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.

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