The eLC assists faculty with their educational use of new technologies. It's a very team-based environment, with faculty members, media specialists and technical specialists. Depending on the client's need, he or she may work individually with one of us, or with an entire team. We get a broad range of requests from faculty, from simple such as scanning a single image or showing them how to use the scanner, to complex, such as helping them re-design a classroom-based curriculum that takes advantage of technology, or creating fully online courses for the college.
My additional and specific
responsibility is the design and development of all online courseware for
Continuing Education, which offers about 95% of the college's fully online
courses. Significant areas that I must address in my work relate to the
academic issues surrounding online learning; technical, production, and
maintenance issues in the development of web-based learning; project management;
helping faculty adjust to new ways of thinking about instruction and the
development of instructional content and activities; keeping abreast of
innovative technologies; and modelling best instructional design practices
in the courseware projects I work on. The URL's below have been selected
from this broad topic base.
Samples of Courseware
created by my colleagues and me -
Login as follows:
UserID: ctl1799.demo
Password: demo
In the MySeneca-Subjects
portion of the screen, click on the course name "Demo".
Then just follow the instructions
to access some samples of online courses created in the past few years.
I'm especially proud of the
first sample, ACC106, in which our goal was to make Introductory Accounting
a fun, yet viable online learning experience!
http:www/bbdev.senecac.on.ca
- link no longer active
Web Accessibility
For the past seven years
or so, all of our web-based content was designed for a typical user working
at their own desktop computer, using Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator.
These days the importance of making our content accessible to special needs
users is changing the way we think about both the design and delivery of
instructional content, and the very nature of the intended online learning
experience.
Here's an article that touches
on just some of the issues that my colleagues and I have to think about
in developing online courseware.
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/articles/vis_vs_cog
Open Source
Commercial web-based course
management systems have been evolving for some years now. However, some
educational institutions are moving away from licensed vendor products
towards tools that are shared freely, collaboratively developed, and more
customizable by the institution.
This article describes one
of the most significant recent developments, the Sakai project.
http://www.uctltc.org/news/2004/12/feature.php
Learning Object Repositories
A psychology course may
teach Maslow's theory of motivation within a particular context, to meet
specific learning outcomes, but an introductory marketing course may teach
the same content topic in a different context and for a different educational
purpose. In recognition of multiple needs and uses of the same content,
a lot of the instructional content prepared for the web in the past few
years has been produced as discrete, re-usable "objects", rather than as
"courses" or units of content. Here's a link to Seneca's prototype repository
of learning objects. Any of the objects in this repository are available
free for educational use, and can be used either as stand alone content
pieces or supplements to the educator's own content.
http://slope.senecac.on.ca
- use "browse objects"
Teaching Online
Teaching online can alter
our views of education from both an academic and an administrative perspective.
One of the challenges my colleagues and I have faced in the past few years
is helping the policy makers to understand the operational and administrative
issues that affect online teaching and learning. This article introduces
some key issues in creating an appropriate institutional environment for
online teaching.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/classrooms/index.html