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