Colleagues,
I hope you enjoyed time with family and friends this Memorial Day weekend. As we wrap up graduations and an incredibly busy year, I am excited to announce progress in three key areas of the Colorado Online @ project:
- Assigned instructors already have access to our new single instance of D2L to begin preparing fall courses, and we are on track for students to begin accessing all of their fall online course shells from their home college D2L dashboard in August.
- We have adopted QM+ as the foundation for our online course quality standards, along with a streamlined Healthy Course Checklist to support implementation. The Learning Design Team enhanced the popular Quality Matters standards with additional standards reflecting our commitment to DEI and accessibility, and then made them easier to use by distilling them into a two-page Healthy Course Checklist aimed at continuous improvement in six key areas. Pending a CO Online financial model and budget approval, we will hire a Learning Designer to provide professional development and support in the areas of Accessibility and Universal Design, and we will incorporate a web-based accessibility checker into D2L.
- After a successful pilot with SPA and ECE this spring, we will begin using the new Collaborative Learning Design process to develop additional Ready-to-Teach course starting this fall. Discipline faculty will partner with skilled learning designers to develop course maps and curate content for Ready-to-Teach course shells that will be built to be fully accessible and align with all the QM+ standards. These course shells will be available as a resource to faculty and instructors from across the system.
To provide excellent, equitable instruction and services to our online students, we will continue to build on this spirit of collaboration, working across colleges with support from system office staff. Last Thursday, the VP Council participated in a half-day Colorado Online @ Summit to discuss operational aspects of the Spring 2023 pilot and subsequent roll-out for Academic and Student Affairs. While there are still many decisions to be finalized, the VP workgroups will begin outlining college-specific implementation and communication plans over the summer. In the coming month, the Design/Build team will continue to refine our model for equitably distributing course sections across colleges, create the foundation for our financial model, and clarify the scope of technical changes needed for students to start registering for Spring 2023 pilot courses in October.
We will continue to send monthly updates over the summer and post changes to the Colorado Online @ Blog. As always, feel free to contact me or Tammy Vercauteren, Project Director of the Colorado Online @ Strategic Plan, if you have any questions or concerns about the project.
Sincerely,
Landon