What are master courses?
A master course is a fully developed "consensus course," developed by a team of faculty within a department. These courses typically require minimal, if any, changes made to the structure, content, and assessments to be ready for online delivery. Master courses are managed by department and program faculty. Department chairs, the team of faculty course developers, course coordinators, and other department faculty work together to review, update, revise, and maintain courses. These courses represent faculty collaboration, to help ensure equivalent rigor, outcomes, assessments, and continuous improvement in online programs.
Instructional Design and Distance Learning recommends collaborating with an instructional designer during the design and development of master courses. If you're interested in using a master course model, please
contact Instructional Design and Distance Learning.
Key Features
- The master course holds the official course content, structure, and materials.
- It allows instructors to update or revise course materials within the master course and then copy content to the live courses (sections) for each semester.
- It ensures that all course sections are consistent in terms of content, structure, and updates.
- When "live" courses are created in Brightspace, the instructor can copy content from the master course into their live course, keeping things consistent.
Why use master courses?
- Ease of the course copy process for scalability and efficiency.
- Continuous improvement using feedback and research-based practices to improve for future offerings.
- Reduce the labor required to design and develop new courses each term.
- Help maintain consistency and quality for students when a single course has multiple sections and instructors.
- Easier to perform content and technical updates by faculty and department chairs.
- Provide adjuncts with a developed course requiring only targeted areas for personalization and customization.
- Simplify the Course Design Review (OSCQR) process.
Design considerations for master courses
The adoption of a master course philosophy involves an institution developing content for a single version of a course, which is then duplicated each time that course is offered. These single versions of the courses, called master courses, are created in alignment with institutional standards and programmatic outcomes in mind, ensuring quality and consistency across multiple sections of the same course.
- Don't include instructor information. Because a master course may be taught by different instructors over the course of its life, instructor-specific information should not be included. Alternatively, you might include a Meet Your Instructor template page with information that can be filled in after the course is copied and the instructor is assigned.
- Don't include term dates. One nuance of master courses is that the duplicated versions of the course may be taught across different terms. Because of this, specific dates should not be included.
- Be careful with time-specific material. Because a master course may be taught during different terms, be wary of time-specific assignments and assessments. These are course elements that refer to specific dates, or those that are designed to be relevant during a particular term.
- Include rubrics. One important consideration when it comes to designing master courses is that some sections of the course likely won’t be taught by you. One of the primary benefits of implementing a master course philosophy is scalability, so it’s common for multiple instructors to teach various sections of the course. Another benefit is data analysis; that is, departments can track student success data across multiple sections of a course, which can then be used to make systematic improvements to that master course. To ensure that this is done accurately, though, consider including rubrics for all summative assessments.
There are numerous benefits to using rubrics in the online classroom. They help make feedback timely, they communicate important information to students, and they can even encourage critical thinking. When it comes to master courses, though, rubrics also help ensure that the myriad of instructors teaching the course are able to grade summative assessments fairly and consistently. That way, regardless of which section of the course a student takes, they receive a fair and equal experience. This benefits instructors of your course, too, as they know exactly what the assessment’s expectation is regardless of whether they designed the course or not.
- Develop a course map. A course map is a document that provides a bird’s eye level view of your course, and illustrates the alignment between all of its components. Starting with your macro-objectives (what students will be able to do by the end of your course) and working through micro-objectives (what students need to be able to do to accomplish the macro-objectives), assessments, and instructional materials, a course map illustrates what students will do in your course, how their mastery of learning objectives will be mastered, and what learning materials they’ll use to gain mastery. By creating and providing a course map to these instructors, you illustrate the pedagogical organization and rationale of what they’re teaching. That way, they have an easy-to-read tool for familiarizing themselves with the course they’re preparing to teach.
- Review master courses periodically. The master course should be reviewed periodically to ensure that course content, technology, assessments, and learning activities are still meeting the needs of the students and faculty. Periodic review also ensures the master course is up to date with Buffalo State, SUNY, state, and federal regulations. Faculty updating the course should note when/what was changed as they make updates.
What does this mean for Course Design Reviews?
A master course will follow the same Course Design Review (OSCQR) process when it is first reviewed. All faculty who designed and developed the master course should be involved in the Course Design Review (OSCQR) process. After a master course completes its first Course Design Review (OSCQR), individual faculty who wish to use the master course as-is do not need to complete a Course Design Review for that course.
To support continuous improvement, master courses should engage in a Course Design Review every 3-5 years depending on updates made to the course design.
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