As the parent of a toddler, I’m faced with the task of choosing a preschool for my son. The most important factor on my list? That the curriculum—if it’s even called “a curriculum”—be play-based. That means I want my son digging in dirt, running around outside, making up nonsense words to songs with his imaginary friends, and in general, just being the messy, loud, unorganized, joyful beast that he is. I don’t want there to be any concern about him reaching educational or developmental benchmarks, and I certainly don’t want there to be any evaluative assessments, report cards, or homework. This isn’t because I’m against learning, of course, but because I know (and research supports) that playing is the very best way toddlers learn.

Value creation. Differentiation advantage. Competitive positioning. What do those terms mean to you? Any MBAs out there? Anyone? I don’t have an MBA, but recently, those terms have come to mean more to me in the university context.

If you read Online Learning for Free?, the blog entry my colleague Elizabeth Schinazi posted a few weeks ago, you may already be on the same dog-eared and coffee-stained page.

Elizabeth closed her post with the following statement: I think it’s important that as a university we keep track of our “competition.” Specifically, Elizabeth was stressing the importance of keeping track of the burgeoning number of free online offerings in higher education.

Business and professional communication is an essential skill, but it no longer takes place solely in person. An important component in preparing students to segue to a professional career is ensuring that they have a plethora of experiences—today, this should include working in a virtual space.  

Many industries offer telecommuting options, require global Web-based presentations, etc. Students who are charged with working in these organizations must understand the etiquette when communicating synchronously and asynchronously.

So developing an online course in public speaking must include a myriad of opportunities to create experiences that enable students to hone communicating in an online context.

Last fall, I wrote about the challenges of creating engaging video for online courses. Disappointed with the end product I was getting by serving in a mostly advisory capacity, I declared that I would take a more hands-on approach. I was hopeful that by requiring early ideation sessions, script review, rehearsal, and on-site art direction I’d be able to get results that would meet faculty goals and that students would actually watch.

“But being lazy means you aren’t productive, right?”

Lies!

Being lazy is about getting as much done as you can with as little effort as possible. Think “task streamlining” rather than “task avoidance.”

The tasks that take the most time for me are repetitive text-manipulation tasks and responding to email, so those are the two things I’ve worked on automating the most.

The tools I prefer are Autohotkey (free) for Windows or Text Expander ($35) for Mac. Both allow you to set up keyboard macros which will perform longer text-entry tasks. I will not go into incredible depth for either of them, but I will go into the basics of why they’re useful.

Problem: Student–to–Research Librarian Instructor ratio is 60:1.

Solution: A collaborative effort between the faculty, research librarian, and instructional designer to design and embed online tutorials in the learning management system, Desire2Learn (D2L)…quickly.

It is mid-October and the January 2nd winter quarter start date is fast approaching. Nursing 400: Theories of Nursing will be offered as a hybrid for the first time. The instructional designer and faculty have been working feverishly to produce narrated PowerPoint lectures, embed video clips, write content and assignment instructions, develop rubrics and engaging discussion prompts, and integrate images and graphics. The course hinges on a multistep research-project assignment and the librarian instructional time is vital for students to have a successful course experience.

I have a particular penchant toward the self-published.

You see, I grew up with printed pages still warm from a Kinko’s copy machine. I was taught with manifestos stapled sideways, printed in perfect punk-rock attitude and do-it-yourself aesthetic. A girl who was awash with the unspoken mission statement of “anyone-can-do-it” chanted by movements like Riot Grrrl and Act-Up, I learned that you didn’t have to hit the New York Times Best Seller List to be considered an author. I learned that, given time, a typewriter, and some dimes for the copy machine, you could print your own stories, your own news, and your own ideas. I learned that my voice and thoughts counted. I learned the magic of self-publishing.

I recently signed up to take a free online course, Human-Computer Interaction, through Stanford University. While I already have my master’s degree in HCI, I thought it would be a fun way to stay engaged and gain new insights into the field. That it was free certainly didn’t hurt. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for the course to get off the ground—what was originally a January start date, was pushed back to March and has now been shelved as “under-development.” I’m still on the mailing list and hopeful that the course will be offered soon.

As an instructor in an online or hybrid course, I want to know how the students feel about the content as well as the structure of the course. I have given a number of surveys for both my hybrid and online courses that include both an initial survey and an end of quarter survey. While the university has an official assessment instrument for the evaluation of instruction, I find an informal, anonymous survey in my courses has helped me fine-tune the course for the next time it is offered. In this survey, I not only ask about the content matter, but also about the format and structure of the course. I ‘bribe’ the students to take the surveys by giving participation points or extra credit for completion.

Here at DePaul, we’ve got a well-established learning management system. For many faculty, this provides a means to deliver content in both text and multimedia forms to students anywhere in the world. Some faculty are using their course sites in really excellent ways, delivering lecture content, videos, discussions, and assessments entirely online. Many others, though, do not want to or believe they need to use the system. On first glance, a number of disciplines don’t seem to benefit from having this system in place; for example, a music instructor whose sole purpose at DePaul is to teach private lessons might not see the value in having a course site available, since they don’t have a syllabus and each student’s lesson content is different. A foreign-language instructor might not see the immediate value of a course site beyond being a syllabus repository, if the majority of the course content will be conversational speaking. However, there are many ways to leverage the technology available in the Desire2Learn system to avoid the woes of the “common course site.” In order to take a course site to these new places, we first have to break down exactly what the words “course site” mean to us as instructors and designers, and from there we can use the available tools to produce something truly beneficial to students.