At FITS, we have a number of strategies that we like to recommend to help keep students organized and on task:
- Use the “Completion Tracking” feature in the D2L Content tool so students can check off items as they complete them.
- Set due dates that will be pushed to the calendar tool and encourage students to subscribe to their calendar so that it syncs to whatever personal calendar they use.
- Use use the News tool to send updates and, again, encourage students to subscribe so they get updates via email.
But there’s a danger in all these strategies. If you don’t fully commit to them they can backfire spectacularly, and rather than help keep students on task, only create confusion about what they’re supposed to do.
Do instructional designers secretly serve as change agents in higher education institutions? Change is a faint tremor that rarely erupts to alter the academic structure cemented in tradition and intricate policies. However, instructional designers have a unique role that gives them access to the three primary stakeholders at a university: faculty, administration, and students. Acting in a supportive, non-threatening role, instructional designers have the opportunity to create change without having to move the weighty levers of the academic machine. Taking a look at the five characteristics of change agents identified by George Couros, author of 
I’ve always been research-oriented, and I’d like to believe that I’m a curious soul. I love asking questions, often with little hope of finding a definitive answer. One thing I’ve always wondered is how we think about the things we hold important. It started with what apps I keep on my phone’s home screen. I was looking at the difference between the home screen on my phone versus the home screen on my boyfriend’s phone. He had folders on the front; I put folders on the other pages. I kept a lot of the “pre-installed” apps on my home screen; he just had one or two.
