January 26th, 2009

Good Morning!

We have reached the end of the development time period! All courses must be 100% complete by February 2nd (Next Monday). At that time the peer advisers will have one week to go into your courses to provide you with feedback. After you have worked in your changes suggested by the peer advisers by February 23rd then there is only one step left

• Changing your course to the 10 week schedule

All courses must also be designed to fit the 10 week schedule because we now offer our summer quarter courses in 10 weeks instead of 12 weeks. All courses must be changed to match the 10 week schedule by March 2nd.

For those of you that have contracts an additional $200 will be added to your payment to compensate you for this additional development work.

I blogged about how to change your courses into the 10 week schedule on December 15th so if you have questions please go back to that post for the original information. If you still have questions please feel free to contact me at any time to help you through any questions that you still have. I am happy to help!

For those of you who are current faculty members I hope you had an opportunity to attend the in-service on Friday, there was a lot of great information! For those of you who weren't able to attend Brian James did a presentation on "The Changing Classroom" and discussed many great online tools that can not only be used in a residential classroom but also an online classroom. I have attached his power point presentation to the e-mail I sent out - the ideas in this presentation are great and I hope you had an opportunity to work some of them into the design of your course.

Please let me know as soon as you finish your development and I will go in and check your course before I open it up to the peer advisers.

Have a great week!

Amy

January 20, 2009

Hello Everyone,

We are getting down to the end - only 2 weeks left until your courses are opened up for the peer advisers. If you finish early please let me know and I will go in and check it and mark it off as being complete.

There is exciting stuff happening at the Globe Education Network! We are looking at two new campuses: Middleton (Madison), WI and Elk River, MN. We anticipate all approvals to be in place by March 2009! All of the students at these campuses will be eligible to take courses online.

As you finish up your developments please remember to take a look at the following items:

• Spell check EVERYTHING - quizzes, discussion boards, reading assignments, etc. We want to catch those spelling errors and typos before the students do
• Make sure to include at least one external link in every unit - the external link must open in a new window.
• You should have at least one assignment in every unit.
• Upper level courses should have at least one assignment that is threaded through a couple of units. In these upper level courses it is important to connect the content from unit to unit and tie them together in the end.
• If you would like to work in a research assignment we have a ton of online library resources. Please contact Elaine Settergren at esettergren@msbcollege.edu and she can point you in the right direction.
• Please be sure to include a course calendar and check that the total points in the course calendar match the total points in the grade center.

Please let me know if you have any concerns about finishing your course by February 2nd.

Have a great week! Enjoy the inauguration and happy belated MLK day!

Amy

January 12, 2009

Hello Developers,

Today marks the 75% completion deadline so I will be going into your courses this week to check for 75% completion. This is also the time I start to gather peer advisors to go through your courses, once they are complete, so you have feedback from other instructors that teach online. I will be sure to include you on this e-mail, so if you are interested in peer advising on another course that is currently being developed, just let me know! It is a great way to see what other developers are doing in their courses.

I also want to remind all of you that here at Globe Education Network all of our employees can subscribe to Online Classroom for free. I haven't mentioned this since August, so I thought it was time to remind you :-)

Online Classroom provides practical advice and examples of proven, research-based pedagogical techniques to help instructors and course developers create and teach outstanding courses. To access Online Classroom simply go to www.magnapubs.com/licenses/suscribe.html. Enter your individual email address and password as well as the other required information. You will need to enter a Voucher Code and PIN number where prompted - I have e-mailed this information to you.

There is a new issue that just came out last week and there are some interesting articles that I felt were very interesting. I would like to comment on just a few of them here.

The first article I would like to comment on is titled Instructors Personality: An Essential Online Course Component. This article encourages instructors to infuse their personality into the course they are teaching/developing. As a developer, you are creating a master course shell for multiple instructors to use at one time. Therefore, it can be difficult to know how much of your personality you should include in your development. My recommendation would be to include some components of your personality into the course, but to keep in mind that some instructors teach differently then you may teach and to provide options for these instructors to teach the course a little differently. You can insert hidden notes for future instructors explaining why you set something up in a certain way and you can also use this method to provide future instructors with options and ideas of how to teach the concept a little differently based on their personality.

The second article I would like to comment on is titled Tapping Into Higher Level Thinking in Online Courses. For several months now I have been mentioning the idea of including critical thinking in the development of your courses. This article takes it one step further and actually defines what it means to incorporate critical thinking. If this is a topic that still has you stumped, this article will help to clear up some of your questions.

The third and last article I would like to comment on is titled Online Teaching Fundamentals: That’s Debatable. I don't often see online debates set up in our courses, and this article provides a great understanding of not only why online debates can be valuable but offers examples and step by step guidelines on how to set one up in your course. This can be a great tool to use in your development to really engage the students as well as to get them to think critically about a topic! I encourage you to check out this article!

Have a great week! Stay Warm :-)

Amy

January 5th, 2009

Good Morning!

This is my first post of 2009 - I hope that everyone had a great holiday! I hope that you all had a chance to work on your courses over the break, but just in case you didn't I want to alert you of a few changes in Blackboard:

• Over the break we updated to a new version of Blackboard. When you go into find your grade book you will now find the "Grade Center" instead. I will be e-mailing out the new "how to" document on the grade center, but a few pointers are listed below.
• To move stuff around in the Grade Center hover over "Manage" and click on "Organize Grade Center". Use the Drag and Drop Feature on the far left column to sort the assignments by unit and then click "submit" on the lower right.
• To view the total points in the grade book (grade center) you go to the "total" column and select the drop down arrow and then select Column Information.
• The Grade Center does not update as quickly as the grade book. If you update something you will likely need to go back to the control panel and then back into the grade center to see the change you made.

I hope you are all enjoying working on your courses and that you have a great week!

Amy