Suggested Tools for Basic Sakai Course
The current course review for online certificate programs in the CPCE and the faculty development courses uses the following guidelines:
- Home: a welcome message on the landing page with information about the course.
- Announcements: A message clearly indicating where students need to go to start the course
- Syllabus: A syllabus that contains learning outcomes, course overview, policy information, clear grading criteria, and calendar.
- Lessons: There is a clear narrative or path for the student to follow in the course. This can be through the Lessons tool, a very detailed syllabus, or some other mechanism like announcements or a blog, for example.
- Alignment: The syllabus is aligned to the tools and assignments in the LMS
- Resources: Necessary resources for the course are available.
- Links: Links within the course site are active and not broken
- Interactions: There are clear mechanisms for interaction between Instructor-Student and Student-Student through one or more of the following: Forums, wikis, Blogs, Elliuminate.
- Assignments and Assessments: Assignments are set up with correct dates and are aligned with the syllabus
- Test & Quizzes: Tests and quizzes are set up with correct dates and are aligned with the syllabus
- Grade book: Grade book is aligned with syllabus
These guidelines are specific to a program taught on only the Sakai platform. It is recommended that course quality guidelines be created that are expansive enough to take into account a variety of delivery (or future) platforms while focusing on core student experiences and provides for both synchronous and asynchronous communication.
For a broader (and perhaps more useful) quality assessment tool, SUNY Empire State College developed a tool under creative commons that looks at each course through three basic categories: Learner support and resources, organization and presentation, and instructional design and delivery.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
