Showcase and Module 10 Peer Review - See you at 9:00 a.m. on Friday!

Showcase and Module 10 Peer Review - See you at 9:00 a.m. on Friday!
(Note: This is the same information sent via email.)

We are rapidly approaching the Showcase date! August 12th seemed so far away when we started this whole process and now the big day is almost here. This message will outline the remaining things you need to do to complete the workshop.

Finish all of the Workshop assignments. Be sure to look at the assignments tool to see if you have had assignments that were returned to you for corrections. You will not be paid your stipend for the workshop completion component if all assignments are not submitted and successfully completed by 5:00 p.m. on Monday, August 15. So review your grade book, look at the assignment tool, and let us know if you have a question about the assignments.

Complete the Peer Review Assignment. Module 10 is open and you will see further instructions and learn who your peer partners will be when you access that module. The peer review provides the opportunity for you to have another set of eyes on your course from someone who is in the workshop just like you are. You also get to take a look at someone else's course to learn from them and to provide your feedback. The peer reviewer will have a checklist that is a derivation of the rubric that will be used later by the three faculty evaluators that will review your course for the quality seal. Further instructions on sharing the peer review, the form you will use, and the process will be available in Module 10.

Attend and present at the Showcase. The eLearning Course Design Workshop Showcase is Friday, August 12 from 9:00 – 1:30. This is a required meeting so please plan to spend the day! The CPDE Design Team is excited to have you share some of the hard work and creative effort that you have put into your online courses this semester. To prepare for the Showcase, please review the following frequently asked questions.

When and where is it?

We kick off promptly at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, August 12 in the Will Rogers Room in the Nigh University Center. Plan on staying until 1:30 p.m. We will have time after the Showcase for last minute questions.

So what should you do in the Showcase?

Focus on one or two things that you have done in your course that were the most helpful, exciting, interesting, unique, etc. Maybe you incorporated avatars? Are you having the students build a blog? Did you find great outside resources? Did you do cool things in SoftChalk? Did you identify a process that made it easier to convert your existing material? Are you using videos (self-made or from the web)?

The Showcase is a time to inspire and teach others based on your experiences and ideas, so what in your course will do that? You will have seven minutes to wow us with the very best of what you have done!

So what should you NOT do in the Showcase?

Don’t go over your seven minute timeline. There will be a countdown clock to help you manage your time and we will ask you to wrap up if you go over your time limit. You will not have time for course tour showing all of the elements of your course (and that gets tedious anyway). And while your subject matter may be very interesting, this should not be a talk that is focused on your course content. It is all about the instructional design!

Who will be there?

All of your eCDW peers are required to attend. University administrators, including department chairs, deans, and the Provost, have been invited. Feel free to invite colleagues who may be interested in online course design. If you will be inviting someone, let us know no later than noon on Tuesday, August 9 by noon so we can adjust food counts if needed.

What will you gain from the Showcase?

We can guarantee you will leave the Showcase with at least one great idea for how to improve your online course. This is a time to celebrate success.

Many of you have already set up appointments for next week, but if you need help, we are only a phone call or e-mail away. We know this is a stressful time and want to support you as much as possible. Let us know what we can do to help.

We are excited about the courses you will be submitting for review and are looking forward to seeing you and the highlights of your courses on Friday!

Warm regards,

Tracy, Liz, Andrea, and Milissa


Course Showcase Agenda

9:00 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. Welcome & introduction of guests

Explanation of remaining tasks:
> Complete content for entire course
> Submit course for evaluation
> Contract/payment information

9:15 a.m. – 10:10 a.m. College of Liberal Arts (6)

10:10 a.m. – 10:4 0 a.m. College of Business Administration (3)

10:40 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. College of Math and Science (4)

LUNCH
(Advanced Workshop Presentation – College of EPS)

12:00 – 1:20 p.m. College of EPS (9)

1:20 p.m. -- 1:30 p.m. College of CFAD (1)

Program evaluation/wrap-up

How do we know what they know?

This is the final content module of the eLearning Course Design Workshop.This module will help you consider how you will assess your students to determine if they have mastered the learning objectives you set forth for the course. While the Assessment tool in WebCT just relates to exams and quizzes, there is a whole wide world of ways to assess your student's learning. From project based learning to service learning to using technology in creative expression, you can make sure students are learning in creative ways that will help them become masters of the content. You can also use the assessment results to further improve your course.

So what is next? Once you complete the activities for Module Nine, you will focus on perfecting your course. Review the UCOnline Course Quality rubric again looking for the places where your course needs improvement. Add discussions. Add content. While we encourage you to be creative and add challenging content, some of that "icing on the cake" may need to take a back seat while your finish developing the core of your course. You have about eight weeks until your course will be opened for peer review.

The remaining Module 10 is the peer review. We will assign your peer review partners at the beginning of August. So congratulations on nearly finishing the coursework. Now get busy finishing up that course!

Andrea and Tracy

Let's talk!

What a fantastic group of faculty we have in this workshop! You are all keeping up and showing great progress in your course shells. This module is about communication. It is easy to take for granted the amount of information we share with students in the traditional classroom. Those before and after class conversations, the discussions that evolve during class and the details we normally provide about special projects and assignments. The same information must be shared in the online classroom. We will specifically address the crucial information students need to get started in an online course and talk about several communication tools.

Let's not forget about the importance of adding your personality to the online course. We talked about several ways you can use multimedia tools to reflect your personality in the second group meeting. What appeals to you? A simple html page such as Notes from Dr.....? A weekly blog such as the Designovations? A quick video using your webcam? A podcast using the Wimba Podcaster tool? A green screen video?

NOTE: The green screen mini session is scheduled for July 7. Watch the design workshop email this week for a signup sheet (to select specific recording times) and more information.


Additional Communication Tools

Voice Thread for educators: http://ed.voicethread.com/

UCO Broncho Blogs: Quick Guide http://www.uco.edu/technology/trc/guides/blogs-wikis/Blogs-Quick%20Guide.pdf

Blogger (free) http://www.blogger.com/

Twitter (free) http://www.twitter.com/

pbWorks (free and paid) http://www.pbworks.com/

Social Media/Networks
• Ning (free) http://www.ning.com/
• Facebook (free) http://www.facebook.com/
• Delicious social bookmarking (free) http://www.delicious.com/
• Flicker (free) http://www.flicker.com/
• MindMeister-Mind Map (free) http://www.mindmeister.com/

Video Sharing
• Youtube EDU (free) http://www.youtube.com/edu
• Teacher Tube (free) http://www.teachertube.com/

Taking Your Seventh Inning Stretch

 Many of you are celebrating summer and enjoying some baseball. While I am not a baseball fan, I can appreciate the seventh inning stretch where you take a short break and stretch your legs before getting back to the action. With Memorial Day this week, we hope you stretched and relaxed and are ready to get back into the content of the workshop! 



Courtesy of AJ Wms from flickr.com



The seventh inning also marks the beginning of the ending of a baseball game, and we are truly at the beginning of the ending of the CPDE content portion of the workshop. This module will introduce you to some ways to convert existing course content for online use. Many of you have already discovered these tools, so for the exercises, feel free to just point us in the direction of an existing bit of content. Don't create fake new content for this lesson. If you have not already created content, just follow the instructions. We have some participants who are fast tracking themselves through the workshop and getting ahead of our standard pace. That is great, and we don't want to hold you back.

After this module, we have another on communication from the designer's point of view and another on assessment. Module 10 will not be opened until shortly before the Showcase. We are getting to a point in the workshop where the focus will turn from the workshop participation to your content creation and course design. We are seeing good things so far.

As a side note, your course icons and headers should be the way you want them and loaded in the course at this point. If that is not the case, contact your lead instructional designer and we can work with the media guys to get things worked out.

The Design Team, other than poor Milissa who we left all alone to answer questions, just got back from the Distance Learning Administrators conference in Georgia. We learned a lot and have been contacted by three universities to share more about how we do things at UCO. You are part of a great program and other schools are very jealous and/or inspired by our level of faculty interest and engagement. Thanks as always for all you do.

Try to squeeze in a baseball game or some other summer fun, but keep working on your course! Let us know if you get stuck or have questions.

Regards,
Andrea and the CPDE Design Team

Visual Design and the Coming Checkpoint

First, you all did a great job with the Fair Use discussion. There was considerable debate, and the idea that copyright and fair use is not a clear cut issue definitely came across. Check back on the Fair Use discussion on Tuesday to see the wrap up post. We will let the last minute discussion posters have their chance to share their ideas, and then the answer will be revealed. Of course, it is tough to say there is a clear answer when it comes to copyright, but we will give it a shot!

Visual design is the focus of this week's module. There is some good research that says that the look of an online course is important to student perceptions of the course and ultimately even student retention. This module will help you think of ways to communicate information to your students in a visual format. You will also get to add your course header and icons this week. It is amazing what a difference these make. Most of the icons and headers are designed by Jesse Warne, our Instructional Multimedia Specialist. Jesse is a graduate of UCO's graphic design program and does a great job on the icons. They will be located in your images folder. More information about how to add them is in the learning module.

