Using Google Apps to Increase Collaboration and LMS Platform Portability in Course Design

Learn how to make course development more approachable for faculty by allowing them to develop course material using Google Apps.  If they know how to use MS Word and are content experts, they are ready to begin online course development.

 

International Hispanic Online University (IHOU) adopted an innovative approach to online course development out on necessity.  We needed an approach to help our geographically distributed faculty work efficiently with the instructional design team to create new courses. Google Apps offered a free platform with WYSIWYG capability for the faculty and instructional design team to collaborate on course content asynchronously. These apps are as familiar to faculty as a word processing program which makes the course development process approachable to a broader range of content experts.

 

IHOU instructional designers add learning activities, media-rich lecturettes, and assessments. Once content is finalized, it is zipped and sent to the LMS as a packet.  This development approach also allows IHOU to easily deliver courses on multiple LMS platforms because the content development process is independent of the LMS. Data addressing productivity improvement as well as student evaluations of the initial courses will be shared.