BCH 453/553, Biochemistry of Gene Expression, is a distance education course redesigned from an existing face-to-face course. DELTA staff worked with Dr. Cynthia Hemenway to reorganize the course materials into topics and modules, develop concept maps and diagrams to represent the knowledge structure, and create various online learning activities to support students’ conceptual understanding.
Instructional Challenges
- Help students develop a comprehensive knowledge framework of the concepts and principles taught through lectures.
- Shift students’ attention from simply memorizing the content to actively constructing knowledge by synthesizing and integrating lecture content.
Solutions and Highlights
Course Concept Map Animation: An animation was developed based on the course concept map of six major topics and their connections. Instructor provided narration along with the animation to explain the course content structure.
Moodle Navigation: The course concept map was used as the basis for the Moodle navigation by linking to pages for individual topics. Topic-level diagrams were developed to present the structure of and provide access to the subordinating modules and lectures.
Online Learning Modules: Online learning modules were developed under each topic to provide learning objectives, lecture videos, note-taking slides, online resources, learning activities, and quiz assessments.
Knowledge Building Activities: To engage students in actively constructing knowledge, they were encouraged to develop and share outlines of individual modules by synthesizing lecture content. Concept mapping activity and strategy were designed to facilitate study groups to collaboratively synthesize individual module outlines into topic concept maps.
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