Creating Online Learning Experiences: A Brief Guide to Online Courses, from Small and Private to Massive and Open is an open book with a Creative Commons license attached to it. Matt Crosslin and a number of other authors pulled together a very useful book. As I was reading this book, there are specific chapters that I will pull out of it under the Creative Commons license and turn them into a course for Jamestown Community College faculty.
As I noted, this is an open book and can be found as a digital book on the Mavs Open Press. I elected to purchase the book as a paperback edition. This book is 214 pages long and arranged in 14 chapters.
The first four chapters provide an overview of online courses, basic philosophy, and processes and timelines that one may need for building online courses.
I found the most useful parts of the book beginning with chapter five. Crosslin et al. discussed what was necessary to make an effective online course. This included choosing effective activities, putting together effective content, and creating effective online assessments. They also touched on open educational resources. Open educational resources are currently a focus at Jamestown Community College.
Because this book initially focused on MOOCs and then morphed into a book about different online courses, there are elements specifically geared towards MOOCs.
They addressed a number of interesting topics including mapping learning pathways, gamification and game-based learning, augmented and virtual reality, and mobile learning. While they only touched on them, it was nice to see these topics being introduced.
Throughout the book, the authors pointed to research that supports each concept. They also liberally shared links to additional resources that would help an instructor learn more about a topic. Additionally, they curated these links in the back of the book, for a quick reference. I thought it was great that they included full URLs also in the printed version.
Having switched over to Chicago style for the book I wrote, I found that reading a book with APA style was rather clunky. For future additions of this book, I would suggest the authors move to Chicago to help readability.
I would definitely recommend Creating Online Learning Experiences for new online instructors to help them develop better online courses. As I noted above, I will take specific chapters and convert them into an email-based course highlighting key components of the book. This was a surprising find and I enjoyed it as an instructional technology geek.
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