was done earlier when learning geometry. However, the computer program does more than that. By allowing students to ‘play’ with geometrical constructions, it also changes the nature of learning geometry itself; proofs by construction are a form of representation in mathematics that was not available prior to this technology. Similar arguments can be made for a range of other software products" (Mishra & Koehler, 2006: p.1028).
In online and blended learning, three types of knowledge converge: pedagogical, content and technological knowledge (PCTK, often referred to as TPACK). The new digital technologies require us to reconfigure our understanding, not just of technology, but of all three components (Mishra & Koehler, 2006: p.1030).
The design capabilities of the Proximity Online course writers and educational designers combine content knowledge (in Education-related subjects broadly), pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge (understanding the range and affordances of today’s online technologies), as well as the intersection of these three in course development.
We prefer to leave the more technical hands-on production (videos, audio, multi-media) to trusted experts in these fields. These experts may be in your institution’s media production unit, or they may be freelancers or in external production houses that we trust and will be happy to recommend.
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Benefits
Constructing an academic course that is effective on all levels typically requires the services of at least a subject matter expert, a writer, an instructional designer, a graphic designer, a language editor, possibly an illustrator, a videographer, a voice-over presenter and audio technician, a multi-media developer and the educational technologist who combines what each of these specialists produce into a package that can be loaded on to an LMS, such as Blackboard, Sakai or Moodle. This is what contributes to the relatively high cost of online course production.
However, we have been able to assemble a multi-skilled team who are all first and foremost thoroughly grounded in educational theory and practice as well as being experienced writers and designers of highly-rated learning material. In addition, the power of today's software brings within our reach much of the combined functionality of the diverse specialists mentioned above, with the exclusion of video, audio and some multi-media production. We are thus able to keep development costs to a minimum.
Institutions which have their own technical production units, or well-established arrangements with external service providers, may choose to use only our course writing service up to the point of delivering a polished course in print form (MS Word and pdf), i.e. 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3 above.