Professional task-based curriculum development for distance education practitioners at master’s level: A design-based research

Xiaoying Feng,Zhihong Yao,Guangxin Lu

doi:10.19173/irrodl.v16i2.2011

Abstract

<p>Curriculum development for distance education (DE) practitioners is more and more focusing on practical requirements and competence development. Delphi and DACUM methods have been used at some universities. However, in the competency-based development area, these methods have been taken over by professional-task-based development in the last decade, which has not been applied in the open and distance education area so far. Is the professional-task-based curriculum development approach suitable for open and distance education? This study aims to develop a Master Degree curriculum for DE practitioners in China based on professional tasks. Design-based research (DBR) was used and two cycles of DBR were conducted. Interviews and observations were used to collect data. In the first round of DBR, the authors find that professional-task-based development is feasible and could direct more closely to practical requirements of competencies, and that meanwhile, this approach has some disadvantages and limitations. In the second round of DBR, the approach was revised and results showed that the revised approach was much more suitable and reasonable for DE practitioners. Results of this study include: 1) professional-task based curricula for DE practitioners in China; 2) a curriculum development approach for open and distance education revised from professional-task-based development.</p>

Highlights

China has a huge DE market and along with this is a huge team of more than 300,000 practitioners and 30,000 teachers in the DE field in China
This study originated in the desire of developing a competency-based curriculum for MDDE and exploring an approach of competency-based curriculum development for distance education institutions
The Distance Education Curriculum Development for Adults (DECDA) model is derived from the professional tasks development (PTD) method but some significant revisions are made to meet the needs of ODL

Summary

Introduction

China has a huge DE market and along with this is a huge team of more than 300,000 practitioners and 30,000 teachers in the DE field in China. Most of these practitioners have had a Bachelor’s Degree but have very little idea about the principles and pedagogy of DE. Professional training is widely and urgently needed in the DE field in China. Further education on DE at the Master’s level is most welcomed by practitioners as a helpful way for their professional development, especially in on-the-job DE. As Hatcher emphasized, the biggest challenge of CBE lies in creating and implementing a CBE program (Hatcher, et al, 2013)

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion