Earlier this week, Amy and Stevie showed me a list of courses that SI is maintaining/developing. There's always been a question of what we can/should continue to do while moving into new territory. So I spoke with Dean Foley about some of this yesterday.
Here's what we can do.
- Let's make all developed courses open in some way, let the Commonwealth faculty have access to 'em. We can try to come up with creative ways to hand off the content. But we should also tell them that we'll no longer do the maintenance. There'll be some transition time needed to get them ready for this, but we have approval to move these out of our way.
- Having said that, Dean Foley did suggest that IST 110 and SRA 111 might be the courses to hold on to. Since they're the intro courses, and they're important for recruiting, retention, etc. The 110H offering with Andrea Tapia could be a good way to start rethinking our role in course development.
- Cause we might have to do some for more courses in the SRA major. But we should rethink our approaches to this. There's no reason to have faculty write tomes of material that we'd distribute online. Would be more interesting to think about interesting areas that aren't covered by textbooks, place our efforts there. E.g., developing simulations and other materials to help students engage in SRA practices.
- The Dean said that he may send the Professional Masters program to World Campus. I'm sure we could fight for it if necessary. Or make some revisions to existing things if Prof. Chu wants some of what we have to be part of the M.S. curriculum. Else, it's a another thing we can avoid.
- One of many strengths in Edison Services is the peer review tools. Maybe we can strip that out of Edison, keep it as a standalone tool? I know it gets used, so it make sense to hang on to it. If it's easy to do that.
These are options we have. We don't necessarily have to cut these things, but it gives us freedom to do other stuff. Definitely worth discussing sooner than later.
Comments (4)
In regards to courses, it'd be nice to have some sort of graphic/media library with meta-data and comment fields we could open up. I'm thinking an educational youtube, where instructors can simply use the "copy and paste this code" to embed stuff in their course pages. If we could do something similar for our labs and problems, that'd be good as well.
110 - Andrea is more than willing to let us use all the materials that come out of that course. We're already helping her with several aspects of it, and she seems happy to work with us and share.
Peer eval - check out:
http://ipeer.apsc.ubc.ca/ipeer_site/
We have (had?) this running on a test server. It's much more robust than our peer eval tool (something the faculty have been asking for), and would be good to integrate if we can figure out authentication and importing studeints.
Posted by bartman | July 10, 2007 9:26 AM
Posted on July 10, 2007 09:26
I'm all for getting rid of volumes of text online. Links to websites and articles online and books to check out, great. Better still, add: graphics, animations, cool stuff that we create or link to. Let faculty focus their efforts on finding resources and working with SI to design cool, interactive educational pieces, not writing textbooks online.
Posted by L3 | July 10, 2007 12:28 PM
Posted on July 10, 2007 12:28
@bartman: if the iPeer thing is more robust than what we got, may be worth looking into the authentication and import issues. Be good to check it out, maybe at next week's SI meeting (?).
@L3: I'll second that. I think we had to develop fullblown courses in the early IST days cause we were building something very new. Nowadays...well, resources for courses like IST 302 (to pick a random example) are all over the Web and amazon.com. It'd be more fun to work with faculty to find issues that students have in courses, develop specific apps/exercises to get them through those issues. Eliminates some of the IP problems and, hopefully, a lot of time spent developing text materials.
No disrespect to past efforts. Just makes sense to rethink our strategies in the new world order.
Posted by bsmith | July 10, 2007 7:49 PM
Posted on July 10, 2007 19:49
Sorry, came late to the party, folks. I totally agree with all of the above--let's skim out what doesn't make sense for us to be doing, and move into newer, more innovative directions.
A couple of thoughts occur to me, but they're really too long for a comment field. I put them over at my blog, instead.
Posted by Stevie | July 19, 2007 9:41 AM
Posted on July 19, 2007 09:41