New how-to guide for faculty developing blended learning courses

All faculty and staff have been automatically enrolled into the Blackboard Site, “Training: Developing a Blended Learning Course,” and are welcome to begin utilizing this site at their earliest convenience!

The purpose of this site is to assist faculty with designing and building Blended Learning courses, or courses with both synchronous and asynchronous elements. This training contains a lot of information to build fundamental technology skills, as well as step-by-step instructions for how to plan your course and build it in Blackboard in a way that is highly effective and accessible. While most staff do not need to build courses, we wanted to open this training to all who were interested in reviewing the materials. Since many staff support students, it may be good to see what type of design templates and resources are being recommended.

The course can be found in the Blackboard Courses area. Please note that all faculty and staff have been enrolled as students, so it will be listed separately from courses you teach. If you have any difficulty locating the course, please submit a ticket at support.newpaltz.edu.

Finally, as will be mentioned in the training, anyone building a course can make a request to use the Office of Instructional Technology (OIT) Default Shell. This is a Blackboard shell that is pre-formatted with module folders and placeholders for content, which will make building and formatting the course easier. The shell works best when you are designing and building a course from scratch, but it can be used with existing content – however, we recommend speaking with OIT staff before requesting a copy of the Default Shell into a course that already contains content!

For any questions about Training: Developing a Blended Learning Course or the OIT Default Shell, please submit at ticket at support.newpaltz.edu and an OIT staff member will get back to you!

Sincerely,

Kathryn Bohan, Senior Instructional Technologist