As a College of IST faculty member, you are receiving this email to help assist you with Canvas and online learning.
Welcome to the College of IST Learning Design eNewsletter
Summer 2017
Canvas Updates
Canvas released its latest updates on June 24th. Not all of the updates may apply to Penn State’s usage of Canvas. Of note from Canvas:
Blueprint Courses
The new Blueprint Course feature allows administrators and/or designers to deploy, update, and maintain course design templates or components across any number of courses.
Canvas DocViewer
In order to improve performance, DocViewer is a new feature that will be replacing the current Box previewer and the Crocodoc annotation tools. This new feature automatically converts common document types into web-viewable and interactive learning experiences.
More information can be found through Canvas.
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Learning Design Departmental Changes
As many of you know, Amy Garbrick is the director of Learning Design group. Recently, the department reorganized into two areas, Design and Production.
Kent Matsueda is now the Assistant Director of Design and oversees the design group of Chris Gamrat, Ronda Reid and Brian Daigle. Laura Adams is now the the Assistant Director of Production and oversees our Instructional Production Specialist Trisha McKee, our wage multimedia person, Howard Ings, and our student interns.
The Design group works on course developments and revisions, course project management, consultation with faculty on course design and tools as well as special projects pertaining to learning design research and innovation.
The Production group provides administrative, technical, and production support for courses. This group handles such items as semester preparations, course consistency, accessibility plus course maintenance issues, and video and graphic production.
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Instructional Designers (ID) and Backup IDs
In Learning Design, every course is assigned a specific instructional designer (ID) to serve as the single point of contact for the course. The course ID welcomes your questions on the course or online education tools and is here to assist you as best they can. We have posted a list of courses with appropriate IDs. The list also includes ID backup information if the primary ID is on vacation.
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Fall 2017 Preparations Well Underway!
We may be in the middle of summer, but the Learning Design staff is hard at work preparing for fall 2017 courses. If you are teaching a World Campus course this fall, expect to hear from your ID soon–if you haven’t already–regarding your course template suggestions and updates.
Fall 2017 preview week starts August 14th with the official course start date as August 21st.
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