Ever feel like you're on a slow boat to nowhere, searching for an overweight Marlon Brando in pyjamas? No? I didn't think so, but we'll use that mnemonic to bridge to a brief bang your head against the concrete anecdote from this review cycle.
One of my remote profs, who's taught before, had her course ready...uhm, sort of. She had students emailing her assignments, emailing written work, and creating a written summary of their discussion posts, and emailing that too! And emailing back a word doc version of a quiz. I *thought* her previous course actually had these types of activities in there, but maybe a ghostwriting ID'er somewhere helped her out the first time. Regardless, we got it back on track to actually utlize the technology at hand....
Another one had about 12 discussion threads per module, multiple multiple starter questions, all in all the Bataan Death March of online courses. Turns out she was pretty much orphaned between the time my predecessor left and I arrived, so she just "made stuff up" by herself as she went along. Eek!
On the bright side, we found a way to condense down the course info section using a tabbed table layout trick. Kudos to Herr Prusch for that gimme....it does sort of open the door mentally to really seeing the limitations of the current Notes driven CMS, and the "wouldn't it be nice if.." design postulations that could provide some visual cueing as to *where* in the labrynth of learning the student is...
Friday, August 26, 2005
Are we having fun yet?
Well....so much for timely posts. Let's backtrack a bit...
Week of Aug 15, aka the Week from Hell. Thu Aug 18 was the "go live" date, meaning that this is when students can actually access their online courses. Each day up to Thursday consisted of reviewing courses, fixing issues within courses, and answering last minute questions. Lots of graphics editing for POL 311 (converting PPT slides to gifs). Ensuring that the new courses were ready to go. Dealing with BufApp01 crashing on Thursday as profs worked in the 11th hour to update their courses. Also dealing with the unplanned effects of a save option change that SLN rolled out - into Summer courses that were still live and wrapping up for grading. Oh, joy...a 2 1/2hr HyPO committee session that is now gaining traction. Proposal to solicit Hybrid courses should be going out in the next few weeks, after a bit more tweaking.
Week of Aug 22: Some time out of the office spent in new faculty orientation sessions. A good opportunity to explain 1-1 what we do, talk about SLN, etc. Also trying to orchestrate an unplanned last minute online course request, due to an unplanned instructor vacancy :-)
This took on several rather strange permutations, ending in our first Hybrid course being approved on the fly :-) Luckily, this course is the first cousin of an existing online course, the instructor as a deep history teaching SLN online, as well as 17 years in the department he's being asked to teach in. The challenge will be to try to help him with the design on the fly.
Note: those curious about how hybrid/blended/mixed mode courses are positioned and listed should go take a look at UCF:
http://learn.ucf.edu/1courses/1types.html
Oh yeah, somewhere in the past two weeks we met to assemble the COCID planning team and assign roles. I'm webgeek, and I'm also assistant talent wrangler.
Week of Aug 15, aka the Week from Hell. Thu Aug 18 was the "go live" date, meaning that this is when students can actually access their online courses. Each day up to Thursday consisted of reviewing courses, fixing issues within courses, and answering last minute questions. Lots of graphics editing for POL 311 (converting PPT slides to gifs). Ensuring that the new courses were ready to go. Dealing with BufApp01 crashing on Thursday as profs worked in the 11th hour to update their courses. Also dealing with the unplanned effects of a save option change that SLN rolled out - into Summer courses that were still live and wrapping up for grading. Oh, joy...a 2 1/2hr HyPO committee session that is now gaining traction. Proposal to solicit Hybrid courses should be going out in the next few weeks, after a bit more tweaking.
Week of Aug 22: Some time out of the office spent in new faculty orientation sessions. A good opportunity to explain 1-1 what we do, talk about SLN, etc. Also trying to orchestrate an unplanned last minute online course request, due to an unplanned instructor vacancy :-)
This took on several rather strange permutations, ending in our first Hybrid course being approved on the fly :-) Luckily, this course is the first cousin of an existing online course, the instructor as a deep history teaching SLN online, as well as 17 years in the department he's being asked to teach in. The challenge will be to try to help him with the design on the fly.
Note: those curious about how hybrid/blended/mixed mode courses are positioned and listed should go take a look at UCF:
http://learn.ucf.edu/1courses/1types.html
Oh yeah, somewhere in the past two weeks we met to assemble the COCID planning team and assign roles. I'm webgeek, and I'm also assistant talent wrangler.
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