GRANTS |
Innovation and Incubator Grants from the University System of Georgia |
The Content Delivery Network project will allow faculty to create course content in a learning object fashion. The project will include a series of Web applications to support faculty and instructional designers who create learning objects and catalog them for maximum reusability via a Content Delivery Network. Instructors, faculty and other course designers/developers can design courses by leveraging learning objects designed by multiple contributors. Learning objects can be documents, graphic files, multimedia, and other executable files that can be played from a studentÕs PC. The CDN project will comprise of modules for Learning Object Generation, Learning Object Administration and finally Learning Object dissemination to students.
The model for creation of the learning (object) content is localized and left to the discretion of individual faculty members. Each faculty member spends approximately 5-10 hours per week on activities related to content (content generation, cataloging, providing maintenance and dissemination). For a school with 200 faculty members, that’s an average of 1000-2000 hours/week in total.
The Content Delivery Network allows faculty members to create reusable course content and share it with other faculty members using a Web portal. Completion of this project can improve efficiencies with the creation of learning content and delivery of content to students. The goal of this project is to move the content generation and content maintenance responsibilities from every faculty member to just a few members. We expect that after this project, the average time spent by an individual faculty member on content related activities will be reduced to 3-5 hours/week.
We expect to learn the following lessons from this project: (i) best ways to catalog content, (ii) best ways to build learning objects, and (iii) best ways to administer the learning objects to make them reusable across mulitple courses. This process can be a daunting task to take up for all the courses in the catalog – so SPSU will take up an incremental/phased approach. Investigators will select a few departments that are willing to leverage this design for course content and design and implement standards and best practices using a template based approach.
The CDN product suite will comprise of the following application modules:
Project Phase Activities Milestones Timeline
Phase 1
Faculty Content Generation Module
Web App for Content Generation
April 1st, 2013 to June 1st, 2013
Phase 2
Instructional Designer Module
Web App for Content Review and Edits
May 1st, 2013 to July 1st, 2013
Phase 3
Student Module
Web App for students to view Learning Module
August 1st 2013 to December 1st, 2013
Phase 4
Adaptive Learning Module
Adaptive Learning and Flipped Classroom Modules
August 1st 2013 to December 1st, 2013
Phase 5
Mobile Learning
All modules will be accessible from Mobile Devices
December 1st 2013 to February 1st 2014
Phase 6
Learning Exchange and Consortia
Ability for institutions to exchange content to other institutions
February 1st 2014 to April 1st 2014
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