ITC: 21 – Exploring the Design and Layout Standards for an Online Course Review

Have you ever driven a rental car or someone else’s car? Isn’t frustrating that you know the light switch is somewhere but you can’t find it. Or perhaps it starts raining and you need the windshield wiper but you can’t find it. This is how a learner feels when they enter a new online course. They know the discussion should be there but it is not obvious where. Repeated frustration can cause a student to throw their hands in the air and quit. The OSCQR rubric provides tips for successfully designing and laying out a course. The goal is to make the technology transparent to the learner.

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In this episode, we are continuing our exploration of online quality reviews. We are continuing to look at a specific tool called OSCQR. It is a rubric for reviewing online courses.

We will be focusing on the 13 Design and Layout standards.

OSCQR Standards

By attending to these standards, you can create a course that is easy to navigate and consume. These standards help ensure that students can quickly find necessary content. Your navigation structure must make sense and the layout must make it easy to read. The specific standards include:

16. A logical, consistent, and uncluttered layout is established. The course is easy to navigate (consistent color scheme and icon layout, related content organized together, self-evident titles).
17. Large blocks of information are divided into manageable sections with ample white space around and between the blocks.
18. There is enough contrast between text and background for the content to be easily viewed.
19. Instructions are provided and well written.
20. Course is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
21. Text is formatted with titles, headings, and other styles to enhance readability and improve the structure of the document.
22. Flashing and blinking text are avoided.
23. A sans-serif font with a standard size of at least 12 pt is used.
24. When possible, information is displayed in a linear format instead of as a table.
25. Tables are accompanied by a title and summary description.
26. Table header rows and columns are assigned.
27. Slideshows use a predefined slide layout and include unique slide titles.
28. For all slideshows, there are simple, non-automatic transitions between slides.

In this episode, I will discuss each of these standards.

Resources

Here are some of the resources I talked about in this episode:

• • OSCQR Rubric
  • OSCQR – Design and Layout Standards
  • Grammarly
  • Hemingway Editor
  • JAWS Screen Reader
  • ITC: 8 – What Is Universal Design for Learning?
  • ITC: 9 – How Multiple Means of Representation Can Help Your Classroom
  • ITC: 10 – See What Your Students Know Through Multiple Means of Action and Expression
  • ITC: 19 – Exploring the Overview and Information Standards for an Online Course Review
  • ITC: 20 – Exploring the Technology and Tools Standards for an Online Course Review
  • ITC: 22 – Exploring the Content and Activities Standards for an Online Course Review

This episode of the podcast was put together with the assistance of:

• Music credit: Purple Planet
• Editing assistance: Lost Recording Studio
• Sponsored product: Audible
• Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Adapted from: The OSCQR Rubric, Dashboard, and Process are made available by Online Learning Consortium, Inc. (OLC) under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC By 4.0).