Thoughts on The First Cut

Recently, the IST Solutions Institute, which is where I work as an instructional designer, was assigned a new director. His name is Brian Smith, and he's one savvy guy about both technology and education. One of the things we've been doing as a result of this transition is talking about going in new directions. He recently posted some thoughts on our role in course design/development to his blog, The Director's Cut. I had a few thoughts on this, so I thought I'd post them here.

First, I wholly agree with the thinking that we get out of the way of faculty regarding courses. While instructors may not always have the technical know-how to do the high-tech stuff we often give them, I think it's our responsibility to figure out how to provide them with the support they need without acting as gatekeepers to what is, essentially, their stuff for their courses. It's a complex balance, but the idea of helping without getting in the middle of things is extremely attractive.

How to do this? I keep coming back to the idea Bart mentioned in his comment about a searchable, taggable repository. The question is whether we get involved in something like SCORM, or whether we create our own system for tagging and uploading content. While I personally like the model of using blog-like tags to describe pieces of content, I also think it might be attractive to go in a direction no one else at the university seems to be exploring--feel free to correct that if you will, but I don't know of anyone at PSU working actively to create content that is SCORM-compliant. So playing in this space would be a way for SI to contribute to the larger PSU (and beyond) community.

On the other hand, it might be nice to create something that combined social networking capabilities with ease-of-use, searchability, voting/commenting functions, easy editing and sharing back, AND the ability to easily add the stuff to our CMS. Not asking much, am I?

Regarding Edison's peer review tool, I agree that we should take a look at iPeer. That having been said, however, we need to make it an absolute necessity that whatever peer evaluation tool we use integrates with rosters in Angel. To me, that's a deal-breaker for anything we look at. If it doesn't integrate with Angel, or cannot be made to integrate, we can't use it--because we don't want to have to manually add folks to teams or rosters every semester. That's another version of our "being in the way" for faculty. It should be automatic. I also think that whatever we do, there should be a bank of suggested questions, but instructors should be able to easily and on the fly edit, remove, and add questions of their own. There are other things a peer eval. should be able to do, as well (let students evaluate team members on one screen, good graphical interface, AJAX-y widgets, and extensibility).

Finally, and this may need to go in a separate post because I have a lot more thoughts on this, I think we should seriously reconsider the "how" of how we do things at SI--everything, not just courses. I've been reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, and it's giving me many, many ideas about how we can change how we work to take advantage of the fact that the world has changed so much. More on that, as I said, in another post. :)