Everything takes longer online. – Ko & Rossen

After reading the book and looking at the other materials for this week, this statement kept me thinking about my future online course. How do I adjust my syllabus/lesson plans to take into consideration the longer time students might need in an online class to complete assignments? Also, what impact does the introduction of Blackboard or Web 2.0 tools have on the amount of content I want to deliver and my expectations for students to utilize and respond to that content? I can see that I will need flexibility in how I deliver my class. This has me leaning towards delivering the class week-to-week rather than letting students view the whole course and be able to work ahead.

When it comes to designing my online classroom I want to place all of the content for each week on a single page and utilize links to readings, assignments, discussions, etc. I’m going to start working on a template for each week so that I can keep a uniformity in how I present the material. I can see how important it would be to keep the same type of fonts and color schemes to help students navigate.

Lisa’s “things I wish I knew” list was very helpful and left me with these thoughts –

I’ve saved all of my content on flash drives and have backed up the material on my home computer. Everything is in Word, I think from now on, I’ll save content as plain text as well.

Last year I started thinking about all the content I had in Blackboard at four different college districts. I started to ask about ownership of the content and was reassured that district policy stated that all created content was owned by the instructor. I think that we need to be vigilant on this topic and keep up with our school’s policies concerning intellectual content.

I also appreciated “Content isn’t a course.” I’ll always keep that in mind. It reminded my of almost ten year ago when my wife took an online class. I looked it over and it appeared to be a dump of information with little organization. My wife was constantly asking what the instructor wanted her to do with all of that information. Pedagogy..Pedagogy..

I really like Twitter. I’m using it to deliver new articles and comments on the Middle East for a class. I can link to important articles for the students to read and they can follow the Tweets of people from BB Neytanyahu to Hassan Rouhani. I was hoping that it might replace my RSS feed reader, but I’ve found that I need both to keep up on all that goes on in the Middle East.