There is something strange going on with Flickr right now and I can open it (tried 2 browsers) but I think my laptop may need a restart because other things are behaving weirdly. I emailed myself an image 🙂
I spent some time writing up some thoughts on the Brightspace course that I finished last week. I think it’s helpful to keep in mind as we develop for others. One of the things that nagged at me a bit – and I don’t know if I’ve shared this already or not – was that some of the activities, or ‘workflows’ that we did seemed to have no context, or relationship to the others so I wasn’t sure what the purpose was. Still, I learned things. I don’t mean to be super critical and I value having the practice of pushing the buttons and learning some of the how and why of the tools. Next week we move on to building assessments and student grading.
I met with an instructor who teaches log scaling and helped him out with cleaning up his course a bit. It is not going to win any ‘beautiful design’ awards but I think the instructor feels more confident about how things work and I introduced him to the announcements tools that he put to good use to tell students what had changed on the home page. We put in some folders and created some structure and flow for the students. It’s mostly synchronous on BlueJeans so the Blackboard shell plays a supporting role. We even got into assessment a little bit as this course helps students prepare for a provincial exam.
Jen and I have met a few times this week. It’s nice to be collaborating and sharing ideas. We’re working on some frameworks for our sessions with timing and highlights. I think 2 out of 3 are pretty well finished and the third is shaping up.
I have been working across the three presentations and have started putting some things into our course site to lay it out a bit. I embedded a padlet to demonstrate that. We are tossing around the idea of using a padlet for part of our introductions or in place of a group discussion and then we can embed that in the course instead. I put an intro page into each module with some outcomes to model that.
I attended the College Conversation about the CARE plan. There is still a lot of stress out there… I also Attended an OER Myth busting workshop. I signed up mostly to test whether the UBC System would let me but also because I wanted to hear what sort of arguments there are for not using Open resources and what some of the answers to those concerns might be. I think there was a bit more of a library/research focus in this session than what I’m used to hearing. They had a cool presentation tool: Open Access Myths
Next week I am going to start part 2 of my certificate course on Monday and do some more work scripting my parts of 2 of our sessions. I’m going to create some charts matching the tools and functions in Brightspace too. I will also be continuing to work on the course we’re using as a demo. Jen and I are going to do a run through of a session (2 if possible) on Tuesday and see how it feels. And, I’ll get some more reading in for the FLC discussion on Wednesday.