May 6, 2019, by Joe Bell

Creating a Distance Learning Course

Diane Bowskill and Alison Mostyn were presented with the challenge of converting a campus based course for a cohort of remote learners.

How did they do this? By deconstructing the existing campus based course materials and, in collaboration with digital learning experts in the HELM team, reimagining the teaching outcomes and student journey within the digital domain. The result has been a success that demonstrates how remote learning can provide better option for learners, open up new markets for educators, and can be fertile ground for thinking ‘out the box’.

The existing campus-based course materials provided the basis for the syllabus, but Diane and Alison took these apart and distilled the subject matter and course purpose down to their essence. With this they set about creating new teaching materials for the remote learners, which was not merely a case of converting formats but envisioning an effective experience for the remote learning, often in different modes to the original content, and collaborating with the HELM team to discover how the vision could be realised.

The proof is in the pudding, and so far remote student success has been comparable between the new remote course and the traditional campus-based version, with the remote cohort slightly achieving marginally higher.

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