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Similar to Chris Boon's ‘Show us your Blackboard’ post, I was hoping some of you might be kind enough to share some screenshots of your course templates. We’ve been inspired by speakers we’ve seen at the London BUG and Durham conference recently, and have decided to update our template.
As we’re in the process of updating our template, I don’t have any screenshots for you at the time being, but I do have some questions:
- Are your templates used across different departments and, if so, how did you settle on one everyone is happy with?
- Do you provide guidance notes for staff? If so, where – on one hidden page or in hidden items at the top of pages?
- Do you include any items in your course templates, or just menu items?
Looking forward to your responses
This seems to be a really hot topic at the moment - as Rebecca Anderson says, this came up a lot at the recent Durham conference with a session called "Experiences using a Standard Course Structure for Course Design" from Jonny Crook and Andrew Gold from the University of Manchester, plus some discussion about this in the breaks.
Rebecca and I are working together to improve our standard course template at City College Norwich. At the moment our brand new course menus look like this:
I think there are a number issues with this, including:
1. Lots of staff still leave the "Unit / Module / Topic 1/2/3" content areas without renaming them with suitable titles. We used to have Course Materials 1, Course Materials 2, Course Materials 3, but again lots of staff left them with the default titles. I'm relucant to have just one area called Course Materials (or equivalent) as I want to highlight that they can create multiple content areas for different units/modules/subjects etc, but what's the best way to do this? Change Me 1, Change Me 2, Change Me 3?!?
2. Interactive Resources (content area) - the idea of this is to remind lecturers that they can add interactive tools (discussion boards, blogs, wikis etc) and not just static content, but very few people use this area for this purpose. How do you promote the interactive stuff? Do you provide a general placeholder like this, or do you create an empty discussion board, blog, journal, wiki etc on every course, but risk that most won't be used?
Rebecca and I have quite a few ideas to address these problems, and to make our course templates more user friendly, but before we share our ideas, it would be really good to see what others are doing...