With the eteam’s findings, it’s useful to look at a systemic way to move from a course-centric approach to department- or program-centric.
An article in innovate, journal of online education , talks about one example of moving from course-centric to program-centric technology enhancement. They call out their need for a standard way of addressing plagiarism, reference citation and writing in the discipline. Instead of putting these resources inside their course management system (effectively restricting access to just members), they intentionally made these resources in open web sites. That’s a generous approach that can only improve resources like MERLOT and World Lecture Hall . Their topics lend themselves to the learning object model — though this summer the eteam found few true learning objects out there.
I can see many situations where developing some departmental learning objects could benefit all courses in the curriculum — being able to point a student needing to brush up on a common topic, like citations, to a quality resource can free up class time previously spent reviewing what they should already know. Time is always an issue but approaching such a project as department can help reduce the time each person would spend.
I’m lukewarm to their approach of streaming video. Having clips that are too long or that try to copy a lecture isn’t really taking advantage of the medium. I find online interactive elements, typically done with Flash, far more engaging than any video I watch online.
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