Wow, the end of the summer really is here, and the official first day of class is (gulp)... tomorrow. I probably should have tried to get myself to write two of these InstCon posts per day back in the bliss of late July and early August! Anyway, I will write up the notes promised yesterday about Linda J. Lee's fantastic presentation on Blueprint Courses, which finishes up my Thursday morning InstCon adventures. Luckily, Linda has made my job that much easier by having shared her slides here already, and also with all the documentation she provided throughout the year as her program got their Blueprint Courses workflow up and running.
... and the videos are out: video link. Although at first glance I don't think we can embed a video here (I was hoping for YouTube that we could embed), and I'm also not sure how we can link to specific videos. I'm having trouble navigating the videos too since I'm not sure how they are organized. I'll explore that and report back tomorrow, but for now I wanted to post about Linda's session.
1. Power of InstCon. Linda began this project right after InstructureCon last year: that is really inspiring! So, even though it was a real time squeeze, she went back to Philadelphia and got this big experiment up and running, and now she is back at this year's InstructureCon to report on how it went. What a great spirit of learning!
2. Overlords and minions. Yes, this is unofficial terminology, but I love it! "Overlords" and "minions" is how the folks in Linda's shop use to refer to the parent-child courses (or whatever the official Canvas terminology is; I'm not sure).
4. Total process clarity. I would urge you to go through Linda's slidedeck to see the incredibly clear way she described their process in terms of goals, benefits, challenges, etc. Much like with the Broward County presentation, even though this was about a world and work that is very different from anything I do, I felt like I was able to understand the decisions they made and learn from the process. So kudos to Linda both for the really clear workflow at Wharton and also for her really clear presentation of that in her talk.
5. Ouch: no room! The session filled up, and there was someone who came and announced that nobody was allowed to sit on the floor because that would be a fire hazard (I think this is the session where they made that announcement). I heard from people and saw tweets about being turned away when other sessions were full likewise. That is a real problem, and all the more reason to make the videos as fully accessible as possible (more about that tomorrow). Especially if people were turned away from events and told to just watch the video later, I think that is all the more reason to make sure the videos are as open and easy-to-find and share as possible. And of course there are lots of other reasons for open sharinig too, totally aside from doing right by the people who found themselves turned away at the conference from the sessions they had come a long way to attend. I didn't have time to really explore the video collection yet, but I'll see if I can figure out how to make better use of those videos tomorrow.
Oh boy, lots to absorb here Laura. Blueprinting has really taken off here.