This assignment is perhaps one of the most valuable assignments that I will have complete in my coursework at UF as it helped me gain the necessary skills to be an instructional designer and distance education developer. I learned so much in this course, and this assignment highlights my dedication to mastering the topic of distance education and best practices development in course design. I'm very proud of my final product and hope that I will be able to incorporate it as part of a real course someday to educate faculty at universities about accessibility so that academia can be made more accessible to all. 

 

The advantages of web-based learning and development cannot be overstated, especially when it comes to accessibility for minority and disabled populations to education. Distance education was born to serve the pourpos of increasing access to education way back in 1873, and I believe that web-based and online learning will make the demand for distance education grow exponentially in the next couple of years. This has already started to happen due to Covid-19, but I hope for the sake of minority and disabled populations that distance education will only rise from this point onward. Distance education is the only reason I'm able to pursue a university degree, and that is why I want to incorporate what I have learned at UF, and in this course, into the university system in Iceland so other Icelanders who do not have access to the same opportunities as I did to go to a university in the US, can still access educational opportunities. 

 

In the development of this module, and this course as a whole, I addressed the theory of distance education by using scaffolding and basing my development of the course goals, instructional materials, design, and performance objectives on constructivism, cognitivism, the theory of Transactional Distance (TTD), and the Community of Inquiry Framework. 

 

In my online course, learners (who are university faculty in Iceland) will, among other things, be given instructional material and tutorials to help them create an accessible module page in one of their distance education courses. They will start by learning about the basics of accessibility and slowly start incorperating what they have learned to real world situations, which alignes with constructivism. Moreover, they will have the support of an instructor throughout this process. After completing the nine modules in the course, learners will have a finished product that they can use in the courses that they teach. The constructivist theory aligns with my design for this course, as I'm facilitating a space where learners use the concepts in the class and apply them directly to the real world with my support and guidance. 

 

Although learners will not necessarily have a lot of interactions with each other, they will have interactions with me (the instructor) through lecture videos, weekly announcements, emails, and feedback on course assignments. These are just some of the few strategies that I have incorporated into the course to enhance teaching and social presence, which is very important in distance education courses and aligns both with the Theory of Transactional Distance (TTD) and the Community of Inquiry Framework. 

 

Furthermore, there are multiple other strategies that one can apply to the development of a given course to increase teaching and social presence in online learning, as those aspects are essential to an exemplary online course experience. This should be prioritized in any course development, but especially in the development of distance education courses. Among those strategies are utilizing discussion boards, peer replies, prompt video or written feedback on assignments, engaging lecture videos, weekly office hours, class group chats, peer review, introduction discussions, and one-on-one Zoom meetings. Moreover, if the teacher contributes to discussion posts themselves, it has the potential to increase the quality of replies from students and make the discussion more engaging for all. 

 

I have had a great experience developing this module and am excited to use the skills that I have learned in this course in my future work as an instructional designer.