Our new tool for course design — A fully customizable self-assessment

I had a little mix-up this week when I scheduled a meeting with a faculty member. We agreed on a time to meet, but we never thought to mention where we’d meet. Sure enough when the time for the meeting came I was standing in front of her office door, and she was waiting in reception in the E-Learning Office. We realized what happened, both crossed across campus and missed each other again. We ended up meeting in her office and got our meeting started.

When I meet with faculty, I try to meet you in the places where you’re going to be working. This is because I try to let you do the steering when we’re working with a new tool. We try to let you work things out and jump in only when we’re needed, or when there’s something cool to add. This philosophy was rolling through the back of my mind as I worked on this course development tool.

Before I get to the tool itself, I want to go over some of the basic goals that we had for the tool.

We wanted to create a tool that anyone could use by itself

We want this self assessment to be self sustaining, so part of the project includes creating and connecting resources to help you get the most from it. If you have any suggestions what resources we should have, we’d love to hear it.

We wanted instructors to be able to tailor it to their courses

One thing we recognize from meeting with our faculty is that no two courses are the same, and that’s a really good thing. To try and help the self assessment be adaptable we wanted to make it easy to edit and customize to your courses.

We wanted instructors to be able to share it with peers to let them peer review courses

One of the benefits of using Google Spreadsheets as a base to let you customize the self assessment is the ability to share documents. Instead of using it solely as a self assessment, you can customize the language and criteria and invite others to go through the assessment for you.

So now it’s time to show our tool: The Course Development Self Assessment.

To use it, open it and press File then Make a Copy… we suggest using the course code in the title just so it’s easier to keep track if you have multiple courses. Now you’ll have your own copy of the document and you can make your edits and share with anyone you want to review your course. If you’re going to use the Course Development Self Assessment for peer review, you should make one copy per reviewer.

While we’re turning this project public today, we don’t consider it set it stone. If you have any suggestions for how to improve it, please let us know!