Course Development Consultations

Flipped Classroom, Blended Learning and Online Course Design

• Pedagogical design support will help you explore different strategies for transforming your course ranging from a brand new course design, to a re-design of an existing course, to a tweaking of a particular part of a course.
• Meet with us to learn about what has worked in other courses and develop a strategy to meet your specific learning goals.
• Work with us to develop an overall assessment strategy, integrating online tools and resources effectively and implementing active learning in your face to face sessions.

Example: The POLI 369T flexible learning project involved the development of a new interdisciplinary course to implement a flipped classroom approach that utilized online video lectures and readings while creating space in the classroom for more active learning and group exercises.

We worked with the instructors to provide support for DIY video development as well as the planning and design of the course web site. In the first offering of the course, the instructional designer met regularly with the course instructor to help plan and provide feedback on activities and strategies to integrate the math and science material with the political science material. In the second offering, we worked with the course team to implement peer instruction based clicker activities and develope in class group exercises and simulations.

Course Site and Content Support

• Consult with us to explore the different options for designing a course site and provide guidance for setting up and structuring your site.
• We teach you and your team how to use the various tools available to you and add content to your own site.
• We develop a design template for you and help set up the overall design of the site so that you can then add your content and materials.
• For complex sites or sites with a significant amount of content, we set up the site and help add content.

Example: The GRSJ 224 project objective was to develop course content in UBC’s learning management system as a template that could be reused for both blended and online delivery. To enhance students’ engagement and experience, we developed and designed a template using HTML and CSS that optimized UBC’s learning management system’s environment to deliver the material in a well presented and easily customizable way. Custom graphics, such as icons and a PowerPoint slide interface were created to add visual appeal and organize content in a way to make it easier for students to read course materials. The wiki assignment instruction page provides an example of the page design and custom graphics created the project.

Video Production

• We train and support you to learn to create your own self produced videos with tools such as Camtasia, iPads or Surface Pro tablets.
• For more advanced productions, we plan, film and edit the final video.
• Consult with us to explore different options for how video can best be used to help improve your course, what the research says about strategies for media use and design and share examples that have been successful in other courses.

Example: One component of the “Your Chinese learning, your way” project included creating a collection of student created dialogue videos, which can be used as supplementary language materials for all CHIN101/103 courses. Students were asked to submit a script as part of their homework and Arts ISIT worked with the students and instructor to help produce the video. We provided assistance in planning the videos, directing the shoots, filming, and editing the final videos. We utilized the green screen and applied a different backdrop for each skit’s scenario. We were also able to assist in searching for commercial free images, designing graphics to emphasize the Chinese dialogue and adding Chinese, PinYin, and English subtitles for each video.

Web Site Design

• We help you decide the best approach and tools for creating your web site
• We do custom design and development services to help build your site and set it up with the functionality that you need.
• We offer web application development services for custom built applications.

Example: eNunciate is a project initiated as a collaboration between department of Linguistics and Japanese studies, which provides a visual aid (video of ultrasound imaging of the vocal system) for students to improve their pronunciation skills (hence the name enunciate). For this project Arts ISIT assisted the faculty-led team to gather requirements and break the development into smaller and achievable phases. We worked with the team to provide mock-ups of the end product before actually developing the product, to ensure that everyone would be satisfied with the end result. After deciding on the criteria and agreeing on the mock-ups we selected UBC’s Content Management System (CMS) and developed the overall site structure and functionality. We also provided training and support to the team to help them learn how to add their own content, upload videos and make changes.

Evaluation

• Through training on evaluation methods and individual project team consultations, we can help to facilitate evaluation planning for new projects and provide feedback on evaluation plans.
• We partner with evaluation specialists in CTLT to provide consultation on the selection of appropriate methods for data collection and can provide assistance with data access and analysis approaches.

Example: For the Linguistics flexible learning project, Arts ISIT and CTLT partnered to provide to provide an evaluation workshop for the project team to facilitate the initial evaluation planning and prepare for the development of an evaluation plan. As a follow up to the workshop, we met with the teaching and learning fellow and instructors to provide more direct feedback and guidance as they developed their evaluation plan.