Dev/Rev Planning

Dev/Rev Planning Process

Dev/Rev = New Course Development and Course Revision Projects

For the past four to five years, I’ve been assisting with developing processes for our College to improve our Dev/Rev Process. While I am an Assistant Director, that title is rather misleading as I am relatively low in the organizational hierarchy of the College. This is relevant because I wouldn’t have been able to make the progress I have to improve things for the designers, which includes myself, and the faculty if I didn’t have the support of my Directors and the Faculty and Administrative leadership of the College. We still have a lot of work to do together but I am happy for the progress we have made.

The presentation above is a distillation of a more detailed process flowchart.

https://app.diagrams.net/ was a huge find as it is a powerful, open-source option for creating diagrams. I really enjoyed working with this software.

Questions about Designing Teaching for Inclusion and Diversity

I attended a workshop yesterday for IST faculty called “Inclusive ADDIE” and at one point, we were asked the following questions based on what we had learned so far.

How would you design a student group project for one of your classes?
How would you handle dividing students into groups?
How would you revise the content, examples, resources?

I don’t feel like I had great answers based on what I had learned. I started with what I would do without particular thought to inclusion and diversity.

How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Start with learning outcomes, then decide upon an assessment and rubric if needed, develop directions that includes all the required references to relevant learning content, review my content for accessibility.
How would you handle dividing students into groups? I don’t think I would change. I prefer to form groups based on the order that students made submissions to the first, low-stakes assignment of the course. Having said that, if this were a WC section I would also try to account for timezones.
How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I would look to make sure that I am considering minority groups at least ⅓ of the time in all of my examples, content, and assessments. This one, I took directly from the content of the workshop.

After listening to some other participant’s responses, I copied or added the following:

How would you design a student group project for one of your classes? Provide reminders to class guidelines related to etiquette and group work. We have or can find these guidelines, but I wonder how inclusive and diverse those guidelines already are?
How would you handle dividing students into groups? I didn’t have anything new to add here. Teaching through the WC, I do not get to know the students enough to be able to assign groups in ways that account for inclusion and diversity. I don’t think that’s how groups are formed in the real world, so why should I try to make accommodations in my class? I believe that my role would be to try to address issues around inclusion and diversity if they present themselves. I realize that is a slippery slope because if I am not openly addressing inclusion and diversity through out the course, how will my students know that I will address those concerns when there is an issue in the class. How will students even know to be mindful of inclusion and diversity practices in my class? Perhaps I need to develop a resource for faculty to help us provide guidelines to students about working in groups in ways that are inclusive and diverse? Teaching from the WC course template for the class I teach, I’m not sure we have much information about best practices for students working in groups. Perhaps I need to start there and include universal best practices in that resource from the start.
How would you revise the content, examples, resources? I believe Jon Hughes mentioned to create group assignments with roles to allow for individuals to have a voice. This reminded me of Col. Jake Graham (ret. USMC) group work assignments where he will assign students different analytical roles depending upon the scenario/exercise he’s provided them. Dr. Lynette Yarger reminded us of something Dr. Alison Murphy shared with faculty during her McMurtry Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award presentation: create something for an under-represented community and through doing so, you will learn more about that community.

Peer Evaluation of Group Work Options

Qualtrics Peer Evaluation

Qualtrics is a great option for delivering a lightweight option for peer evaluations of group work performance.

At Penn State, faculty and staff are able to request a license to use Qualtrics. This is required for this approach. Please contact your IT department for more details.

Once you have a license make a copy of this project into your list of projects. This is also required because you will be managing the setup, delivery, and analysis of the data.

Click to view/take sample evaluation

To setup your project to use in your course, please follow these directions:

Step 1. Make a copy of the peer evaluation into your Qualtrics account

Step 2. Export your Canvas Grades

Step 3. Download this CSV template

Step 4. Copy-and-paste the first column, all of your student’s names, into the CSV file in the first column replacing the sample data. You can ignore all of the other empty cells under the other columns. Save your changes.

Step 5. Import your CSV roster to your Qualtrics project (see “Importing Reusable Choices” section)

To deliver the peer evaluation in your course, please follow these directions:

Copy the distribution link
Paste the link into your Canvas Course or share via a Canvas Announcement or a class email

To view the results after the evaluation has closed, please follow these directions:

Open the evaluation in Qualtrics
Switch to view the reports

Other Evaluation Approaches Tested

The following tests all fail for the same basic reason: the approaches are not viable because different evaluations are stored in the same position and would require a manual process to separate the results for each student being evaluated. Each test does explore different ways of inputting data and piping text in from previous questions along with using display logic algorithms.

