Your Project
You will be working with your instructional designer to identify a project you can work on during Course Design. This project is something you will present to the rest of the group in our final meeting together. You will also have a chance to share it with at least one other colleague to get feedback about it before the the final presentation.
What kinds of things can be a project?
If you are developing a fully online course that starts within the next six months, your project should be to build out at least one full module in your course. If you have more time to build you may want to focus on the worry you identified in Homework for Week 2. For instance, let's say that you are worried that your online discussions won't be nearly as engaging as the ones that happen in your face-to-face class. You and your instructional designer might work together to identify the topics you want to cover in depth and then come up with ten, juicy, thought-provoking questions for each week. Below are some other ideas but, in the end, this should be a project that produces something useful for your course.
Some Project ideas
- Explanation of a Core Concept: This could be a well-written page or set of pages with clear illustrations. It could also be a video or other form of presentation; it could be an interactive tutorial that you produce. Your instructional designer can work with you to identify tools that will support whatever it is you are trying to explain.
- Model the Use of a Tool You Assign to Students: Let's say you would like to ask students to create an interactive timeline, a map, a webpage, or a presentation but you want to make sure that the tool they use can do everything required by the assignment. If it were a timeline, you could start by exploring the tools in the category of timelines with your instructional designer. Once you've decided on the best timeline tool for your needs you could create a model timeline to show students what you expect them to do.
- A Rubric: You might create a rubric for an assignment where students typically fall short of your expectations. A thoughtful, well-articulated rubric is a challenge to write but enormously beneficial in the long run. As a starting point, your instructional designer can direct you to the multiple rubric resources CDLI maintains. In addition to working with you to refine the rubric, your instructional designer can show how to set up the rubric in Canvas so that it is attached to the assignment.
- A Full Module: As mentioned, fleshing out a full module with all of the readings, videos, discussion(s) and assignments is critical to budgeting your time. We strongly suggest that if you are developing a course that will be taught within the next six months to make this your project.
- The Mechanics of a Complex or Scaffolded Assignment: If you have an assignment that has several moving parts, like group work with multiple drafts of a project followed by a presentation of the the project and peer review, you might want to figure out the logistics, write all the instructions and make sure that it will all work as planned. Again, your instructional designer can help with this.
- Thought-Provoking Discussion Questions for Each Week: As mentioned in the initial paragraph, coming up with a great list of discussion questions that build off each other would be a useful project.