Rapid-Prototyping an Instructional Design Intervention for Online Course Development

Abstract

Recent student protests in South Africa have called for a decolonized curriculum and for free higher education. As student protests intensified for fees to fall, the management of many universities mandated that online courses must rise in order to negate some of the negative consequences of these protests. However, many university academics started out as specialists within their own field, having little or no instructional design skills which are required to successfully develop such online courses. The purpose of this paper is to present academic participant perspectives of a solution, or intervention, that uses the rapid prototyping instructional design model to develop online courses in a quick and efficient manner. The intervention addresses three skillsets which are discussed in the paper, namely instructional design, online facilitation and educational technology. An exploratory design was implemented with descriptive statistics involving quantitative analysis of the collected data to determine the participants' perspective on their skills gained. An online survey tool was used to collect the data. Most of the participants felt that after completing the intervention they were able to systematically develop an online course (67%), were confident that they could formulate learning outcomes (75%) and communicate with students online (83%).