Test 1: Depending on how many teammates an evaluator chooses, they are provided just enough fields to enter the names of their teammates. Based on the names they have entered, the evaluator is provided with a matrix of selections for each teammate.
Test 2: The owner of the survey copies-and-pastes the names of the students into a list of potential choices for the evaluator to chose from to indicate who is on their team. Based on the names selected, the evaluator is provided with a separate slider-matrix of evaluation rankings.
Test 3: Evaluators are provided form entry fields to enter the names of each of their teammates and those names are automatically populated on separate rows of a slider-matrix where the evaluator ranks their teammates contributions to the group work.

Earlier Efforts

I tested a similar evaluation process using a different approach that would be used for evaluations of IA/LA/TAs at the end of a semester. I did not feel this was an approach that would realistically work because of the amount of back-end data manipulation required to make sense of the results. This approach asks evaluators to group selections together to indicate who was in the evaluator’s class sections. Then evaluators would provide rankings for each assistant based on their performance.
In 2018, I worked with Christian Vinten-Johansen <v23@psu.edu> with the Penn State Accessibility Team to create an accessible alternative to a CATME Peer Evaluation. At the time, CATME was not accessible.
I found earlier attempts as well that I’ll eventually document here.

Video Copyright and Licensing for Instructional Designers Training

I attended an online training, “Copyright for Instructional Designers” (scroll down the page) provided by Ana Enriquez on the very complex topic of copyright when it comes to video content, but not limited to just video.

My main take-aways:

Contact Ana (aee32@psu.edu) or Brandy Karl (bak25@psu.edu) with questions
Do your due diligence to follow the laws while working on a project for PSU, there may be some protections under PSU Policy IP05 but don’t count on it because there is some specific language about “system users”
There are three sections of Copyright law that we use
- Fair Use (107)
- Classroom use (110-1)
- TEACH Act (110-2)
We only need to qualify for one of these sections, not all three
The laws may not and do not make common sense, but that’s not important, what is important is to try and understand how they work – and this is why I am not a lawyer

Media for INTAF 897: Deception and Counter-Deception

The following are some materials gathered for Col. Jacob Graham’s (ret. USMC) INTAF 897 course. These 3 particular subjects were mentioned in Malcom Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know.”

Go to this Sway

Accessibility

None of the images or videos have been QA’d for accessibility at this time. Updates will be posted here. Given that this Sway is only a draft, accommodations like transcripts will be developed on an “as needed” basis.

Sway

Sway has some nice media features and makes adding images and video relatively easy, although there are some limitations.

To add media, click on the “+” > “Media” tab > choose the form of media.
It doesn’t seem possible to preview the media within Sway, so I previewed videos in YouTube.
For the videos I wanted to use, I copied-pasted the URL in Sway’s Media Search field to display the exact video I was looking for.
Sway doesn’t natively display the titles of the YouTube videos, so I copied-pasted them in as captions so that the audience has some sense of what they can view.

I also discovered by accident that you can group Sway elements by clicking-dragging the elements over one another. There are grouping options available as well. This might be a good strategy to keep related content closely associated for pedagogical reasons.

Kaltura

Created a Channel in Kaltura
Created a Playlist in Kaltura
“Add New” > “YouTube Video”
Copied-pasted link to video
Returned to new Kaltura Channel > clicked on checkbox next to video > “Publish”

This process takes too long. I don’t want to have to do multiple steps for every video.

In-line CSS and Left and Right-alignment on a single line of text

In a few lesson pages in SRA 111, we have two different topics on the same page. The content appears sequentially on the page. I needed a solution to let visitors know that below the first chunk of content, there was indeed a second chunk of content.

I found information on two websites that have helped me with a possible solution:

With this information, I was able to code the following…

<h2 style=”text-align: left;”>[Title of Content Chunk 1] <span style=”float: right;”><a href=”#chunk2″>[Title of Content Chunk 2]</a></span></h2>

…

<hr />
<h2><a id=”chunk2″></a>[Title of Content Chunk 2]</h2>

The top of the page looks like this…

And the link takes the user down to where the <id> tag is…

While not an entirely standard way of formatting text in our lessons, I’m going to try this out and see how it works for now. It’s better than not doing anything!