Finally, we are approaching our first checkpoint on May 25. The checkpoint is a time when we report your progress to your chair and dean. We want them to know if the course is on track to be ready for evaluation or if you are behind in the course design and activities. For many of you, this will be a great time to share how far you have come. For some of you, we will have to report that you are not on track. Please do your best to get all assignments completed if you are behind.

As always, the CPDE Design Team is here to help. We will be out of the office on Monday, May 16 for a CPDE retreat and will be presenting at and attending the staff conference, Road to Greatness, on Wednesday. We will also be out of the office at the Distance Learning Administrators conference Monday through Wednesday next week with the exception of Milissa. Please be patient with us if our response time is not as fast as it has been. We hope to all have access to e-mail and the workshop at the conference, but if you have pressing issues, please let us know this week if possible.

Thank you for your dedication and time. Now that grades are in and summer has officially begun, we are looking forward to seeing those courses come together!

The CPDE Design Team

Mini-Session, Accessible Course Design, and Some Cool Tools

Last week you really developed the flow of your course. You should have a vision of where you want your course to go and what you need to do to achieve that vision. It might still be a little foggy and in the distance, but the scafolding of your course is ready to go!

We also have a mini-session this week. The session will show you how to create online videos and use social networking tools for online learning. It will conclude with some ideas for assessing online student performance. This is a full session, but you will leave with some great ideas to take your course from ordinary to extraordinary. The session is Wednesday, April 27 from 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. in the CPDE Faculty Lab (NUC 322).

This week we turn our attention to Universal Design for Learning and Accessibility. You will learn a lot in the module, so I won't spoil it here. This is a very important module and your activities for this module will be a little more challenging than last week's from a technical standpoint. But don't worry! Pay particular attention to the resources listed on the Application Activity Summary (4.1 in the Table of Contents). You will find tutorials and step-by-step guides to walk your through.  

This week also gives you a bit of a breather on focusing on your course design. If you need to spend a little more time to see that vision through the fog, now is a good time to think about the learning objectives, those heading titles, and all of the consistent elements you want to include in each module and/or week.

If you finish with this week's activities early, jump in and start writing some lessons or experimenting with some cool tools. Just to get you started, here are a few tools you can try:

 

An Online Scrapbook/Visual Book Tool

http://www.mixbook.com/edu

An Online Magazine Creator

http://www.issuu.com/

Tool that Allows Interactive Voice, Video, Phone Call, or Text Responses to Instructor-Posted Media http://voicethread.com/ (UCO has a pilot for this running now. Contact your lead instructional designer if you want to upgrade the free account to a Basic account.)

A Great Wiki Tool

http://pbworks.com/content/edu+overview

An Online Blog/Poster Tool

https://posterous.com/

Using the Internet for a Web Quest

http://webquest.org/index.php

An Online Poster Tool

http://edu.glogster.com/

We know this is a very busy time of the semester for you, but please try to get caught up if you are behind. As always, don't spend too much time in frustration as you work on your course. A quick redirect to an online resource or letting you know what button to click can often save you hours of frustration. So let us know if you need help and keep up the good work!

The CPDE Instructional Design Team

Module 2 - Building Course Structure

Hello again! It is good to see you back in the workshop and ready to learn more about building your course for online delivery. This week we are going to focus on the key structural elements required by the Quality Rubric. The rubric will be used to measure the quality of your course and I think you will find it very helpful when used as a course development guide. Take a moment to read the first lesson and be sure to click on the six sections for detailed information about the rubric. The second lesson will help you organize the course content using either folders, learning modules, or a combination. In the orientation meeting, everyone elected to use the course shell template with (16) structured learning modules. Fantastic!! We hope this decision will save you all valuable time. The required activities in the workshop assume you are starting with a blank course. So, instead of creating sixteen new modules, create one and title it “SAMPLE” and use the “SAMPLE” module to add headings and html files. You can also edit the provided modules to fit your course. For example, you may want to change the name from “Module One” to “Chapter One” and edit or remove the HEADINGS provided in the modules to fit your needs. When you finish the activities, be sure to go to the 4.2 Module 2: Submit Activities link, type “COMPLETE” and submit the assignment. For great examples of course organization, login to WebCT using the username: online and password: quality. Remember to post your questions and comments to the Workshop Q & A. The conversations in the first two discussions were very supportive and full of helpful ideas. You have all done a great job building a community of learners in the workshop. Keep up the pace and have a great week! Tracy