Draft 1 – Online Learning Materials

I have been working on taking the materials that Peter Beyersdorf and I developed for the CFD interdisciplinary workshop on online teaching and putting them into a web page.

I ended up learning quite a bit about the way Desire2Learn exports files.

http://dma.sjsu.edu/james/interdisciplinary-online-teaching/

All of the structuring like the content page, and widgets do not export and there are so many layers of frames that it is difficult to piece the assets back together.  Further the file names end up being pretty haphazard though I am going to bare that in mind as I am putting together my next course.

In fact though, the process was so painful that I think it would be easier to build the “backup” first out of linked web pages and then load the assets up to d2l.

I guess I need to see how that plays out.

Online Teaching Workshop

I have been madly working on an online teaching workshop with Dr. Peter Beyersdorf of the Physics Dept.  We really only had a week to put this together and I just took the workshop from others last week.

The focus is online teaching tools, with an understanding that we are covering the university’s new LMS (Learning Management System) in a great deal of detail.

So far it feels like Peter is carrying the bulk of the load and I am trudging behind and getting nervous during presentations. I think I have a good reason to be nervous, these are some of the best teachers at the university and little ole me is trying to teach them.

Anyhow, all my spare time is being spent generating these materials, and putting them in D2L (eating our on dogfood as it were which is working surprisingly well.)  The downside is that the work that I am doing is not linkable at this time.  The upside is that I am doing the work in Dreamwever and will be posting it all in my DMA account too in preparation for when I have to do this for realsies this summer for the mediated course.

Anyhow, this is like teaching full time and preparing the night before.