Storyboards for Analytic Exercises for Col. Jacob Graham

I started working with Howard on developing a few multimedia deliverables for one of our faculty, Col. Jacob Graham, who teaches SRA courses here at the College of IST.

Based on materials from Jake, I storyboarded some concepts that we’ll be building on this summer. I forgot how much I love storyboarding!

Update to Recording Lectures

I’ve updated my Evernote: Recording Lectures.

I used this page to document processes and strategies for faculty-authors to make the task of recording audio content for online lectures easier. I start off with some specific information on how to make a recording using Audacity. I even have a screencast that I’ve made to walk the audience through one possible workflow. The second-half of my notes covers best practices that will help with the planning, recording, and post-recording phases. These notes are helpful when I sit down with faculty-authors and serve as a good reminder for both of us because there are a lot of considerations when setting out to capture high-quality audio content.

This update is related to a revision of SRA 221: Overview of Information Security where I’m trying something new for our department: hired professional voice talent. I made a connection and was able to find a fantastic graduate student who will be perfect for the job. We’re still working on back-end paperwork, but I’m confident that we can work something out.

ANGEL: Certificate-Generating Tool Instructions

I met with a group of IDs and IPSs from Outreach to present on some work that I did while working on a solution for the PSU School of Nursing.

I have documented my overview, procedures, and implementation notes in an Evernote: “ANGEL: Certificate-Generating Tool Instructions“.

This project covers the design, development and implementation of a solution that was developed to automatically generate certificates-of-completion for participants taking online continuing education credits. Nurses in PA need to maintain professional development credits in an ongoing basis. PSU Outreach worked with the School of Nursing to develop self-paced online learning that would satisfy this need.

An “OpenU” approach to course design

Before I start, I wanted to say that I’m going to take a different approach. I just posted an incomplete post to prove or remind myself that I can’t possibly cover all of the things that are going on. I’m having a hard enough time documenting what I do on an ongoing basis let alone add reflection to the work. At least I have what I am doing fairly well documented on my Google Site. So, my new approach isn’t to reflect on everything that has happened since my last post. I’m going to focus on one thing and try and build my skills there before considering something more expansive.

I don’t know much about The Open University in the UK, but we’re going to try an approach to developing courses that represents a significant shift for us here in World Campus Learning Design. Thankfully, I work with people who do understand what the Open University does and can help with understanding what and perhaps how we can use from their model.

The general approach that WCLD uses is based on a two-semester development time-frame. The basic idea is that if we want a course to launch in the Spring of ’12, we’ll start development in the Summer ’11 semester. One instructional designer will meet with one course author to develop and online course together. The author serves as the subject matter expert and is generally a faculty member selected by the academic-partner department head. The ID works with the author to provide pedagogical and design support. The ID is also a point-of-contact for numerous other resources like permissions, accessibility, multimedia, technical support, etc.

The big difference with this OpenU approach would be extending the development time to three months. The first month would be a brainstorming and planning session open to multiple ID’s and authors working on defining program-level design considerations. The second and third semesters would be used in a more traditional development tasks, however there would be differences how the ID’s and authors might collaborate during this time.

This is a fairly rough description of what we’re planning to do with WC Italian (IT) courses. I would be one of two ID’s, the other would be Juan Xia. Initially there would be three faculty members working together in the brainstorming session and then one would be selected as an author for each course. None of the faculty assignments are set yet, so we don’t know what that might look like.

I’m really looking forward to this approach. There are a number of reasons why this is potentially a great way to develop new courses in the future. First, I really like the idea of collaborating with another designer on a course. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, biases, perspectives, and styles. I don’t know Juan that well, but I’m sure we’ll get to know each other very well by the time this is over. Not only is she on a different design team, but she’s three time zones away! I would think this would be a great opportunity for her to feel more connected to the ebb and flow of daily life here in WCLD. She’ll bring to the table a very different set of competencies. Of course there will be challenges, but I think we’re the a great team to discover and work out potential bumps that the rest of the unit could benefit from.

Second, the brainstorming phase will potentially provide a unique chance to address faculty buy-in, faculty development, and explore a wide variety of solutions. I hope that we can get to the point where we can share inspirations from a variety of sources and define a strategy of offering innovative, world-class courses.

Lastly, I think we would be able develop higher quality courses for our learners because we’d be able to integrate support resources at the brainstorming stage and not during implementation. We’d be able to consider their ideas early enough when it would make a difference on the core design.

I’ll definitely be posting more about our progress and hang-ups.