Instructional Design Tips for Online Courses

California State University, Chico has developed some good resource materials for faculty who are developing online courses.

http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/resources/rubric/rubric.pdf provides a series of rubrics to show Baseline, Effective, and Exemplary tactics/processes/information to include in course designs.

A checklist document which provides easy "check-offs" of design considerations is at:
http://www.csuchico.edu/tlp/resources/rubric/instructionalDesignTips.pdf .

The University of Louisville has best practices advice for designing online learning courses at the site http://delphi.louisville.edu/faculty/ids/ - which starts off the list of tips with "Start Slow" because your students may not have taken online courses before.

Virginia Tech has a great primer for new designers at their page http://www.edtech.vt.edu/edtech/id/index.html - including explanations of some popular teaching techniques in distance education (Audio Tutorial, Goal-Based Scenarios, Case-Based Teaching, Guided Design, Cooperative Learning, etc.).

Desire2Learn in Court with Blackboard - Lufkin, TX

We all knew it was coming, and it has arrived!

Blackboard's patent infringement suit against D2L is finally in court. According to the article at the Chronicle of Higher Education's online site, the case was filed in Lufkin, Texas, where juries have a reputation of protecting patent owners.

Luckily for the rest of us, Blackboard issued a promise last year not to take action against the three largest open source projects, which are Moodle, Sakai, and ATutor.

Desire2Learn has a blog site which is tracking the patent-infringement suit.