Monday 1-4:30 pm
I started the preconference session on Monday, and noticed an interesting article that a participant was reading in the seat next to me in EDUCAUSE REVIEW. Upon further investigation, itt was nice to open up the recent issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW to see an article entitled "Bringing the Best of Business Strategies to Higher Education" by our college president, Dr. Linda Thor http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm06511.asp.
Presenters were Kathi Baldwin and Susan Mircovich from the Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage.
Key points were:
- They are a BlackBoard shop, and emphasized technical training over pedagogical training and frameworks for creating and managing course development.
- They work in a single, academic unit--nursing and allied health--working with individual faculty members to create what I term "Craft" production courses--single faculty--single course--highly individualized design.
- They have a five stage model for bringing faculty on-board in the course development process.
- There was an assumption that faculty needed to move thorugh the stages with increasing technical skill in order to be successful. In the lower levels, the instructional designers did a lot of the work--an assisted model. In the higher stages--the faculty did more of the technical work--and incorporated more rich media--with less assistance. Faculty would produce their own sound, graphics and video.
- They supported faculty at their level of comfort--not pushing them to levels beyond their capabilities or interests.
- Very few faculty made it to the highest level. Most were at stages 1-3.
- They did a good job at identifying barriers to course development within their environment including intellectual property, time constraints on faculty, skill levels, personnel support, lack of a reward system that is aligned with faculty tenure reward systems, and academic freedom.
Application to what we do at Rio:--some brainstorming ideas:
- We are a one-course, many-sections model. Perhaps we can call upon faculty and adjuncts and others to have a greater "ownership" in the process in order to create more media-rich content--that is personalized, yet usable across sections. For example--a recorded lecture from a live classroom (those that we have) or presentation that is published as a podcast or Interactive Flash presentation.
- We could consider supporting them at greater levels with the technologies, tools and personnel to do some of this such as sound files, short video clips, interactive presentations, podcasts, etc. so that they could do it on their own, without burdening or interfering with the course production process.
