January 29, 2008

Good Morning!

Please note that your course must be 100% complete by Monday of next week. If you do not feel that your course will be complete by that time please let me know ASAP. The Peer Advisors will have access to your course on Monday morning. As soon as you finish your course development please send me an e-mail to let me know and I will check it over.

Here is a link to an article titled “Is Online Learning For You”. It is important to understand the types of students that will be taking the courses you are designing. Read through this article to learn about the types of students that are most well suited for online learning: http://www.online-learning.com/articles_foryou.html

Have a great week!

Hello Developers,

The peer advisor volunteers are rolling in and I wanted to make sure you knew what they were going to be looking for when they go into your courses beginning February 4th. As you finish your developments please make sure you keep these questions in mind. They will be answering the following questions:

• Do you feel that the content in the course is written at the appropriate level?
• Is the course split into manageable segments?
• Are visual and auditory stimuli used to motivate students?
• Are appropriate supplementary resources made available as part of the course content?
• Does the use of technology enable critical reflection and analysis of content?
• Do the assignments/activities that require the use of technology clearly explain how technology is to be used by the students?
• Do you believe the instructional strategies employed in the course cause students to be effectively engaged with course content?
• Do you believe that the expectations defining or explaining required levels of student participation are clear?
• Do you believe there is a deliberate attempt to create a learning community through the following methods: Discussions, E-mail, Chat Rooms, Videoconferencing, Group Projects, or other collaborative activities?
• Do you believe the assessments/assignments in the course are aligned with the stated objectives/learning outcomes?

If you finish the development of your course early please drop me an e-mail to let me know

Enjoy your week!

January 14, 2008

Welcome to the GU/MSB Online Curriculum Development Blog Spot! All of my weekly announcements will now take place on this blog and will be archived so that developers can look back at past announcements, up and coming topics in online development, tips and tricks, etc. You can also post feedback and additional thoughts for other developers. This will be a community created for all of us to share online development information

• The 75% completion date is today. I will be going into all of your courses and providing you with feedback on your development. If you do not feel your course is 75% complete please let me know ASAP.




• On Friday you all should have received an e-mail about peer advising. You are welcome to sign up to peer advise upon other courses that are being developed. This process begins on February 4th




• As you all know, we need to add any word documents to Blackboard as HTML files so that it is faster and easier for the students to view the documents. You may have encountered problems in the past when trying to save a word document as an HTML document when the word document contains pictures. Well, I have good news for you! All you need to do is create a .zip file containing the HTML document and all the pictures. Then upload the .zip file into Blackboard, and identify the HTML file as the source. I have e-mailed the How To documents that walk you through step by step how to do this.

Here is a link to an article from e-learn magazine on Development Principles for Online Learning: http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=33-1

This article discusses the ideas of learning objects, procrastination, level of content, etc. Read through this article and feel free to post your opinions for other to see on this blog!