| | September - 201919Curate, Don't Create: Online Courses as Instructional ExhibitsBy Steven D'Agustino, PhD, Director of Online Learning , Fordham UniversityDirect instruction generally refers to the explicit teaching or demonstrating of content, processes, or skills. Students experience direct instruction as lectures, usually accompanied by slides. The instructor talks while students listen and take notes. Direct instruction is a common strategy in higher education due to the high student to teacher ratio, which can be a limiting factor when choosing an instructional methodology for large seminars. As a result, instructors in higher-education settings are most familiar with a teacher-centered methodology in which both students and instructors experience teaching as telling. The instructor tells students something; the students record this information, and sometime later students are assessed on their ability to recall this information.During the instructional design process essential to developing online offerings, faculty, in their dual roles as both content and instructional experts, select the teaching style, which ultimately determines how students will learn. Faculty comfort with direct instruction leads to a tendency to focus on content creation. Content in online offerings often consists of videos featuring the instructor and are designed to transmit information ­ to tell. There are instructional design advantages to teacher-centered videos. Being under the ownership of the content creator, they are reliable (they do not disappear from the Internet). Instructors are confident in the accuracy of the information, which lends a high level of perceived legitimacy. Instructor created videos are directly relevant. Instructors can tailor videos to meet specific information transfer needs. Finally, videos featuring the instructor lecturing replicate the traditional face-to-face instructional setting, a quality that may provide students with a sense of immediacy, the perception that their online instructor is a real person committed to their learning.Disadvantages to direct instruction videos of lectures appear in both the technical and instructional domains. If videos of instructor lectures will be the primary form of content, instructors and support personnel must create tens of hours of video. Often, instructors lack the technical skills to create videos on their own. As a result, creating videos for instructional purposes can be demanding, requiring time commitments from faculty (to write and perform scripts) CXO INSIGHTSSteven D'Agustino
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