Busy week @ DEDOS

DEDOS’ instructional development unit has been working hard for the past weeks developing the Faculty Training and Online Courses Design Guide. Recently, we began planning the training sessions we want to give to USC’s faculty in order to improve their course designing techniques and technological skills to attend our students learning needs. As part of it, the instructional designers made a translation to Spanish of the “Building an online course with FACT: Instructor’s Guide” (OAR Model) and revise it in order to provide a self-assessment tool to the faculty selected for the Title V Project. Also, we are preparing ourselves by requesting seminars about E-learning new tendencies and Copyrights in Distance Education.

On the other end, we’re hoping to change dramatically the way online courses are given@ this higher education institution. Instructional designers will like to see more interactive classes, converting students into content generators and more active participants. We have made a little bit of collaborative e-learning tools research in order to be well supplied of options and attend every professor and course’s need. Interactive websites, web-conference tools, podcasting tools, synchronous communication applications are among some of the web tools we’re integrating to our course designing guide. Software to create and develop learning objects is going to be evaluated too.

Despite all our efforts, DEDOS’ staff is worried about the troublesome internet connection @ USC. For the past three weeks students, professors and administrative staff had complained about the unstable quality of the institution’s internet connection causing difficulties for course management, course access (by students), and web research among other things. This well-known problem looms as a threat to the development and functioning of fully-web and interactive courses. If this situation isn’t solve soon, all our efforts looking for highly interactive web courses will go to waste.