Overall, most of the feedback I have received is good. One of the repeated points was to have guidelines for how to respond to a Tweet. I’m not sure that will be  a good idea – Tweets are so short that there really isn’t much guidance you can give. I also don’t want people to over think a Tweet that much. I understand that people are used to having a very specific set of guidelines for forum comments, but with tweets it might be different. I may just need to spell that out – Tweets are short, don’t over think them, just make them worth the time to read them.

There were several suggestions for content to add or clarify, and those will of course be incorporated. Some of the additions that were suggested (like explaining PLN research or why a self-hosted website is important) is actually part of what the participants are supposed to define as part of their learning process. So, of course I can’t spell those out in my content since participants need to find that on their own. The target population for this course are also already self-identified as being interested in these topics, so I’m not sure if they would appreciate me trying to tell them stuff they already wanted coming into this course. But I can definitely add some text that points this out more.

I have been working on professional timelines for years now. Most corporate timelines I have worked on have been 6-12 months, so I’m not sure if I fully agree with the question about 3 week duration. I am sure there are many out there – but they also probably produce much shorter courses that we are producing with this one. The overall timeline we have been following in this class has been a bit more confusing than what I am used to. It would be nice to have an overview with dates on it. For example, are we finishing the second peer review this week, or next week? Some places put it this week, but the assignment in Blackboard has it due the end of next week. But we were supposed to notify our peer reviewer last week when we finished the half of the course. In corporate/professional settings, all of that is spelled out on a calendar with dates so there is no confusion. I realize that a lot of the order was changed/updated in this course since it was last offered and a lot of the disconnect is due to that. I just hope that I am not late on any work.

Yes, I have had to make revisions to my course based on the Canvas structure. I noticed that once you dig into the content, you can easily get lost if the week/module/etc is not part of the title itself. The box within a box structure of Blackboard usually means that one box will have the module number and it will be listed in the breadcrumb. Not so much in Canvas. Their system of creating breadcrumbs could use some flexibility. I’m also not sure about how I grouped my weeks together into modules in the actual course. It seems to work okay, but I wonder if having each week be a separate module will work better. Still not sure on that one.

I am also constantly needing to play around with the image settings to make sure the images are easy to see. The CSS that has been applied to Canvas makes that a bit difficult. The smaller font and minimal space between paragraphs makes it difficult to view. I could always insert custom CSS inline declarations to fix that, but that is very time consuming. Not to mention that the next Canvas update could change something else that would make those changes nor work again. I just wish they had put more thought into readability.

So far, my design model is working great. Even though Canvas has differences from Blackboard and Moodle and other tools I am used to, it is still the same basic content repository model that I am used to working with. You can arrange this model to really meet the needs of most design structures, even though it sometimes takes some creativity to be less linear. But I am used to implementing that creativity after so many years of being stuck in Blackboard, so that is no problem.

Of course, as the design progresses and becomes less instructivist, the linear design I started out with might become more problematic. But that should be fairly easy to design around. I just hope that the tools will be flexible enough to allow for more connectivist structures inside of Canvas. Most connectivist instructors tend to abandon any LMS in order to accomplish their designs. Hopefully that won’t be the case here. Probably my biggest concern will be designing the content so that reviewers will be able to tell that a lost of course work is happening even though there won’t be a lot of “text” in the LMS.

So far, putting content into Canvas has gone well. Its not really that difficult of a system to figure out, so I am glad they put some thought into user interface. Still room for improvement, but much better than Blackboard. The challenge has been creating the content. Usually as an instructional designer, the content is given to you by the subject matter expert, so creating content is more than a bit out of my comfort zone. Even when we do create content, we are allowed to rely heavily on textbooks, websites, and existing YouTube videos. So creation of content has been a challenge.

The feedback will begin this week, so that means so far I have not received much feedback on the content. I did receive feedback on the design document, and incorporated some of it into the design. I think a lot of the feedback was based on a specific design model that I wasn’t using, especially about the objectives. So I didn’t really use that advice, but other parts that pertained to other details I did use. I also gave out advice on a design document, mostly to expand some details that were needed.

Of course, I have been working for years in an LMS, developing content as part of my job for years now. So most of what I learned about this time was specific to the Canvas system – where to find certain functions and how to host media. I also learned that creating content from scratch is very time-consuming, so I will be an even bigger fan of OER after this 🙂 (at least, the good parts of OER).