Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

While serving as the Economics department chair, Don Meyer stepped in to teach a previously vacated course – ECON 3180: The Economics of Medical Care. Meyer began teaching the course in the spring of 2014 and successfully worked to make it part of the Western Essentials Studies curriculum. Although a self-admitted "technical dinosaur," Meyer slowly began to introduce online elements to his class over the years. First, through online quizzes and later by shifting from purely face-to-face instruction to a hybrid model with just one in-person meeting a week. However, when COVID-19 struck in 2020, necessitating a need for all instruction to move fully online, Meyer knew he needed a little extra help.

WMUx Instructional Design teamed up with Meyer to complete the formal online course development process. Meyer wanted to ensure that the online experience he created was comparable to what students had received in their former face-to-face or hybrid class. Specifically, the Economics of Medical Care course focuses more heavily on policy than quantitative data, so he needed to find a way to promote thoughtful conversation and dialogue in an online format.

The instructional designer Meyer worked with listened to his needs and recommended he try single thread discussions, where students post their responses to a prompt or question in a format that looks similar to a bulletin board. Using online threads as a learning tool was new to Meyer and he was initially worried about what the execution might look like. However, Meyer found that his instructional designer "had a great background and education on why you'd want to utilize certain tools over others." She explained why it would help accomplish his objectives and showed him how to set up a single thread discussion for his course.

Don Meyer, Economics Department Chair

Soon, Meyer was using the online single thread discussion tool to foster conversations around big questions like, "Should and how may the U.S. reform its health care system?" and "What should government's role be in providing health care?" Empowered by this initial success, Meyer built a long-standing relationship with his instructional designer, meeting weekly for well over a year. Over time, he worked with the Instructional Design and Instructional Technology teams to create intro videos for all his course modules, discover relevant and engaging resources to augment his content and learned how to utilize tablet software to better convey material in his master level courses. Meyer continues to collaborate with the Instructional Design team to add effective feedback mechanisms into his course design.

While face-to-face instruction will always be his preferred way to teach, he has come to think of online course design as a "fun challenge." Meyer recognizes that to design an engaging online course, there is a great deal of education required, and he is not afraid to ask for help. "I so appreciated my instructional designer because she would constantly bring me new ideas and was always giving me suggestions of how to tweak my course. I always approached my challenges as step one, how do I do it? Step two, how do I make it better?" Meyer is the perfect example of how enthusiasm, a willingness to learn, and an openness to trying new things can truly enhance the learning experience for WMU students.

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