5 good observations about online course design

Faculty Focus has a great short article today -- Five Common Pitfalls of Online Course Design by Elizabeth St. Germain. All 5 pitfalls are on target, but I see #1 -- "Upload your course materials, then call it a day" -- all the time. I think this is the most common mistake made by first-time online instructors who don't spend any time understanding the differences between face-to-face and online teaching. The thing that typically goes along with this design mistake is to fail to replace the face-to-face time with anything at all. In the worst case, the course assignments and readings are retained and narrator-less presentations are uploaded to the course, and that's it.

All of these pitfalls can be avoided by participating in our free online courses for online instructors.

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Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

Podcast features in Blackboard 7.3

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .

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