Content Development Session

· Support all the way through the process
· UNC-W takes proposals for online courses, upon approval, faculty member gets 5k+laptop stipend and a technical team is assembled to accommodate the faculty member. 2 CCs and library for it support.
· Are librarians overlooked as a resource for online course development, etc.?
· Pedagogical issues and having faculty look at the inherent structure imposed on students by the various course mgmt. systems
· Content and form and woven together, one can control the other. Will the form prevent faculty from teaching the course that they want to teach? Tltc should be inviting students and faculty to these collaboration meetings.
· We are using a "tool" centric approach; we should be using a "task" centric approach. The objective is paramount.
· A central repository of tools would allow improved task-fitting
· Quality control, content approval committee, tool approval committee
· Non-web tools (LaBov and Beyond, media recommendation tool)
· General consensus that we do not know how to create good online courses
· Legal issues of letting just anyone view a course in guest mode (forums in particular)
· Programs like Dream Weaver allow for greater flexibility, creativity
· Angel - program that allows plugins for forums, etc.
· General issue of supporting many different platforms for course development and look and feel from an IT staff vs. faculty perspective. Forced unity occurs because administration wants to see consistency across degree programs and universities.
· Interest groups focused and organized around the various tools and course mgmt. systems. These groups could meet online through email lists.
· Create GA sponsored email lists for each of the tools, course mgmt. systems.
· Should IT staff have content backgrounds?
· Appropriate uses of technology tools in teaching (ex. Uses and abuses of PowerPoint)
· Cross-platform issues, large majority of funds are channeled through wintel in the IT departments. Mac and Unix support.
· Faculty concern that similar systems create boredom/tedium
· Create a system-wide clearinghouse and support group for online course development
· Instructional design workshops, train the trainer sessions hosted by tltc for some of the smaller schools (or all)
· Create smaller collaboration groups for similar content types, allow guest accounts, etc.
· Faculty incentive should include tenure and promotion, release time
· If a university's mission included IT related statements, the reward structures within the universities will most likely be found to be insufficient.
· Resource and infrastructure equity between the universities needs to be looked at by GA
· GA sponsored copyright committee; Jim Sadler will disseminate information via the tltc to the campuses.
· A faculty member creates a very popular course, the faculty member leaves, what happens to the course? Generally, each institution has internal rules governing what happens in this situation.
· Tltc should put up some help on how to contact publishers, relating to getting permission from publishers for publishing content. Put the publisher list and a form template online on the tltc website.

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