Bad Instructional Design (2:13)

Thomas: Many times when you're called in late to the design process, you encounter not only bad instructional design, but no instructional design. What you can do in those situations depends on a number of things. One is how much time is left before the course is delivered. One is how open the instructor is to suggestions. Sometimes an instructor has taught a course for 20 years, and the instructors think that they know how to teach that course, and they're not going to take any suggestions, and they're not going to implement any newfangled technologies. In that case, you do your best to try to get some things in there that will help the course and help the students out. If the instructor is, however, willing to listen and is open to suggestions, there is an amazing amount that you can do in a short period of time, particularly if the instructional designer has had past experiences of dealing with situations of this nature.

Hightower: Sometimes we have to develop a course quickly. We get a course that is given to us by a dean or a chair of a department, and they say to turn around this course in a month or two weeks. We have to have this course turned into a Web course for a certain semester. We don't have six months or a year to develop a course. In those cases, we have an initial consultation with the instructor and try to see where they're at. If they have a lot of time in the next couple of weeks to devote to it, we can really put together a nice course. We can put up a Web site, narrated PowerPoint, alternative ways for them to deliver their materials. If the instructor is not cooperative, if the instructor does not want to do a distance education course and they are mandated to do it by a higher-up administrator, we do the basics. We make sure they have a nice-looking Web site, we make sure the syllabus is up. We just don't do as much. We can't do as much. We're limited by time and how cooperative the instructor is with us.