I have provided the following recommendations to each of the faculty teams. If you have comments, feedback or suggestions please comment to this blog posting so that the other faculty teams can view your comments.
Course Design
- Please begin with the learning outcomes, and the assessment of those primary outcomes
- I have created a Google doc that includes the outcomes, major assessments, midstream assessments, learning activities and content elements. We will use this worksheet to drive the data analysis that will provide you with very useful data about what your students are doing and what impact it has on the achievement of learning outcomes. Please use this as you are designing the course. You can find your template under the Course Designs tab on this website.
- We have assigned an instructional designer assigned to your course. Please take advantage of their expertise and support. Contact Kim if you have not hade contact from your instructional designer.
Open Content
- You may include content that contains any Creative Commons license.
- You may include content that includes an explicit permission to openly access, share, and distribute (YouTube videos, TED videos, etc.).
- You may NOT use content that is openly available on the Internet in violation of existing copyrights.
- If you are struggling to find open content for a specific learning need, please contact Kim. I can assist with additional resources.
- If we complete an exhaustive search and cannot find OER of sufficient quality we will need to document that and report it to the granting agencies.
- If there is quality open content available but you prefer your existing copyrighted content, we still cannot use it for the purpose of this grant.
Assessment Process
- Nancy Pawlyshyn has agreed to act as our assessment lead for the projet. She is available to review the assessments of the learning outcomes and the mid-stream assessments. She will also guide out approach to the rubric-based assessment.
- To ease implementation we are adding some flexibility in our use of the VALUE rubrics in the first phase of the grant. Please work with Nancy to determine how best to incorporate rubric-based assessment in your course design.
- We have committed to include at least one online assessment for each learning outcome.
- We will track and analyze all online learning activities. The more that students do in the online environment, the more information we can give you about the impact of their activities on their learning.
- Please consider including very frequent low-stakes assessment activities. If there is a reading activity that is important to the learning results, consider beginning class with a three-question comprehension quiz. Every time you add a midstream assessment we will get a snapshot of the student that will assist in improving performance.