For instructors who teach courses I coordinate

Me, at the National Day of Service before
President Obama's 2013 inauguration.

Hello instructors,

Before diving further into the Maddening Moodle Muddle, I wanted to reiterate a few basic policies and practices that I hold vis-a-vis the courses that I serve as Area Coordinator for. These courses are currently: US History to 1865: What Does It Mean To Be A Free Nation?; US History Since 1865; US Women's History: Lives and Voices; Transformations of the Colonial Experience; Historiography; and Hip-Hop America: The Evolution of a Cultural Movement.

1. I view all of you as great, qualified instructors and I trust your decisions. I monitor classes as I can, but many of you have been teaching for ESC (and teaching more generally) longer than I have so I hold you capable!

2. That means, please, by all means, put your personal mark on the courses that you teach. Add Course Announcements, supplemental resources, lecture notes, thinking points, and even alternate assignments as it makes sense to you. If you can drop me a note via e-mail letting me know what you're doing (or would like to do), I would appreciate it. Keeping tabs on new activities, changes, etc., will be helpful for all of us in the long run as we'll have a continually growing pool of fresh ideas and approaches.

3. There are a few things about the online courses at ESC that cannot be changed. These are: the course description, the required texts, and the documents that are in the course regarding college policies. I have revised the course descriptions for all but one of the courses under my coordination since I joined the college in 2010, and plan to tackle that last one as well as revisit all the existing courses once our Moodle transition is completed. Textbooks are ordered months in advance through the college bookstore and often are tied directly to student financial aid packages. So changes to texts are also changes that require a multi-step and lengthy process. College policy documents are well, college policy documents. We need them to stay intact.

4. In the past, under Angel, we were able in some cases to arrange for an individual course section from a former term to be poured into an instructor's section for a new term. I do not know at this point if we'll be able to do this. So, please, if you want to implement your changes from one term to the next, keep a copy of them, in a Microsoft Word file or something similar. I personally tinker with my own course sections each term because I am always finding new things or ideas that I want to try out. I encourage you to do the same.

5. Specific changes to the Moodle course templates poured into your individual course sections are just as possible as they were under Angel. ESC policy states that instructors should seek AC permission. Consider the permission granted. The next post will offer some suggestions for how to go about making changes. Remember, that I'm learning how to do this at pretty much the same time as you all are.

Best wishes,
Himanee