I created the original version of the Media Fluency course with the help of instructional designer Jonathan Klein about 10 years ago, when UW–Madison implemented a strategic initiative to expand our summer course offerings. Since then, hundreds of students have taken my class, and summer semester enrollment for the College has grown tremendously.

Jonathan is now the Director of the IDC, and we both thought it’d be fun to take a crack at overhauling the course structure, rhythm, and graphical interface for today’s digital learners. The IDC is a team of instructional designers and video and graphic content creators who collaborate with instructors in L&S to create new classes or enhance existing ones. For example, they can help with innovative new homework exercises or technologies to make L&S classes even better.

Teaching in the digital space requires instructors like me to stay current with ever-changing media and topics, so I have always refreshed the class content each time I’ve taught it. But I hadn’t touched underlying classstructure. One of the biggest things that the IDC folks and I did in partnering together was to reimagine the structure of how we are delivering the class to make sure we’re meeting the needs of today’s more sophisticated online learners. The IDC team created frameworks to help me re-think the course design and develop a new course rhythm.

One of the most important aspects of online instruction is to ensure you’re building what’s called “instructor presence.” My goal — even though we’re not in a face-to-face class — is for students to feel that we have built as much of a relationship and classroom culture online as possible. While I feel the prior version of the class did that, the instructional designers at IDC worked with me to take that to a higher level.

For example, you won’t find any online lectures in either of the two online classes I’ve developed, and that’s for a reason — because it’s hard for students to sit there and listen to a 25-minute videotaped lecture. They learn better through organized content, whether that’s delivered through the web pages within Canvas [the online learning system used at UW], video snippets that are maybe two to no more than five minutes long, interacting with each other, or other graphic elements.

It’s very easy for instructors to get into a rhythm with our existing classes. And while we always take time to enhance them for each new semester, this experience really forced me to completely step back from the class and reevaluate it, tear it apart and rebuild it from the bottom up. I can take all of that and apply it back to not just my online classes but to my face-to-face classes, as well.

This whole opportunity to create a new version of this class was a great experience. We were able to learn from each other and take something that we thought was already good and make it even better. I’m proud of that.