I have a background in graphic design, and have taken many design courses. It always amazes me how the terms in the elements and principles of design change, depending on who is discussing them. This is the first I've heard of "dominance", as I learned this as "emphasis". Regardless, the elements and principles of design are critically important to all educators, because embedded in the Iowa Core ELA standards is the concept of visually literacy skills. I do include parts learning about the elements and principles of design in several of the online courses I teach.

I have a background in graphic design, and have taken many design courses. It always amazes me how the terms in the elements and principles of design change, depending on who is discussing them. This is the first I've heard of "dominance", as I learned this as "emphasis". Regardless, the elements and principles of design are critically important to all educators, because embedded in the Iowa Core ELA standards is the concept of visually literacy skills. I do include parts learning about the elements and principles of design in several of the online courses I teach.

This could be an entire topic--that of logo design. What I learned in my logo design course was that those that were deceptively simple were actually the best and best remembered. All of the elements and principles of design have to be embedded into the logo.

I wonder if Moodle and/or SoftChalk will/can work with CSS? That would be very handy to help to keep things consistent.

I remember learning about the "voice of the instructor" in one of the OLLIE courses. This is important not only in the course content, but also in feedback provided to the students. In all of the OLLIE courses, and also so far in this course, I've learned how important subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) humor is for the online student.

This is one of the reasons I am taking this course! The instructional design of my online courses definitely improved after my taking the OLLIE courses, but there is still something missing in my courses. I am hoping that learning how to design lessons in SoftChalk will be the missing piece in my courses, and that my students will benefit from this addition.

Even though my students typically indicate that they learn a lot from my courses, I don't feel they are very interactive. Learning how to design lessons for the courses may help with this, as well as providing sufficient information to the learners. I provide websites for students to read that are related to the module concept, but a lesson would really help to gel the resources and the objectives together.

If the additional assessments were mostly formative, I do believe that we would be more accurately estimating student achievement.

Clear learning targets are so important--and so often not understood by teachers. I still work with so many teachers who don't question learning targets, as they just go from page to page in the textbook and teach what is next regardless if students already know the information or would need background knowledge in order to understand the concepts.

In the first class I took towards my Master's in Educational Technology, the professor did this--not just for our assignments, but also for our participation in our forums. Since then, I have "borrowed" this strategy for my own students. It definitely encouraged me to work on improving my responses in the weekly forums!

I think it depends on the discipline. Art and graphic design--and perhaps music--are probably going to be much farther ahead here. Students have to prepare portfolios of their work and that is what is looked at, at least at Morningside College. They also look at GPA, but there is more weight put on the portfolio.