Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning
Instructional Design
The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning has several instructional design initiatives for developing online courses. These initiatives will result in implementing or bringing up to date several resources for faculty teaching online courses and new training for students enrolled in online courses. The first resource described below, Guidelines for Developing Online Courses, is underway and is the underpinning for most of the other resources. Please watch for more specificity in the other sections as the guidelines near completion in the near future.
Guidelines for Developing Online Courses
Missouri State’s instructional designers are working to create guidelines for faculty who are developing online courses. These guidelines are intended to influence the general quality of online courses while still leaving great latitude to individual faculty in designing and delivering courses using their own pedagogical choices and style. The finished guidelines for online course development will drive new training initiatives.
The guidelines for Developing Online Courses will also guide the development of a template for creating new online courses. After the guidelines are completed, they will be applied in the design of a template to assist faculty in creating new courses. We anticipate creating initial Blackboard courses in the likeness of the template for approved online courses. The template will include information recommended for all courses, and depending on the final guidelines, could affect the course’s graphical design and organization. This template will be delivered to faculty after course approval. That faculty will then develop the new online course using the template as is or altering it to his/her satisfaction.
Our Instructional Designers, along with the Missouri State Online team, will develop training based on the new guidelines and template. This will initially be a live workshop. Online training based on the live workshop will be developed as time permits. The online training will be less inclusive than the live training. Both the live training and the online training could be broken into small workshops and smaller online modules to accommodate those desiring a refresher on training aimed at specific skills.
As a minimum, online training will be developed for students for how to get started and how to do common tasks on Blackboard.
Blackboard Faculty Community
We will create a Blackboard Faculty Community that could include online discussions, MSU faculty panels, and external speakers.