Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Good advice, Given quickly

September. Blogs are about pondering, but the beginning of Autumn quarter leaves little time for pondering... despite pondering being my favorite pastime. OK, a new year at University of Washington Tacoma leaves little energy for pondering or pastimes. It is, as the word describes, past. For a time. This month, the new year on our schedule, we work! 

Classes started Monday, and yesterday I served hundreds of hot dogs to students at an event on campus called "Hot Dogs from the Top Dawgs." A fun way for the students to see that their administrators (aprons, hair nets, slimy gloves) are human. So very human, one of them gave me a cold and my head feels the size of a pumpkin.

Thus this short post is a simple hurrah sent out to the Rapid eLearning Blog for it's short, brilliant reminders regarding the heart, soul and sweetest of practice in learning design. The brilliant Tom Kulman reminds us this month (Guiding Principle) not to let previous classroom learning design dictate eLearning design. Doh! I knew that, but it's so very easy to fall into the habit of teaching the way we taught, designing the way we learned. Tom reminds us:

Instead of being intentional about the instructional and visual design of the course we allow the existing content to determine how we build it. What we should do is take a step back, think about general course design, and then map our content to the design that’s appropriate to the course objectives.

What better advice to begin a new academic year? Do the right thing, not the thing you did before. 

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