Of all the instructional design projects I have worked on, fully online physical education has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding. This project has enabled well over a thousand students to fulfill our university’s physical education requirement for graduation. Many of those students were away from the university while completing the course, either for personal reasons or on school-related travel, like study abroad or internships.
The project, which began in 2013, became the eventual topic of my PhD dissertation. This blog post provides a high-level overview of the project. If you are interested in more details you might want to check out chapter 3 of my dissertation, a design case that explores the project in detail.
The major takeaways from the design case were:
- A major component of the vision for the course was for students to meet heart rate goals during each week of the course. This pushed the course beyond being only conceptual in nature and made it a challenge to create for fully distance students.
- In 2013, the technology to accurately and reliably monitor heart rate via a ubiquitous consumer device (e.g., Fitbit, Apple Watch) wasn’t quite there yet. However, technology eventually caught up to our vision.
- APIs are the fundamental building blocks of customized technical solutions on the web. As described in the design case, Fitbit’s open and well-documented API made it an easy choice once their technology was able to reliably monitor heart rate during exercise.
- Working with a subject matter expert who is a truly collaborative partner is fundamental to the success of innovative instructional design project.
Since the design case I linked above focuses almost exclusively on the design of the app used in the course, I’d like to take the opportunity to expand on some of the more technical design and development aspects of the app in future posts.