Today's undergraduate students often must balance coursework with other personal and professional commitments. While much attention has been placed on effective strategies for helping students manage workload, curriculum optimization has been largely overlooked. In an analysis of a university lower-level online STEM course, a course redesign…

Curriculum mapping can be used to visualize, align, and assess the ability of online degree program graduates to meet stated learning outcomes (Rawle et al., 2017). Though consensus has yet to be established on standardized outcomes for curriculum in some disciplines (e.g., criminal justice), educators remain in charge of preparing current and…

Individualized approaches to online course design benefit faculty in numerous ways. Using a "concierge" model approach, this paper describes the working principles and steps used in course development. The general approach directly addresses many inherent problems with instructional design processes, which often highlight discrepancies…

This literature-based study seeks to identify best practices for adjunct faculty participation in the centralized design of online courses. Literature from 2014-June 2018 relating to faculty participation in course and curriculum design was identified through a search of the ERIC database. Following further examination, nine studies were selected…

Given the increasing numbers of students who choose to learn online, educators should understand the conditions necessary for student success in this environment. Previous studies have documented that student engagement is essential to student learning, retention, persistence, and satisfaction. In this descriptive qualitative study, we sought to…

While competency-based education is growing, standardized tools for evaluating the unique characteristics of course design in this domain are still under development. This preliminary research study evaluated the effectiveness of a rubric developed for assessing course design of competency-based courses in an undergraduate Information Technology…

This case study describes a collaborative process by various teaching and distance support units to create and run a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in the subject of Leadership. Whereas typical collaboration arrangements in the literature involve partnerships of various teaching and support units, the collaboration of course developer,…

The course design and development process (often referred to here as the "production process") at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU-Worldwide) aims to produce turnkey style courses to be taught by a highly-qualified pool of over 800 instructors. Given the high number of online courses and tremendous number of live sections…

Cognitive theory suggests more interaction in learning environments leads to improved learning outcomes and increased student satisfaction, two indicators of success useful to program administrators. Using a sample of 359 lower-level online, undergraduate business courses, we investigated course enrollments, student and faculty time spent in…

Previous studies conducted on dropouts within online courses have found inconsistent factors affecting attrition. A literature review was performed, focusing on eight main studies. These studies were performed at both national and international universities. The methodology, participants, research question, and results varied by study. Overall,…