Here at DePaul, we have the DePaul Online Teaching Series program (DOTS), where we work with faculty to help prepare them for the unique challenges of teaching online. It’s an intensive program that begins with a crash course in designing an online or hybrid course and goes all the way through working with a design consultant to get the course completed and evaluated.

In order to help the faculty effectively accomplish this, we give them the tools they will need to create their course, including a laptop computer, a webcam, a headset microphone, software, and a portable voice recorder. Doing this ensures that they have all the technology they will need to produce a robust, dynamic, and interesting course.

I received a phone call today from an instructor who went through the DOTS program asking about what resources were available to a student who wanted to produce videos to submit to the class. This got me thinking about the aforementioned technology toolkit we give to faculty. At what point will the students need a similar toolkit?

A great deal of focus in course design is often placed on creating instructional materials for the students to consume. For example, they watch a video, read an article, or view a Web site. There is not much focus on student-created content—regardless of whether it is eventually offered up for assessment. The majority of the time, students interact with the material through writing a paper, posting to a discussion board, or taking a quiz.

However, what happens when an instructor would like to send off her students to create materials for assessment similar to what the instructor can produce for the students to consume? Where does a student, especially an online student, obtain the required video camera, microphone, or editing software?

This thought process, combined with a conversation I had the other day about technical requirements for online students, made me wonder if we will see not only tech specs for computers for students in the future, but also what they will need as peripheral devices in order to succeed as a student in an increasingly visual and technical world.

I can’t wait to see where this may lead.