Aloha all,
I shared a bit about my experience as a course reviewer and wanted to elaborate on the experience. The rubric categories for the award submissions are: course design, interaction & collaboration, learner support, assessment and the levels for in each category are: exemplary, accomplished, promising and incomplete. Here's the link to the Exemplary Program site that includes a link to the rubric: http://kb.blackboard.com/display/EXEMPLARY/2010+Exemplary+Course+Program+DocumentsAlthough I felt like the rubric was very detailed, including measures for each level, I still felt like instructional design was not enough of a focus. I felt like you could rate yourself as "accomplished" in certain categories by strictly following the criteria in that level and yet how the content was presented could still seem very lacking in the appeal to various learning styles. I think our own courses are not only a testiment to the cultural content presented and the awesome faciliation skills of our instructors, but really emphasizes the value of our instructional designers. I could definitely see how the courses I reviewed contained all the necessary components of effective distance learning best practices including teaching methods, but the "feeling" of the course was not welcoming and I would imagine it would be difficult for some leaners to really feel motivated and engaged. I did see that facilitator interaction and their passion for their subjects and caring for their learners, did help to overcome, what I felt, was a lack in design. Most of my comments were suggestions to the instructors on simple tools, that we use, that they could easily incoporate. As we dive further into re-development projects for A`o Makua and `Ike Hawai`i, I think this rubric would be a good start for us to begin to construct our own measures of an effective online course. I would evaluate all the categories for various sections of the course and not rank them on an overall status and I would like us to include cultural measures and diverse learning style measures as well as a section on specifically building a learning community beyond just communication and interaction. Just as a side note, looks like KSDL has the most winning entries :)
`O ia wale nö (that's it for now),
Kelly
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