Category Archives: Administration

Vetting Project Management Resources: Finding the Right Fit

If you’re like the majority of the world, multitasking is part of your daily routine. From managing personal to professional tasks, keeping it all together in your brain can be a bit overwhelming.

Thankfully, there are a number of tools, from easy to use smartphone apps to more complex software, that exist to help manage it all.

Whether you’re looking for a tool to individually track tasks, or you work with one or more people and need to manage and track a series of tasks, choosing the right process and solution doesn’t have to stressful. The following are some general tips to consider as you broach the subject.

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Beyond QualityMatters: Introducing the Pedagogically Distinctive Features (PDF) of DePaul Online Courses

In 2008, DePaul adopted QualityMatters (QM) as the quality standard for online and hybrid courses developed through the DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program. During the past eight years, nearly two hundred courses have been through the QM internal review process at DePaul.  Since 2011 when the first instructor was rewarded with a QM star for developing a course that met all of the QM standards, the number of QM star recipients has increased drastically.  These days, becoming a QM star has become a common expectation of all faculty participants of DOTS.

As designers, we are pleased by the numbers and the feeling of “getting a hang of QM”; on the other hand, we ask whether this is the place where we want to be – because that pounding question remains loud and sound: Does QM guarantee a successful learning experience for students?

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Instructional Designers: Preventative Care is for Us Too

I don’t often write directly to my instructional designer colleagues; usually I try to impart some of the occasional nuggets of wisdom I’ve gained from teaching, research or just plain trial and error to faculty, so they can avoid making the same mistakes I have. This time I’ve found a new way to stay inspired and reduce the burnout that can happen in this line of work, and I’m excited about how it has affected my approach to Instructional Design (ID) that it bears repeating.

Over the past decade or so, we have all witnessed a major change in health care. The medical profession has shifted focus from just treating the symptoms to preventative care—the idea that by changing life and health habits earlier on, it will reduce the amount of symptomatic care required for patients later in life. It does seem to be having a positive effect so far, as hospitals have more time to deal with emergencies, and their doctors and nurses spend less time in consultation over health conditions that are ultimately preventable. The individualized care at Los Angeles drug rehab centers is tailored to each patient’s unique needs. A dedicated healthcare negligence attorney in Tacoma will fight for the compensation you deserve for your injuries. Continue reading →

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Web design is…dead? Maybe it’s just resting its eyes?

“Web design is dead,” declareth Sergio Nouvel of UX Magazine. I’ll admit that this clickbait headline drew me in—if web design is dead, what about instructional design? But, as expected, the “big reveal” of the article wasn’t anything earth shattering: web design may have met its demise, but from its dead cocoon husk emerges a new field, experience design. And in my view, experience design = instructional design for non-teachers, so this is good news to me.

While the grand finale of this article may not seem like much more than a semantic differentiation, I appreciated Nouvel’s thoughtful description of the trajectory web design has taken in the past few years, especially now that we carry computers in our pockets and wear them on our wrists. Users still access websites through their full computer-based browsers, but that’s rapidly shifting, so much so that the venerable New York Times forced its staff to use only their mobile site for a week to emphasize the importance of mobile. It is also advised to utilize a Chrome extension for Google indexing to reach more audience.

More importantly, Nouvel’s description of the transition from a focus on “the design of individual web pages” to the “design of an ecosystem with a focus on user experience” mirrors what I’ve seen in my job as an instructional designer. Establishing a quality template for content—one that is readable, easy to edit, and designed to look like a high-quality website—takes time. I’ve worked in my college for a few years now, and it’s only in the past 6-8 months that I’ve had a consistent starting point that has worked for most faculty and that’s flexible enough for customization. Continue reading →

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Building an Airplane While You’re Flying It: Why You Shouldn’t Build Your Online Class on the Fly

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

In Faculty Instructional Technology Services, we’ve established a recommended timeline of two academic quarters to develop an online or hybrid course, assuming the instructor has a normal course load over that time frame. That’s twenty weeks, give or take. In this time frame, we can help instructors in planning, development, and quality assurance in creating a professional online or hybrid course.

With less time, we can do less.

