ETR&D

In this paper, I report a critical case study of optimization in online course design within the context of higher education. Through ethnographic work conducted at a university in the United States, I studied an office of online course design, investigating how the office (comprising course designers, administrators, other staff, and the faculty they worked with) enacted optimization as a practical concern. The analysis revealed that optimization was not only the result of interactions between various actors, but also the influence of multiple artifacts that mediated the transformation of educational ideas into concrete learning resources, presumed to be calibrated for a specific purpose. However, since optimization was not a singular construct, course designers regularly found that optimizing along one dimension (perhaps to comply with a policy) caused damage in another (such as providing an engaging learning experience). Furthermore, the practices of course design tended to deemphasize matters purely associated with the quality of learning, while trending towards forms of optimization related to organizational efficiency: streamlining, standardization, reliance on quantified measurements, and developing mechanisms of interchangeability. I conclude by discussing how these findings complicate our understanding of course optimization as well as of course design itself, and what implications this understanding holds for the field.

The crucial role that student-related factors play in the effect of flipped learning has been emphasized, and self-regulated mechanisms have been integrated into flipped classrooms to promote students’ learning; however, self-regulatory skills are of no use if learners cannot be stimulated to utilize them. In this study, a differentiated self-regulated flipped learning approach (namely DSR-FL), which integrated differentiated instruction and self-regulation into a flipped classroom, was designed to support EFL students’ learning. Furthermore, a three-group experiment was conducted to evaluate the influence of the three different flipped learning models, namely the DSR-FL approach, the SR-FL (incorporating self-regulation into flipped learning) approach, and the C-FL (conventional flipped learning) approach. The results indicated that both the DSR-FL and SR-FL approaches were capable of promoting students’ class engagement, motivation, and perceptions of self-efficacy, in comparison with the C-FL approach; furthermore, the students who learned with the DSR-FL approach outperformed those who learned with the C-FL approach in terms of improving their learning achievements. This could be a valuable reference for teachers to promote EFL students’ learning.