Impact on completion

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. 

Potential lessons to be learned

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.    

Area of need and defined potential impact on completion

The CDN product suite will comprise of the following application modules:

• Faculty/Learning Object Designer Module – This module allows the faculty member to generate the Learning Objects and submit it for review
• Instructional Designer/Administrator Module – This module allows the Instructional designers to edit the learning object, meta data, key words and catalog it as per institution’s standards and conventions
• Course Designer Module – This module helps the instructors to generate the courseware and build the classes based on their personal preferences and recommendations. The instructors can add assessments, and drag multiple learning objects from the CDN or use the resources available on the Internet.
• Student/Course Consumer Module – students can use view the learning objects, take pre-assessments and get familiarized with related course topics and references

High Level Vision of the Content Delivery Network

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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