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Designing More Usable Web Sites This section of Designing a More Usable World is dedicated to cooperative efforts linked toward building a more usable Web for all. At the present time, there are a number of interlocking and interrelated efforts. These include:

Wiki Design Principles Wiki has turned out to be much more than I'd imagined! That is not to say that I didn't imagine a lot. These are the design principles I sought to satisfy with the first release of Wiki. -- WardCunningham

Accommodations and Universal Design The best accommodations are unique to the individual and develop from a cooperative relationship between the faculty member and the student, sometimes with the assistance of the campus disabled student services office. In this area of The Faculty Room you will learn strategies for fully including students with disabilities in your course activities. You will also read case studies and answers to questions faculty members frequently ask about accommodating students with disabilities in their classes. The section on universal design tells how to be pro-active in creating an inclusive learning environment. Much of the content is duplicated in other publications, training materials, and web pages published by DO-IT.

The World Wide Web has rapidly become the dominant Internet tool, combining hypertext and multimedia to provide a network of educational, governmental, and commercial resources. Much of its power comes from the fact that it presents information in a variety of formats while it also organizes that information through hypertext links. Because of the multimedia nature of the web combined with the poor design of some websites, many Internet surfers cannot access the full range of resources this revolutionary tool provides. Some visitors: * Cannot see graphics because of visual impairments. * Cannot hear audio because of hearing impairments. * Use slow Internet connections and modems or equipment that cannot easily download large files. * Have difficulty navigating sites that are poorly organized with unclear directions because they have learning disabilities, speak English as a second language, or are younger than the average user.

A prerequisite to the use of computer mediated communication (CMC) when facilitating online instruction is access to a high level of computing power and a reliable telecommunication infrastructure. After saying that, I want to emphasize in the strongest way that when developing and delivering instruction, whether online or not, the use of technology is secondary to well-designed learning goals and objectives. What distinguishes online instruction from entertainment or recreation is the purposefulness of the designers and developers in provoking certain intelligent responses to the learning materials, context, and environment.

Elaboration Theory (Reigeluth) Summary: Elaboration theory is an instructional design theory that argues that content to be learned should be organized from simple to complex order, while providing a meaningful context in which subsequent ideas can be integrated.

HOST: Lawrence C. Ragan, Director of Instructional Design and Development, Penn State's World Campus Strategies for Managing the Online Workload

Welcome to Behind the Blackboard! This is where Blackboard system administrators can find support, download software, obtain reference materials, and manage their Blackboard account. For students, faculty, and instructional designers Behind the Blackboard is the perfect supplement to your primary campus helpdesk!

Digital Content or e-Packs consist of publisher-created digital content that is ready to use in your Webcourses@UCF account. An e-Pack may include learning materials, multimedia elements, and assessments. The quality and the features of e-Packs varies tremendously. Please e-mail your instructional designer if you find an e-Pack you would like to view. We can upload the e-Pack to a Webcourses@UCF practice account for your review. There is no cost for a faculty member to view an e-Pack. If you decide to use one, your students may be charged an access fee. The fee charged to students varies and is generally part of a bundled textbook product. Search the ePacks area for possible ePacks in your discipline.

Blackboard support for Faculty, Instructors and Designers

EBSCOhost Research Databases EBSCOhost is a powerful online reference system accessible via the Internet. It offers a variety of proprietary full text databases and popular databases from leading information providers. The comprehensive databases range from general reference collections to specially designed, subject-specific databases for public, academic, medical, corporate and school libraries. EBSCO Support Site EBSCO's Support Site is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our FAQ database, tutorials, and user guides can provide answers to your technical questions. EBSCO Customer Support Representatives are also available by phone and e-mail 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday, as well as Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (US EST). How to Use Help * When the Help icon Help Question Mark appears, you can click the icon and help for the screen you are on will display. * To obtain help for the database(s) you are searching, click the Help icon Help Question Mark to the right of the Find field and click on the Database name at the bottom of the left-hand side of the Help window. Database help is also available from the Choose Databases window. * To view the entire Help System, click the Help link at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Note: The recommended screen resolution for EBSCOhost is 1024 x 768.

Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator for Window, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.

Welcome to Quality Matters Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty-centered, peer review process designed to certify the quality of online courses and online components. Sponsored by MarylandOnline, Inc, Quality Matters has generated widespread interest and received national recognition for its peer-based approach to quality assurance and continuous improvement in online education. Originating from a FIPSE grant, Quality Matters is now a self-supporting organization offering institutional subscriptions and a range of fee-based services including Quality Matters-managed course reviews and an array of trainings.

Course Management Effective course management planning during design and development can help the instructor to alleviate the potentially increased time spent in managing the online course.

This article describes an ongoing informal study of a distance learning course that uses multiple emerging interactive media to increase and enhance students' participation. (The co-authors are, respectively, the course instructor and a doctoral student in education who took the course and conducted research on students' participation patterns.) First, we present the conceptual context underlying our vision of interactive media for learning; next, we describe the design of the course and the educational interactions this fosters; then, we analyze the learning outcomes that result from this instructional strategy; and finally we discuss the evolution of emerging interactive media. This structure parallels the "scholarship of teaching" framework presented in Randy Bass's article.

Tools: Accessible and Universal Design

Digital Content or e-Packs consist of publisher-created digital content that is ready to use in your Webcourses@UCF account. An e-Pack may include learning materials, multimedia elements, and assessments. The quality and the features of e-Packs varies tremendously. Please e-mail your instructional designer if you find an e-Pack you would like to view. We can upload the e-Pack to a Webcourses@UCF practice account for your review. There is no cost for a faculty member to view an e-Pack. If you decide to use one, your students may be charged an access fee. The fee charged to students varies and is generally part of a bundled textbook product. Search the ePacks area for possible ePacks in your discipline.

Ning competes with large social sites like MySpace and Facebook by appealing to people who want to create their own social networks around specific interests with their own visual design, choice of features and member data. The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific membership bases.

The MERLOT ELIXR Initiative offers a digital case story repository that hosts over 60 discipline-specific multimedia stories. Digital stories for faculty development can provide real-life experiences of exemplary teaching strategies and the process of implementing them. These digital case stories can be used freely in faculty development programs and also accessed by individual instructors.