Producing Digital Content-Reflection

I must admit that in the beginning, this course seemed a bit daunting. When I first heard the name of the course, "Producing Digital Content" , I did not know what to expect. My first thoughts were that I would have to spend unpredictable and enormous amounts of time attempting to learn a new programming language and figuring out how to weave what I learned into elements that would make for a student-friendly course. That was not the case at all. It is true that in the beginning, I spent lots of time acclimating myself to the instructor side of the course management system, experimenting with learning how to navigate with the instructor tools, figuring out the difference between an "item" and a "module page", and when should each be used, but after putting in the extra time the first three weeks, I was able to read each course lesson along with supplementing materials and implement them into my course rather quickly. This was time well spent.

Other items that made building the couse more student-friendly were the step-by-step instructions of the instructor and the Blackboard video tutorials that suppplemented each of the course lessons. The videos were  immensely helpful because the visuals actually demonstrated how the tools could be used in building the course, giving credence to the cliche, " a picture is worth a thousand words".

The instructor was very helpful and the initial Collaborate (live) session put to rest most of the inhibitions I had about taking the course. One good thing is that the previous course, "Designing Online Courses", (difficult as it was) linked well and logically with this course and made it much easier to build the actual course. Additionally, the pace of the lessons was just about right; lessons were not so packed where I did not have time to complete the assigned tasks, especially when I experienced a few technical challenges along the way.

Writing for Print Media

The course that I built was a traditional journalism classroom course, "Writing for Print Media". I began by creating the above banner for the course and selecting a "look" for the course from available templates in Blackboard, the course management system. For the course menu, I selected the "button" look, rather than links because buttons stand out and make the course more visually appealing.  Course management buttons look similar to the blue buttons in the below picture:

Each subsequent lesson covered elements that were mapped out in the design phase of the previous course. In 'Producing Digital Content",  I attempted to build my course according to best practices of online teaching and learning using a quality matters rubric as a guide. Using the quality matters rubric is very important because it takes into account what a course should look like, to meet the needs and expectations of almost any type of student (i.e., those who have physical challenges, visual learners, auditory learners, etc.). Since I am still rather new at designing and building an actual course, I kept my course structure, digital content, and instructional modalities rather conservative, using basic multimedia such as videos, lesson recordings and Internet links. The good thing is that this course provided me with a comfort level and a foundation to couch in the more high level digital content at a later time or in another course.

It was a long journey but I learned a lot along the way.