Designing a high quality online course: A process driven approach using UML

In instructional design rubrics are used for standardized evaluation of an course. Rubrics are also used as guidelines for creating online courses, ensuring quality and for infusion of instructional design principles leading to desired learning outcomes. However, the main purpose of a rubric is evaluative, rather than creative. Its use during a course design may practically lead to loss of productivity towards the main outcome of course design. In our work here, we take a more assisting approach where the activities for the process of designing a course are better aligned with the rubric. Here the tools for course design that is a Learning Management System (LMS) and the design activities related to it are used so that educators can attempt to identify the best practice for each activity and create an effective design. The authors propose a generalized structure for each design activities based on the rubric criteria related to any specified activity. The authors use the tools of software engineering and structured design for this purpose. That is object oriented approach combined with Unified Modeling Language (UML) formalism is used for visualizing the static and dynamic aspects of the high quality online course design process.