Issues, Notes, and Suggestions related to Course ConversionCourse Conversion Subcommittee
Co-Chairs
Mary Nunaley, Volunteer State Community College
Gary Storts, Tennessee Board of Regents
Instructional Design Subcommittee
Mary Nunaley, Volunteer State Community College and Gary Storts, Tennessee Board of Regents
Recommendations:
- It was agreed that Instructional Design was an area that crosses all other subcommittee areas. Therefore, Instructional Design needs to be primary consideration in all recommendations from the Course Conversion Subcommittee.
D2L Template Subcommittee
Mary Nunaley, Volunteer State Community College
Recommendations:
- All schools should work within a template structure, allowing for institution, departmental and/or class type variations
- Working demonstration template available to all faculty for viewing by January 07
- All content should be built into Course Modules
- Some level of D2L Training should be required before accessing the template
- Online Orientation will be made available for some levels of training.
- Style sheets should be available to assist with ADA compliance
- Certain items must be consistently named for example: Course Content, Calendar, Syllabus, Mail, Discussion, Chat, “Assessments” (TBD). This naming format should be consistent across all institutions.
- Each template should have a Syllabus, Calendar, Mail, Discussion, Gradebook, Library, Rubric, Help Desk (tiered), Outcomes (in each module); Research (for evaluations of programs, services, courses, etc.)
Faculty Training D2L Subcommittee
Audrey Williams, Pellissippi State Technical Community College
Recommendations:
- Provide a variety of training approaches and allow faculty to choose the type of training best fits their time, instructional goals and needs
- Recognize the diversity of abilities of faculty who will be transitioning and keep required training to a minimum
- Provide awareness training/presentations to demonstrate D2L’s different toolset and how it can be used to enhance current WebCT classes and practices
- Provide samples of exemplary classes inside D2L - these classes should be “tiered” or “cascaded” to demonstrate using D2L for different instructional goals or needs
- Provide a mechanism for homogeneous training or professional development so faculty of the same or similar disciplines can meet and work together with D2L
- Provide a “sandbox” course for each faculty in addition to any master courses and development courses. This sandbox will give the faculty a place to test and “play” with D2L without fear of breaking a current course or a course that is in development
- Investigate outside certification for trainers AND faculty
- In addition to the requested recordings of the D2L training, work with the institutions to spread the development of training materials across the state and use the Learning Object Repository to store “training objects” that can be used by all of the institutions.
Requests
- More complete information on the train-the-trainer process, such as number of days, dates, location, who should attend, how many can attend per institution, types of training (some of this was answered yesterday, I know)
- Record the D2L training sessions and make available within a D2L course for reference
- Ask D2L for continuous training opportunities, professional development for campus trainers throughout the transition year
Learning Objects Repository Subcommittee
Gary Storts, Tennessee Board of Regents
Recommendations:
- Metadata standards for tagging objects for our repository need to be adopted. Recommending either the SREB’s LOM standards or Dublin-Core.
- Schools can institutionally brand their own repositories, but they need to be federated with the other repositories in the entire system’s, and with the SREB SCORE Initiative, when technology allows.
- Copyright and intellectual property concerns need to be properly addressed with regards to objects place in the repository. Recommend following the SREB SCORE policies.
- Training needs to be provided in the use of D2L repository tool, and the proper use of registering metadata with objects placed in the repository.
- A review process for all objects placed into the repositories need to be created and put into practice. Objects should not be placed into a repository without being reviewed or tagged as having not been reviewed.
- Developers of objects placed into the repository should receive recognition for such deposits.
Migration Preparation and Transition Conversion Subcommittee
Sandy Schaeffer, University of Memphis
Recommendations:
- “Housecleaning” needs to be performed on all courses prior to their conversion to D2L. This would include eliminating unused “items” in courses, revising, creating “new” content, etc.
- All course content units/modules should have defined objectives within the units/modules.
- All archive course need to be staged for future migration. This applies to courses that have been taught previously in WebCT – however, which aren’t currently being taught – but might yet be taught again in the future in D2L.
- Mandated Student records retrieval which allows for grade appeals, incompletes, etc.
- Consideration of all third party software which integrate currently with WebCT, needs to be evaluated with D2L.
- The usage and implementation of Learning Object Repositories needs to be during migration.
- The system needs to be prepped for a tight timeline of migration and conversion.
- System-wide implantation of organizational planning at the campus level. The creation of a “toolbag” to be used at the campus level to create system-wide consistency and prevent duplication of efforts.
- Consideration of running two CMS systems simultaneously – both developmental and production.
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