Customize Your Own IITE Course

Each educational institution has its own culture, policies, leaders, priorities, needs, and capabilities to deliver professional development programs to its faculty. What worked at the University of Lucknow and California State University is not likely to work as well in your institution "right out of the box".

Your success can be greatly enhanced by customizing the IITE program to fit the needs, priorities, and people of your institution.

To help make it easy to customize the ITTE professional development program, we have created templates from many of the materials we used and tested at the University of Lucknow.

  • These templates are free and open for you to use, download, modify as you see fit so they better suit your institution.
  • The templates all have Creative Commons Licenses: By, NC, SA which means you are free to use and modify the templates and when you do, you need to include an attribution of this project, put the same Creative Commons licenses on your derivative product, and use it for non commercial purposes.

To customize your own professional development course:

  1. Develop and support a management and governance process for the design, delivery, evaluation, and sustainability of the course. Choosing the team members of your project will be essential in being able to implement your plans
    1. A project strategy document helps everyone create shared vision for the course (DOC)
    2. A project schedule helps everyone travel on the same timeline to that shared vision (XLS)
  2. The innovative use of technologies requires your institution to have the ability to support the technologies and the people using the technologies. We provided University of Lucknow some guidance of what technology capabilities they might need. (DOC)
  3. Designing your IITE Professional Development Course can be aided by using the following templates to construct your curriculum.
    1. Complete the Standard Course Outline (SCO). (DOC) The Standard Course Outline defined the goals, resources, and activities for the course which will guide the development and organization of your curriculum and assessments.
    2. Download and modify the PowerPoint Presentations
    3. Modify the guidelines for developing and evaluating lesson plans
    4. Modify the lesson plan template as needed
    5. Modify the Assessment Rubric template as needed
    6. Modify the Course Completion letter for the faculty providing you their portfolio for redesigning components of their course as needed
  4. There are a variety of ways you can conduct your own IITE professional development course, depending upon the technologies that you have reliably available at your institution.
    1. Mostly Face-to-Face Course: If you have very limited availability of technologies and internet access, you can print out the PowerPoint presentations and they various worksheets and templates and deliver the course in a face-to-face classroom setting. The participants can then access the internet to search for MERLOT resources when the opportunities arrive.
    2. Using MERLOT's "Cloud" Services: If you have reasonable internet access but your institution does not have reliable technology services and support, you can use MERLOT's free Open Educational Services. Here's a PowerPoint that outlines how MERLOT's "Cloud Services" can be used to deliver an online course. (PPT)
      The MERLOT Cloud Services include:
      1. MERLOT Voices: An academic networking and online community and conversation center which you, your colleagues, and course participants can create a "Community Conversation". Your Community Conversations website enables you to have threaded discussions, post and share documents, post and share videos, chat, and a variety of other online community activities. Your Community Conversation can be open and closed to the world.
      2. MERLOT Digital Library: You can organize and deliver an online course using MERLOT's free and open digital library services. MERLOT's YouTube Channel provides 7 videos showing you how to use different features and services of the MERLOT Digital Library.
        1. MERLOT's Personal Collection Services enables you to organize the online content you find in MERLOT and provides you the ability to add
          1. The course name
          2. The prerequisite skills, knowledge, or other background courses needed
          3. The pedagogical approach for delivering the course
          4. The learning outcomes of the course
          5. The assessment methodology for the course
          HOW? After creating a MERLOT Personal Collection, simply click on "Edit My Personal Collection" and a web form with be provided to you so you can add all the online course information into the MERLOT Digital Library
        2. MERLOT Learning Exercises can be created for each online learning material in MERLOT that you would like to use in your online course. MERLOT provides you a webform for describing how you want your students to complete a learning activity or lesson.
          HOW? On the webpage that describes the learning material (Material Detail page), click on "Create A Learning Exercise" and you can create your own learning activity for your students. Simply give them the URL for your learning exercise and they can complete the lesson.
        3. MERLOT Member Comments can provide the students and instructors opportunities to share their reflections on how they were able to use the MERLOT learning materials to advance their learning and teaching.
          HOW? On the webpage that describes the learning material (Material Detail page), click on "Write a Comment" and you and your students can write and share their own reflections on the learning and teaching experiences.
      3. MERLOT Content Builder: You can create your own OER with an easy-to-use and free authoring tool. MERLOT provides a Guidebook as well as video's explaining how to design your OER to achieve your instructional design goals. MERLOT's YouTube Channel provides 4 videos showing you how to use different features and services of the MERLOT Content Builder tool.
    3. Using Your Own Learning Management Services or Portal: All the materials on the IITE Teaching Commons has a Creative Commons license and you can either "cut and paste" and link all these materials into your own learning technology environment.

    We hope these resources are helpful to you as you design your faculty professional development program to bring technology innovation and inquiry-based teaching and learning into your institution.

top of page