Digital Dog

They describe the school as being in the middle of nowhere. They wanted to develop an online program that "wasn't an electronic version of correspondence education."

The Learning Objects (LOs) at NW Missouri are developed by a team that includes the subject expert (faculty member), an instructional designer, a computer expert, and a student. Their AT staff spends a lot of time developing LOs. The first thing is a meeting where all parties get together to discuss the project. The AT staff accesses Merlot, etc. to see if the project being requested has been done elsewhere. In cases where there is already an LO available the faculty have the opportunity to accept it but usually do not; as Erik Poole discovered here a few years back, everyone wants something created just for them.

A problem that is immediately apparent concerns copyright infringement. The LOs created by this team, while often impressive, take liberal advantage of found images.
Were they to create the images themselves they'd probably need another team member: a digital artist. They belatedly became aware of the issue, and now all projects are vetted by a librarian. Personally that seems like the wrong team member to add; having an artist on the staff would eliminate the need for vetting altogether.

Notes:

• Their office gives "grants" of $1,000.00 to faculty so faculty can come to their office and have a learning object made. No, I'm not kidding.
  
• Because they use Flash almost exclusively none of their projects are ADA compliant.
  
• They also use Tegrity - the only other school I've seen it at.
  
• More LO creation tools can be found at http://learningware.com, http://ambrosine.com/resource.html (games), and http://flashkit.com
  

Victoria McGlone, Library Director FCCJ (convener); Kevin Kelly, Faculty Development SFSU; Merry Carter, Faculty Development, FCCJ

"This conference is the intellectual highlight of Jacksonville" - really not so hard to believe.

Carter -

See: http://web.fccj.edu/~kwhitten/website/

Discusses the CREOLE (CREating Optimal Learning Environments) program: "CREOLE is being developed as a partnership with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University serving as the technical developer and Florida Community College Jacksonville providing project management and content development. The CREOLE project addresses a major, international need-to facilitate faculty expertise in applying learning and motivation research and theory to the development and teaching of higher education courses."

Four modules in the CREOLE program:

• Learning Research
  
• Motivation Research
  
• Blended Course
  
• Online Course

CREOLE was funded with a FIPSE grant and is available commercially (which explains why it is being flogged mercilessly during this conference). It uses either WebCT or Bb
and costs $250.00 per user. Apparently people from all over the world are participating.

Kelly --

See: http://oct.sfsu.edu

Also funded by (the no longer available) FIPSE grant, SFSUs program aims to offer an orientation to college teaching. It was originally developed for teaching fellows in the science program but is being expanded across the curriculum. Both this program and CREOLE are voluntary but staffs at both schools are working on making them mandatory for at least a portion of the population (first time DL teachers, etc.)

30-minute modules include introduction to course design, course development, course implementation, and assessment. Unlike CREOLE it is free, but it does not include interactivity.

One wonderful demonstration of a product of this process was a video featuring a nursing professor who took her kids to swinging doors in a hallway and assigned them roles as parts of the heart. Using the doors as heart valves they acted out proper heart activity, then a heart attack. Very funny and very memorable. As an aside, I was chatting with Kelly after my own presentation and I told him about this wonderful video I saw during one of the presentations and he interrupted me saying "Harris, that's the one I showed!"

Program features include:

• Flexibility
  
• Interactivity
  
• Mentor participation

As a final cautionary note he suggests we remember that these things are not built overnight; they take institutional commitment and time.