UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The book that two Penn State instructional design experts wrote as a guide for designing online courses has received an award from one of the country’s leading higher education organizations.
The book, “High-Impact Design for Online Courses: Blueprinting Quality Digital Learning in Eight Practical Steps,” was published in 2024 by authors Andrea Gregg and Penny Ralston-Berg, along with their colleague Bethany Simunich. The book, referred to as HIDOC, outlines the model they developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to differentiate the design for online courses from emergency remote teaching.
UPCEA, formerly known as the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, recognized the book with the 2025 Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature for works written about the theory or practice of professional, continuing or online education. UPCEA is a national organization for online and professional education.
Gregg is the director of learning experience design and an associate research professor for the Penn State College of Engineering’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Ralston-Berg is a senior instructional designer for Penn State World Campus. Simunich is the vice president of innovation and research at Quality Matters, a nonprofit organization that focuses on ensuring the quality of online and blended course design.
In writing the book, Simunich, Gregg and Ralston-Berg said they sought to provide a step-by-step guide for busy instructors who teach online and do not have much, if any, instructional design support. They said the book fills a gap, because existing design models offer broad frameworks, and they wanted to provide a practical guide with detailed tasks and prompts that instructors can follow to design a high-quality online course.
“Collectively, we’ve worked on hundreds of online and hybrid courses, and we wanted to synthesize our more than 65 combined years of working in online education to develop a practical, quality model that worked,” Gregg said. “The book is supported by research and integrates crucial concepts such as community of inquiry, high-impact practices and transactional distance. First and foremost, we want it to be used to design high-quality online and hybrid learning experiences.”
Gregg said the need for the model introduced in the book arose in 2020 when lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic forced in-person instruction to be delivered online through video conferencing technology, such as Zoom. The concern, Gregg said, was that emergency remote teaching was being misconstrued as online learning even though the two modalities require different design frameworks.
“It really brought to light that there wasn’t an easy-to-follow model for designing high-quality online learning experiences created with an online-first approach,” Gregg said.
The book provides an eight-step guide through the design process, from understanding learners and desired learning outcomes to being able to make continuous improvements. The book includes design worksheets with prompts to guide readers through the course design process, along with a final section featuring real-world scenarios that demonstrate how the HIDOC model can be applied to improve course design.
The award was announced at the organization’s annual conference in March in Denver. The authors will be recognized at UPCEA’s Summit for Online Leadership and Administration conference in July in Portland, Oregon, and present the design model during one of its plenary sessions.
“This award is especially meaningful because it comes from our peers,” Ralston-Berg said. “Our goal has always been to create a resource that truly supports others in designing high-quality online courses. Receiving the Frandson Award from UPCEA is an incredible honor and affirms that our work is making a difference.”
Gregg echoed the sentiment.
“UPCEA is an important professional organization in online learning with a wide impact, so it’s a huge honor to have won this award,” Gregg said. “I’m personally very grateful that they saw the value in this, and to me, that shows a recognition of the need for more applied texts that help others design quality online learning experiences.”
The award from UPCEA is the latest accolade the book and its authors have received.
HIDOC was also named one of the Outstanding Academic Titles for 2024 by the American Library Association’s Association of College and Research Libraries. The resource TeachOnline.ca named it a must-read book on online learning, and the eLearning Coach website recognized the book as one of 12 for instructional designers to read in 2024.