Eerie Poe Course Shows Creativity of Designer, Faculty Team to Engage Online Learners

Illustrations created by Brysen Taylor, Global Campus

 

Lissette Szwydky would teach her Edgar Allan Poe course in a haunted house if she could.

Instead, Amalie Holland and others on the Global Campus team helped her build an online course with visual elements evoking the gothic creepiness and macabre themes that characterize the American writer's work.

Szwydky, associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas, and Holland, an instructional designer, worked several months this year to bring to life the course on adaptations of Poe's writing. Szwydky is teaching the fully online, 40000-level course this fall as part of the bachelor's degree in English. The English bachelor's degree is offered both online and on campus.

At the beginning of the course development process, Szwydky said, Global Campus staff asked her, "If you could do something really cool with this course, what would you envision?"

"I think we created a visually interesting course," she said. "To the basic course, we added a lot of iconography. The students have really responded. One is an art history major who said, visually, the course is great to look at. It also helps with the organizational structure."

 

Decorating the Classroom

Brysen Taylor, a visual designer on Global Campus' media production team, created black and white illustrations to conjure a spooky feel to the course in Blackboard Ultra, the university's learning management system. Banners with weird and nightmarish scenes taken from Poe's works add sinister elements. The standard Blackboard file folder image was replaced with a spectral or ominous image corresponding to the case study for each week's lesson. Holland used eerie pictures of book covers and illustrations wherever they added to the otherworldly feel Poe induced.

Szwydky recommends faculty members spend time thinking about the look and feel of their online course and that instructional designers encourage instructors to add visual interest.

Visually engaging aspects help students learn the content, Szwydky said. They notice it, and it sets the course apart from their other classes.

"Blackboard is the classroom," she said. "It's the same as decorating your classroom. If I could, I would teach Poe in a haunted house."

 

Support Services

Global Campus provides support services to U of A colleges in the development and delivery of online degree programs and courses and workforce development programs. In addition to instructional design services provided by 11 instructional designers under manager Ken Muessig, Global Campus offers learning technology support, media production services and assistance with financial administration, recruitment and marketing. Several services are designed specifically to assist students studying online, including online student liaisons and coaches, online orientation and an online student forum.

Each instructional designer is assigned to specific departments or colleges. New courses are typically developed during three cycles of 12 weeks each per year. Between developing new courses, instructional designers assist with updates of existing courses.

Sometimes a course is developed the semester before it starts, but ideally the instructional designers want more lead time, Holland said, especially if the instructor and designer team wants to use the services of the media production team to create videos or other illustrations or animations, such as they did in the Poe course.

 

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe, a 19th century American writer, is best known for his dark, gothic tales and for pioneering the modern detective story.

"This was a course where we knew early on we wanted to get the media team involved in the process," said Holland, who is also a former English teacher. "It's Edgar Allan Poe. It's going to need illustration; that goes without saying.

"It's a multifaceted course in which students create versions of Poe's stories or poems in different media forms," Holland continued. "They could use animation, film, audio ... there are all these different ways it can be presented. Students investigate and analyze different ways the story could be approached in these modalities."

Szwydky's research centers on adaptation of literature across all types of media, including textual rewrites, video, graphic novels, music, animated live-action and dramatic readings. Szwydky has published extensively on the topic including in her book, Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (2020), which takes a historical approach to adaptation and transmedia storytelling.

"The point is not only to study the stories themselves but how stories inspire later artists," she said. "We use adaptation as a way to help us interpret the story in a number of different ways. That is not typically possible unless we are looking at it in different ways and engaging with it. Stories permeate every aspect of life and culture. No media exists that doesn't include storytelling.

"My research looks at how stories move through time. Without adaptation, stories die," Szwydky continued. "They will fade out of cultural memory if not adapted to other media. That's the main thesis of all my research."

From her experience as a former English teacher, Holland described Poe as one of those writers who is always present.

"Everybody read his stories," she said. "Everybody remembers reading them as a kid or seeing a play. This course really looks at ways his work has seeped into our culture."

The course also looks at ways certain technologies have portrayed Poe's work and affected readers' understanding of it, Holland said. Each week, students look at a different case study with examples from the 19th century through the present. For the final project, students can create their own adaptation of a Poe work, she said, and may think of something that fits their own planned career path.

 

Quality is Vital

Holland shares a goal with faculty members she works with at the U of A. They strive to create high-quality, online courses that engage students for better learning.

Holland enjoys her job, in part because there's enough variety to keep it compelling, while the consistency gives her room to keep improving. She's worked as an instructional designer for the U of A's Global Campus for 2½ years and previously worked in other positions at the U of A.

