Online Course Development: So Sakai...

Last year, we switched from the Blackboard platform to Sakai. I spent last summer frantically getting myself up-to-speed on Sakai since all of my course assignments and materials are housed there.

It worked fine for me last year, but I (and students) lamented the plain, visually unappealing and less-intuitive interface. I especially disliked the lack (or so I thought) of customization and the separate sections/files for resources, assignments and test/quizzes.

Going into this online class, I worried about how I would make the material "flow" in Sakai. I was very proficient with Blackboard and used html to enhance the appearance. I liked the way Bb let you create tabs that could contain the entire module (videos, handouts, assignment links, etc.). I was afraid students would get "lost" trying to pull all of the related materials together in Sakai.

Enter Steven Wicker, an IT support person, and his Sakai customization workshop! While I had some vague ideas that Sakai could be customized, this workshop quickly gave me the "how to's".

I came home and started playing with the tools/techniques and soon I had created "web pages" within Sakai that contained quizzes, embedded videos, animations and all of my supporting materials!

If you use Sakai and would like to see an example of how this looks, just touch base with me!

Online Course Development: In the Beginning...

I am spending my summer developing an online course on Professional Development topics. I realized that blogging about my process might be helpful to someone considering online program delivery. This process has been challenging and thought-provoking, but incredibly stimulating and actually very fun!

It has required me to reflect and refresh myself on areas including pedagogy, various media that facilitates information delivery, how students prefer to learn, tools that can help this process, and even HTML to make the interface I'm using (Sakai) more appealing and user-friendly.

I proposed the course back in February as a combination of online and in-person workshops. While faculty were excited about the content, they wanted the entire course to be delivered online! This allows students to complete the class during the summer and immediately utilize course content in the fall of their senior year. A totally online class is a first in our school of business! How exciting to be ground-breaking!

After the course was approved, I realized I was on a tight deadline to get everything in place. Fortunately, I have presented all of these workshops as part of an ongoing in-person class I already teach. I even already had videos developed on each topic because I require students who missed my class to catch up through the web videos. That made the process of developing the workshops for this online class a little easier, however, I needed to rethink how the videos and other supplemental materials actually were used. It was imperative that I implement the best ways to engage students and ensure their mastery of the materials.