Starting the New Year and the new week off with a bang.
This was a busy week right off the start. We are hiring for two postings so there were some meetings around those as well as some instructor support. Monday and Tuesday were very full.
Margaret and I had a session to prepare for on Tuesday so we met a couple of times. There wasn’t much time to work on it before Christmas as we both had other projects. It was mapped out in a google doc but we had some holes to fill and we needed to figure out who would say what. We had three participants and we covered 5 principles for engagement and used some of the speaker content from the various conferences we attended in November. I enjoyed doing it.
I’ve also been working one on one with an instructor this week. I have been giving them homework assignments before each meeting and things are coming together.
Monday and Tuesday kept filling up so I blocked out some time in my calendar for prep time for my own sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. I had outlines but wanted to feel more prepared. I am starting to put more things like that in my calendar – even a half hour to sort out priorities – because the time just seems to disappear. I’ve had limited success with this strategy in the past but it seemed to work this week.
The session on ‘clearing the path’ and creating clear navigation went well. Again, it was a small group and it’s practical information so pretty straight forward. For the session on ‘putting out the welcome mat’ now that I’ve done it once I know that next time I will make it more conversational up front. We can unpack a few terms together. I think I can also use some visuals to see how people ‘feel’ about them. This one is still practical information but it’s more personal. I used a module in the sampler course for most of the content. It was a small group again ,with a couple who had been in the session the day before. We had some time to talk about their specific teaching situations and formats and how to bring in some of the community/humanizing pieces.
Speaking of the sampler course I was able to take a little time to revisit it. It was tricky to be objective while I was immersed in creating the content. Now I am looking at it with my Instructional Designer hat on and I can see some missing pieces. I created a folder on what a module should/could look like but I haven’t followed my own advice. I now need to go through and create a consistent format for each module and find some ways to logically break up long pieces of content. I also want to revisit the name and decide if that’s what it even is anymore. I took out the pieces on assessments and grade center because they didn’t seem to fit any longer. I’ll take a holistic look at it and what the goals for the course are and make a decision. We have so much content on ‘how to’ do things so I don’t want this to be ‘that’, but it’s hard to separate sometimes. Anyway… I am putting a block of time in my calendar next week to address the consistency and content chunking.
I enjoyed my break and it’s good to be back. I feel like this was a really productive week.