This quarter, most of our consultants are working on at least a couple build-as-you-go courses, where instructors are still developing course materials while the course is running. I understand why this happens, particularly in the Spring quarter. Instructors are busy people, and it’s hard to find the time to prep for the upcoming quarter, particularly when there are so few breaks in the academic calendar. It also might be a shock to be asked to spend so much time preparing a course they’ve been teaching face-to-face for years and are not accustomed to needing to do a lot of preparation for each offering.

I’ve never seen a course simply not run because the online materials weren’t ready. The course always gets done in the end, because it has to. But that’s not to say that building a course while it’s running isn’t without consequences. Continue reading →

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Teaching Online…For Real This Time

Online and hybrid learning are so commonplace nowadays that many students have experience with them even before they leave K-12.  However, with the increasing ubiquity of this mode of instruction, there are certain challenges that we encounter along the road to “teaching a good class.”  Looking back to the beginnings of online teaching and learning, the greatest fear many faculty had, and some still do, was that it would be flat, not engaging for students, and that students would lose all sense of a faculty member even teaching the course.  Since that time, we have come a long way in trying to allay faculty and student fears that an online course will have less quality and be a “gimme” course and will be much easier than a face-to-face course would be.  (Well, that last one is an idea we are still trying to discourage.)  A brief look at the distance education/online courses of years past will show how we’ve attempted to alleviate the  concerns of student engagement and reveal that it’s still a hidden issue that could use some work.

The earliest kind of distance education courses were correspondence courses.  Students would get a book to read and a series of tests to take at a testing location. Tests were mailed in and scored, and afterwards a certificate was supplied to the school for the academic credential.  I took one of these courses in high school, and I was the teacher and the student, and because I only read the book to prepare for the tests, I can honestly say I learned little or nothing. Continue reading →

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IDD Book Club: Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

Do you remember the dread of reading books “for school”? As a former high school English teacher, I remember feeling conflicted about book selections because I feared that the “for school” designation would automatically turn students off to a book they might like in other circumstances, no matter how hip and non-worksheet-y the accompanying assignments (Make a soundtrack for the book! Create a children’s book version of the same story with pictures and everything!).

I often find myself falling into the same trap with “for work” reading. I’m genuinely interested in reading about topics related to my job — Cynthia Selfe’s  “Multimodal Composition — Resources for Teachers” is a fantastic book, for example, but these aren’t the types of books I turn to for those 20 minutes of unwinding time before my head hits the pillow.

To my delight, though, my current “for fun” reading, Thunderstruck by Erik Larson, is striking the perfect balance of telling a compelling narrative and making connections to my professional life. Continue reading →

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Instructional Designer 2.0; or, How do I explain my job to my grandparents?

When I taught high school English, saying my job title was an explanation in itself, mostly because anyone I was talking to had experienced high school English for themselves. The only difficulty was to convince them I was still an OK person even though I was a high school English teacher: “Don’t worry—I won’t be correcting your grammar or suggesting syntax improvements during our conversation!”

Now, when I say that I’m an “Instructional Designer,” the expression on most people’s faces is one of polite befuddlement—I may as well have said I’m a “Foley Artist” or “Happy Salad Model.”

That’s why I was surprised when Peggy Maki, the keynote speaker at the Teaching Commons Fall Forum, mentioned instructional designers. In her talk on the scholarship of teaching and learning, Dr. Maki was explaining the connections among program outcomes, course outcomes, assignments, and student learning, and she advocated for a clearer linearity across those elements. As an aside, she said (excuse my loose paraphrase), “And that’s why instructional design is so popular now.”

I was sitting right in front of Dr. Maki when she said this, and I think she saw my politely befuddled face. Popular? Instructional design? I think my friends and family have a vague understanding of what I do, Continue reading →

In the Cloud(s)

I still shudder when I think of standing with my father curbside watching his laptop being carried away in the trunk of an anonymous city cab. We couldn’t chase the cab, we had no recollection of which cab company it was, and my dad had paid the driver in cash. Everything on his computer was instantly, mercilessly gone. All we could do was stand there and watch, slack-jawed.

That was a decade ago.

Just last week, I had a harrowing experience of my own: I spilled water on my laptop, completely destroying it. The Macbook Pro was pronounced dead on arrival at the Genius Bar.

I felt horrible and lamented my carelessness to my partner. He just shrugged and said, “thin client; no biggie.” Continue reading →