Getting back on track. It’s been a while since I have written a reflection. 

We’ve been really busy with the Craft Service course . Every Thursday I just seem to run out of time to write and at 3 days a week, the weeks go by really quickly. I will go back to making a few notes in a draft throughout the days so that I’m not so frazzled on Thursdays.

Margaret and I have been taking a ‘divide and conquer’ approach to course content: proofing, organizing, creating thumbnails, formatting (So.Much.Formatting), and coming up with exercises and quiz questions. This has been more or less the formula for the past 3 weeks and it’s engaging and kind of fun. It’s not ideal that we’re building a course that has students in it but that’s how it goes sometimes. Laying down tracks in front of a moving train.

I am using the accessibility checker in Microsoft more and more. I’m going to do a little video or something about it for future because it’s a really easy way to get people thinking about accessible content. For our documents lately it doesn’t like the low contrast headers and I get errors about text not lining up with pictures. I’m going to look up the text/image issue and see what that’s about – didn’t seem to me from what I understand about the tech – that it would be a major issue. I’m also not sure that split and merged tables cells are still a big problem. I’ve read a bit on both sides of that.

My strategy for next week is to get all the module structure in place in Blackboard first. Then, have the thumbnails and documents in place. While checking the documents I’ll see what kind of exercises I can come up with and if I can gather a few quiz questions. Next step will be formatting any Word docs I need for exercises. This is what I got hung up on at the end of the week and because of that I missed things I usually wouldn’t like BB settings and the module overview bullets section. I’m going to work Monday and Tuesday next week and then Wednesday and Thursday mornings. I hope that Thursday will be a time when I can walk through and look for details – I hope that every Thursday, but hey, could happen 🙂 . I’m going to take note of any issues that need fixing but only go in one direction – forward. Then I can back track and work through the fixes.

I feel better for getting this done even if it’s Sunday.