Comments on: Dump Schedule-Driven Online Course Design

By: Teaching College Math » Blog Archive » Starting from Scratch (Part II)

Teaching College Math » Blog Archive » Starting from Scratch (Part II) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:02:59 +0000

[...] Starting from Scratch (Part I) and in Dump Schedule-driven Course Design I discussed how to create the general structure of a course shell. Now we begin to fill it with [...]

By: sandra742

sandra742 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:47:55 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. Cheers! Sandra. R.

By: Derek

Derek — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:17:04 +0000

Not sure about tagging in Bb either. I’ve mostly stopped using Bb for my classes (which are all F2F). Instead, I just set up a WordPress blog for distributing course content, like this one:

http://blogs.vanderbilt.edu/mlascrypto/blog/

Tagging is then easy! I’ve also experimented with having my students (and me, too) contribute to a Delicious feed for the course, which has been working well.

http://delicious.com/tag/mlascrypto

By: Avoiding schedule-driven instructional design

Avoiding schedule-driven instructional design — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:01:35 +0000

[...] Dump Schedule-Driven Online Course Design Teaching College Math Maria H. Anderson 2 July 2009 [...]

By: Maria H. Andersen

Maria H. Andersen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:43:26 +0000

@Pete Excellent point. (I was saving that for “Starting from Scratch, Part II) I do put section information on my folders, but never on the actual activities or video lessons. I did it at first, and then later, like you, I realized what a mistake that was going to turn out to be.

It’s not too hard to rename a few folders with a different section number. It SUCKS to have to go in and redo all your videos, worksheets, and activities to change a section number!

@Derek Interesting idea about the “tagging” – I’m not sure that it can be done in Bb, but I’ll keep my eyes open!

By: Pete H

Pete H — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:39:07 +0000

One point people need to be aware of when organizing courses by topic is to avoid organizing primarily by chapter and section numbers. If you are also using a text, remember the publishers like to change editions on about a three to four year cycle. When one of the texts I use renumbered the review section from Chapter 1 to Chapter 0, there was a cascading effect on all the other sections as well. This meant that I had to rename all of the chapters in my website, and rename sections that had moved to other chapters, etc. Not fun.

I’m now moving my supplements into Moodle, and find the option to group by topic far more intuitive. I can still group topics by chapter, but it is no longer the organizational key. Additionally, if I change texts or the publisher changes chapter orders, I can simply move my materials to the new location.

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:29:26 +0000

I like this statement: “Designing around the ‘week’ may even give the mistaken impression idea that learning takes place at a particular time, and once you’re past that time, you should be done with that learning.” I think it’s really easy for students to fall into this trap.

I’ve not taught online, but I blog a lot, and I really like using tags for organization and searching. Might you label a piece of content with tags like “rational functions” and “week3″ and then students find what they need in whatever way seems most natural to them? Multiple ways of finding the same content are great–as long as they’re not *too* confusing!

By: SplineGuy

SplineGuy — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:17:08 +0000

When I developed the online Algebra courses that we use, I developed them around content sections much like you have recommended here, but then when I reached the stage of making the content and resources available to the students I imposed the schedule.

What I never considered is that the students would benefit from seeing the content organized BOTH by schedule and by objective. Not only that, but I could also benefit by adding (and subtracting) components in that structure. Blackboard (and I imagine most CMS’s) will allow me to upload and organize content by objective and then create a schedule with appropriate links to the content in this original structure.

Good post and I’m going to run with this idea.