November 9, 2009

Hello Everyone,



For those of you that are completing your developments, the peer review process starts today. Here is a link to the questions that the peer advisors answer when they go through your courses. If there is something that you would like to have them look at specifically in your course please let me know and I will pass the information onto them! Thank you to all of you for your hard work this quarter!

There are also those of you that are just beginning your developments for the Spring 2010 roll out (crazy that we are thinking of spring when it is only November!). Please go through the blog and familiarize yourself with all of the great resources that are available here for you.


Additionally, for both groups of developers I wanted to give you a few resources today that would be helpful to you no matter where you are at in the development process:


Here is a training on how a GEN course looks when it is completed This is a 5 minute "walk through" example of an introduction level course and how the announcements, readings, assignments, discussion boards, external links and exams are identified.

Here is a training on how to determine if the course calendar matches up with the grade center I often give the feedback that the course calendar doesn't exactly match the total in the grade center. If you are unsure of what I mean by this feedback please see this 2 minute "walk through" example.

Here is a link to the Top 100 Tools for Learning in 2009. This list is compiled by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies and is well worth the look!


Have a great week!


Amy

February 17, 2009

Good Morning Developers!

All of you that are developing a course during this round of development have done online development before so rather than focusing on the basics of development for the upcoming blog posts, I will be discussing more advanced topics and will do my best to give you ideas to spark your development creativity.

To start off with a few announcements:

• If you haven't returned your contracts yet, please return those to me this week.
• The 25% completion deadline is on March 9th
• I will be going on maternity leave during this round of development. When I go on leave you will begin to receive updates and announcements as well as blog entries from Heather Thomton-Stockman
• We will need to create both 12 week and 10 week masters for every course

I also wanted to bring an article to your attention regarding the use of laptops in lecture based classrooms. Although you are designing courses primarily for online use, most of your shells will be used by residential instructors as well. The article titled "Can I have your half-attention, please?" discusses whether or not laptops are creating a culture of 'constant partial distraction'. As we work more and more in a technology centered educational environment, this is an important topic to know about: http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2009/02/06/can-i-have-your-half-attention-please/

In your design of your course think about whether or not it would be beneficial for instructors to have students access your course during a lecture or if it would be best used as a supplemental tool for residential instructors. Is there a way you can add items to your course shell to make it useful during a lecture situation?

Have a great week!

Amy