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"Many of the decisions affecting the success of a course take place well before the first day of class. Careful planning at the course design stage not only makes teaching easier and more enjoyable, it also facilitates student learning. Once your course is planned, teaching involves implementing your course design on a day-to-day level."

"Whether you're new to technology, just getting started with a social network, or looking for some useful tips then these courses are for you. They're part of a new idea that I've been working on with a few friends. We're calling it Modern Lessons and it's essentially a 'Khan Academy for real-world skills' where a small handful of people build free online courses designed to help you learn some important things. But it's more than just a few useful videos about Twitter. There are customized certificates, quizzes, prerequisites, and more. But that's not important. The important part is what YOU can expect to learn. Since many Edudemic readers are teachers, there's a whole area devoted to teachers, don't worry. Adam Webster, an Oxford-educated teacher just outside London, has lovingly crafted a series of useful (and free!) courses designed to help you integrate technology into your classroom. More on that later. "

"A blended course often reduces face-to-face "seat time" so that students can pursue additional teaching and learning activities online. These ten questions (adapted from the University of Wisconsin's Hybrid Course website ) are a good starting point when thinking about blended course redesign."

"The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. The notion of a flipped classroom draws on such concepts as active learning, student engagement, hybrid course design, and course podcasting. The value of a flipped class is in the repurposing of class time into a workshop where students can inquire about lecture content, test their skills in applying knowledge, and interact with one another in hands-on activities. Although implementing a flipped classroom places different demands on faculty and forces students to adjust their expectations, the model has the potential to bring about a distinctive shift in priorities-from merely covering material to working toward mastery of it."

Great looking resource with a CC-BY-SA license on it. "In this online resource, the model used for course development is a project team-based structure. The framework still can be used by those who have a "lone ranger" approach to the course development process. All of the resources can be used as they are and are in development, based on the feedback received and ongoing research in the field. You can evaluate/modify your courses using the checklists provided in this module. "

20 minute mini-lecture Eric Landrum from Boise State University on Perry's Scheme of Intellectual Development prepared for the Boise State Course Design Institute.

David Trottier, from our ICT services on campus at the U of S, has begun a repository of interesting information related to educational technology and instructional/course design.

"Students are going to use mobile devices and computers in the classroom, regardless of the professor's level of comfort with technology. It's best to embrace the technology and work with your educational technologist or instructional designer to determine the best tools and methodologies to enhance your course with technology and support the course objectives."

"ION and the Illinois Virtual Campus have taken the lead to develop a quality online course rubric and evaluation system in the state of Illinois. The goal of this project is to help colleges and universities to improve accountability of their online courses."

The is a quick online tool to determine the "readability" of your written content. You simply paste in some text and it gives you an indication of how many years of formal education would be needed to be able to understand the reading. This tool is helpful when designing your course content. For example, if you paste in text for a first year course and get a reading level of 16 years of education on the Gunning Fog index; then you should try to state your content more simply. You don't need to "dumb down" the content, but rather re-state it.

Another interesting variant on a rubric for evaluating your course syllabus. I like how this one focuses on the principles of universal design- making your course accessible to differing student needs.

This article takes Chickering & Gamson's "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" (1987) and applies it to online courses.

"Almost 25 years have passed since Chickering and Gamson offered seven principles for good instructional practices in undergraduate education. While the state of undergraduate education has evolved to some degree over that time, I think the seven principles still have a place in today's collegiate classroom. Originally written to communicate best practices for face-to-face instruction, the principles translate well to the online classroom and can help to provide guidance for those of us designing courses to be taught online."

"The SOLO taxonomy stands for: Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes It was developed by Biggs and Collis (1982), and is well described in Biggs and Tang (2007) It describes level of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject, through five stages, and it is claimed to be applicable to any subject area. Not all students get through all five stages, of course, and indeed not all teaching (and even less "training" is designed to take them all the way)."

CLASSE is a version of the National Survey of Student Engagement that is designed to be used at the level of an individual course. It is free to use, but requires a note to be sent to the developers (as per the instructions on the website.

"This site is designed to answer the question being asked: What does a high quality online course look like? It is ourhope that instructors and instructional designers will use this site to learn more about the Rubric for Online Instruction, and be able to view examples of exemplary courses that instructors have done in implementing the different components of the rubric."

n some educational settings, the cost of textbooks approaches or even exceeds the cost of tuition. Given limited resources, it is important to better understand the impacts of free open educational resources (OER) on student outcomes. Utilizing digital resources such as OER can substantially reduce costs for students. The purpose of this study was to analyze whether the adoption of no-cost open digital textbooks significantly predicted students' completion of courses, class achievement, and enrollment intensity during and after semesters in which OER were used. This study utilized a quantitative quasi-experimental design with propensity-score matched groups to examine differences in outcomes between students that used OER and those who did not. The demographics of the initial sample of 16,727 included 4909 students in the treatment condition with a pool of 11,818 in the control condition. There were statistically significant differences between groups, with most favoring students utilizing OER.

Concise look at writing learning outcomes based on Blooms Taxonomy.

"Students are not only intellectual but also social and emotional beings, and all these dimensions interact to impact learning and performance. To plan an effective course, it is important to consider who our students are, taking into account their: Prior knowledge Intellectual development Cultural background Generational experiences and expectations "

Interesting article that describes the student data being collected at some universities. The data is be used to "eAdvise" students into the proper programming and courses, which leads to higher retention rates. The data may be used to go as far as even monitoring card swipes and analyze student social interactions.