Hitchhiker’s Guide to Course Development

URL: http://www.midsolutions.org/cms/

"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Course Development is designed as a resource for individuals with varying levels of course design experience.

• Individuals new to higher education can use this site to help design their first classroom based course integrating technology where appropriate.
• Experienced instructors, being encouraged to place materials within a learning management system, can use this site to decipher the differences between Web-Presence, Web-Enhanced, Web-Centric and Online courses and how to plan courses for online delivery.
• Instructors of online courses, looking for new ideas and ways to improve their course, can use the site to improve content development by finding sources for pre-developed content and ideas to improve student centered learning.
• Instructional Designers and Instructional Support Staff can use this site as a reference for themselves or as a resource for the faculty they support.

There are three (3) primary content sections within the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Course Development.

• Planning Courses: Online and Classroom
• Content Development
• Assessment and Evaluation

As well as four (4) ancillary content sections.

• Course Design Types: Web-Presence, Web-Enhanced, Web-Centric, and Online
• Professional Resources and Associations
• Other Tools and Techniques: Learning Management Systems and selected external resources
• Web based Learning Units: links to learning units that available for adoption from around the internet."

This wonderful engaging interactive resource (using the yummi Moodle platform to run its courses) provides content and activities for the full course development cycle, which could benefit anyone interested in instructional design and (online) course development (A lot of juice!). We should thank those that have contributed and made it a reality including content developers Amanda Albright and JoAnn Gonzalez-Major, Site Designer JoAnn Gonzalez-Major, and the rest of the of authors and Universities that have shared their intellectual course development knowledge, skills and experiences on this site. They all deserve a "Honky Tonk Yamaguchi" thumbs up!

Some of the courses are available without requiring you to login, while others you are required to login. Though, it is worth creating an account enabling you to explore some of these wonderful courses and resources. Don't just read these words, go and check it out yourself :)

Still reading? Isn't learning wonderful today. If you are motivated to learn (hungryjack), the knowledge galaxy is there for you to explore and make a difference (much thanks to the open educational resources (OER) movement and amazing evolution of technology). Though, the tough part is sorting through the billions of pages and filtering out the juice. Get someone else (or thing) to do it for you! Google, blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking, portals, journals, etc. Good luck :)