"I love that everything is a little different every time, different class, different instructor, different students, but also enough the same so that you can keep trying to perfect what you're doing, keep iterating," she said. "It's different enough to keep it interesting."

Szwydky began teaching at the U of A in 2013. She became familiar with online teaching at her former position with Penn State University, but since then her only experience came during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"All educators need to become competent and get experience teaching online," Szwydky said. "The pandemic taught us we need to figure out ways to be comfortable in an online format. We need to connect with a different range of students."

The U of A offers more than 100 online programs, including degrees, licensure and certificates. Online programs expand access to higher education by allowing people to remain in their home communities, in their jobs, with their families while studying.

"I appreciate how Global Campus helps to accommodate a broader range of students who have other responsibilities that prevent them from coming to campus," Szwydky said.

 

Continuity and Improvement

The course development process is designed to create a course that can be easily handed off to a different instructor if necessary.

"Any good instructor is going to analyze what is in front of them and pivot throughout the semester," Holland said. "Instructors are the subject matter experts; I'm the fairy godmother who tries to make it happen. They know the content. My goal is to find the best ways to get the information they know – that I don't know – across to students. Instructors like having a sounding board, not necessarily specific questions. They don't want explicit instruction, but they need someone to talk through the process and give them ideas.

"Ken (Muessig) says we have to be like silly putty, take on whatever role the person in front of you needs," she said. "Some need handholding, while others want to be given the space to work and know they can reach you when needed. You have to be the steady presence that shifts to best help the instructors."

In their team effort, the workload is divided between academic content provided by Szwydky and technical and structural expertise by Holland. However, Szwydky noted the benefit to her of Holland's experience teaching English in the past.

"Not every professor has the advantage of working with someone of the same background," Szwydky said. "I rely on her perspective about what this kind of course would be like online."

She also has learned from Holland ways to use new aspects of Blackboard Learn, the university's learning management system.

And, more than halfway through the semester, she had not seen any major changes she would like to make to the course, but she would like to record mini video lectures to supplement instruction on some concepts. Hearing from a couple of students helped her, she said.

"It's very difficult for us to understand the student experience, and if they can provide specific feedback about what they had trouble with and ask us to clarify, we can create additional material. That is great constructive feedback for faculty."

 

Breaking Down the Process

Holland begins the process by sending a survey to the instructor, asking questions from a broad perspective before they begin writing course objectives.

• What do you want to accomplish with this course?
• What do you want students to walk away with?
• If there were no limitations, what would you want the student experience to be?

Next, Holland gives instructors a worksheet that breaks lessons down into parts such as the introduction, objectives for what they want to accomplish with lessons, what students need to be reading, and how to demonstrate what they have learned. Instructors typically spend three weeks on this phase.

"We usually meet weekly with them taking their big ideas to the next level," Holland said. "We are still not super granular; we're not working on quiz or discussion questions yet, but we know what topic the questions will be on."

From an empty development shell supplied by Blackboard Ultra administrators, instructors copy and paste links to materials and textbooks and upload videos of their lectures.

"That's where we build it out," Holland said. "For the first two to three weeks, we go into further detail. That gives instructors a chance to see how they want it to look, how it flows, before they go ahead and build the rest of the course."

Once an instructor has taught a class, evaluation is the next step, she said.

"They can review analytics including grades and student engagement," Holland said. "They can see what worked and what to do differently."

An instructor can tell whether students are opening files, for example, and the media team can create an infographic that's easier to access than opening and watching a video, she said, which was what happened recently in a communication course.

 

Time Invested

For Szwydky, online course development was much more work than designing a course to teach in person, she said. She spent much more than a hundred hours on the content. Online course development requires frontloading all of the content before the semester starts, she said.

"When you are teaching live, it's very different," she said. "You have the first few weeks planned out, you see how the students are responding and you adjust along the way. Teaching online is a lot of work, especially if you're new to it."

Szwydky is proud of what she, Holland and the Global Campus media production team came up with. All the work was done online except for once when she came to downtown Fayetteville to record a script for one of the videos in the Global Campus production studio.

 

Online Instruction

"Good teaching is good teaching," Holland said, regardless of the format of a course. "For us, constantly being on the lookout for new ideas is important."

The instructional designers attend professional conferences, do a lot of reading and share what they learn with each other, Holland said. Several of them host a podcast called the Pedagogy Toolkit with information for instructors who teach online.

"We also have 'hall talk' where we go over all of our new ideas," she said.

Ultimately, the teamwork aims to provide the best learning experience possible for students. Learn more about online programs. 

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