Instructional Design Services

OTLA staff members Gary Pavlechko and Greg Siering can meet with you to help plan new distance education classes.  The consulting tasks we work on are varied, depending upon your needs, but they often include the following:

• Audience Analysis -- We help you determine the unique learning needs and situations of your students, as well as develop ways of adjusting your course to meet those needs.
  
  
• Course Design -- We help you design the course at any level, from the ground up to specific elements that need to be converted from a traditional classroom format.
  
  
• Assignment Design -- We help you design new assignments or convert old ones to make them work with your new course format.
  
  
• Media Development -- We help you design special media--from videos to animations to games--and connect you to the BSU staff who can create them.
  
  
• Technology Selection -- We help you select the most appropriate technologies for your teaching needs and connect you to the BSU staff who can assist with training and implementation.
  
  
• Evaluation/Assessment of Student Learning -- We help you design testing and other evaluation methods for your class, as well as develop approaches to assess student learning beyond traditional graded assignments.
  
  
• Connections to Best Practices and Other Faculty -- We've worked with dozens of distance education faculty members, so we can provide you with "best practices" and lessons learned from their experiences.  And if it seems most appropriate to your needs, we can connect you to those experienced faculty members for consultation and mentoring. 
   

Mediasite Support

Mediasite is currently being used for recording lectures and classroom sessions for use within distance education classes.  OTLA staff is available to talk to you about the basics of the system and its uses in courses.  We can also put you in contact with the Teleplex staff who support faculty using this tool.  More information about Mediasite is available here.

Getting Started

After you receive approval to teach a distance education course by your department and the School of Extended Education, you can make an appointment with us to start developing your course. You may contact us at 285-1763, or e-mail Gary Pavlechko or Greg Siering.

The traditional model for course development starts two semesters prior to the first semester you will teach--the first semester deals with general course design and planning, while the second is devoted to the creation of the media you will use in the course, from video clips to multimedia games and animations.  Some individuals can shorten this process to one semester if no media is planned.  But if you think there is any possibility you will want media produced, plan on two semesters; many of those projects take time, and there may be multiple projects in the queue before yours.