I am truly at a loss as to why we are still arguing about this, but we somehow still are! (See “Retailers Giving Vinyl Records Another Spin.”) Here is the quick answer: digital-audio techniques and media can capture and reproduce sonic events far more faithfully than any analogue technique and medium. Note that the focus of the above statement is fidelity not preference, a distinction that most “LPs versus CDs” debates wrongly blur.

Old news

Libx is a Web 2.0 tool that connects you to the university library while exploring the web. Available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, this plug-in is customized especially for DePaul and pops a handy little search bar across the top of your browser window, so you can quickly and easily search the library catalog or check on whether the library has the journal you need online or in print.

Even better, when searching for titles from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or many other sites, you will see a little DePaul icon next to the book title allowing you to see if it is available in the DePaul Library.

In my last blog post, I promised to share more findings on viewing faculty-development programs through the lens of TPCK after trying to implement the TPCK framework into our faculty development program—DePaul Online Teaching Series, or DOTS. This program, offered in both a quarter-long and an intensive three-week format, is intended to prepare faculty to design online and hybrid courses. A total of twenty-one DePaul faculty members from psychology, public services, and education attended DOTS in spring and summer 2008.

As a graduate student from the writing program working at IDD, I often wonder how much time it makes sense to devote to copy editing the online-course syllabi and modules that come across my desk. I sometimes think I’m being too stringent in my attempts to apply the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style. I have a tendency to get lost for upwards of half an hour at a time trying to resolve ambiguities of correct hyphen and comma use. (I’m still not sure if I should use a comma before a coordinating conjunction connecting two imperative clauses.)

Here are a few templates and tools that can be used by a faculty member who either does not have the resources of an instructional designer at hand or merely chooses not to work with an instructional designer. The core standard for a well-designed course is the alignment of the objectives with the course assessments, learning activities and learning materials.

The central pieces of course are the learning objectives. That is where course design begins and against which course outcomes are measured.

This location is interactive and can actually help you build measurable learning objectives for your course based on Bloom’s Taxonomy! www.radiojames.com/ObjectivesBuilder

Tips for the Flip from Rick Salisbury.

When I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s annual meeting in January of 2008, I was sitting in a general session, and I was thinking to myself about online education and what students ‘do’ in that environment. I then got to thinking about service-learning and how authentic, situational, and service-based assignments can be of great value to students.

All of that led to the thought that, for the most part, online learning and service-learning seem to be mutually exclusive. The question is, do they have to be?

I’ve been thinking a lot about usability these days. It’s not like I never considered the user; we document and provide print and video tutorials for a host of processes and procedures here at DePaul. But I recently had a long discussion with an instructor who took me to task for assuming that students would know how to play a file in iTunes U. He didn’t know to locate and click the play icon, or to double-click the file. He was frustrated and questioned the logic of having to explain to his students the process to access a video tutorial meant to explain yet another process. My impulse was to dismiss him as a clueless Luddite, but thankfully I heard him out.

For many institutions, online course development follows a publishing model. Faculty members are recruited and compensated to “author” content that will be used by multiple instructors. This approach has several advantages:

1. Greater Accountability: Expectations can be clearly spelled out (and enforced) through a course-development contract.
2. Higher Quality: Course materials are often edited by an instructional designer and reviewed by other instructors.
3. Greater Efficiency: Ideally, faculty don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they teach a new course. The initial effort of the course author and instructional designer to create a core set of course materials saves future instructors a great deal of time in the long run.

Don’t get me wrong! I own three iPods, which I use extensively and absolutely adore for their portability and other obvious advantages. I, of course, use them differently than most listeners. (If you are lazy or impatient, feel free to jump to the bottom of the page and read how.) Most listeners use mp3 players and mp3 files in ways that severely degrade sound quality and eventually deteriorate the listener’s ability to even tell the difference between good and bad sound quality. But more on this a little later.