Online Course Production

White Glove Course Development

Our guiding principle: We do as much as we can for you as possible. 

This can include, but isn’t limited to:

• Drafting learning content, weekly overview guides, objectives, assessments, and activities
• Building out all content, pages, and modules in Canvas
• Remediating content for accessibility
• Converting PPTS to interactive eLearning activities
• Drafting, scripting, and managing the development of instructional media
• Creating scenarios and simulations
• Setting due dates, assignment settings, and completing the gradebook setup

Build once, deploy everwhere: When developing a course for one term length, we will also offer additional term length builds as a bonus. This ensures that you have the same class and content available for multiple terms.

The majority of our faculty SMEs report spending 2-5 hours per week during the process. This includes regularly scheduled meetings, drafting course content, recording instructional content in our state-of-the-art studio, consulting with the instructional designer on the look and feel of the course, and adjusting course pacing.

Our white-glove course development process includes extensive media development to elevate your course.

Want to go faster?

Our accelerated white-glove course development process mirrors our full-term process, but we complete it in half the time. The accelerated timeframe for this process is an opt-in option, not one prescribed by the School of Professional Studies.

Independent, Self-Paced Build of Online Courses

When you select this option in the form linked below, the Digital Learning Production team will whitelist you for Cidilab’s Design Tools and enroll you in an asynchronous training on how to use the tools. We will also send you helpful planning documents, guides, and instructions for developing online materials and assignments; pre-built Canvas templates for online course delivery; and a copy of our custom Student Ready Checklist, which we use to provide feedback on online courses. Once you have completed your course development, you can resubmit the form for a review and consultation of your course with an instructional designer.

Existing Online Courses

The following options are available only to courses that already exist online. Please note that these development processes, regardless of their length, can start at the beginning of a term or at the beginning of the half-term.

Option	Best For	Duration	Faculty Time Commitment
Online Course Design Bootcamp – Cohort	Faculty with an existing online course needing updates to upgrade course content and navigation.	4 weeks	Initial synchronous face-to-face meeting in Week 1, then 7 hours a week for three weeks.
Rapid Refresh	Faculty with an existing online course needing specific updates to look and feel, assessments, or course pacing. When possible, we will complete the draft of this for your approval to minimize your workload.	8 weeks	16 hours
Course Review	Review and feedback of existing online courses	1-2 weeks	Varies

Online Course Design Bootcamp

Bootcamps are available to departments and programs with existing online courses and can be tailored to each program’s needs. Our goal with these custom Bootcamps is to meet you where you are. We’ll do as much as we can for you within your availability and customize the program to your departmental needs.

Our regularly scheduled Bootcamp is a stipended development process that typically runs in the Spring semester and consists of two phases. Phase I is a full-day event where we discuss what you need to be successful as a faculty member, current trends in online learning, and the unique needs of online students.  Phase II is online for three weeks, to take your course even further with the hands-on assistance of instructional designers. Phase II is a mix of synchronous online Zoom meetings and asynchronous guided course design work. The goal of Phase II is to improve the student experience in your online course.

As a bonus for signing up, you’ll be provided with our Canvas visual design tool, Design Plus, to use in all of your classes to make them look better than ever. Not only does Design Plus help your classes look great, but it also makes it easier and faster to build them. 

During the Bootcamp, you will be placed into groups and assigned an instructional designer. You will receive a report with insights on potential course enhancements. 

For me, the Bootcamp was NOT a professional development opportunity. Rather, it was an objective, non-judgmental look at my teaching with ideas for improvements. I use the word improvements; however, I view the Bootcamp experience as more of a reflective opportunity to create fresh excitement that follows best practices, while meeting today’s learners with updated tools and strategies. I would be crazy not to take advantage of the help being offered to me in such a fun, creative, and friendly setting.

Jason Karp, College of Computing and Informatics. 
Watch the full testimonial.

Rapid Refresh

A rapid refresh consists of online courses or programs developed in collaboration with a faculty member and an instructional designer, or of courses developed independently by a faculty member and taught successfully multiple times online. A course is automatically considered for a refresh three (3) years after the original development. This process ensures that courses are kept up-to-date with the latest content changes, online best practices, and technology. 

Course Review

Using our custom Student Ready Checklist, based on the Online Learning Consortium’s new Quality Scorecard, we can provide feedback on existing online courses or faculty-developed course drafts and identify targeted areas for revision. This no-stipend process focuses input on the areas with the greatest student impact in online classes, as well as on areas for revision that can positively affect faculty grading load and online course management and facilitation.

If you want to build your online course independently, you can use this option to request resources and templates to get started.

When completing the form below, select Review and Consultation only if you just want a course review.

Extended Faculty Support

We don’t just build courses with faculty; we also support you in teaching and revising them after launch. Our team will schedule a launch meeting with you for the first semester you’re scheduled to teach the course, and will follow up throughout the semester to discuss how things are working. We can assist with troubleshooting technology issues and revising content, organization, and assessments to better align with the student experience as they take the class, and we will provide you with feedback on what is and isn’t working.

Email offers of continued support are also sent at the start of every semester for any course we have built. We encourage faculty to reach out to us for assistance with course copies, formatting fixes, and beginning-of-semester course setup, as well as more in-depth content revisions.

Canvas Commons

To make it easier to find your courses after they are built, we can assist with loading your development shells into a department-specific group within Canvas Commons. This makes it much easier to keep track of your development shell when completing course copies at the beginning of the semester.

Currently, this solution is available on a “by request” basis. Courses loaded into Canvas Commons are shared only inside your department, and only with a specific list of users provided by your Department Chair or Online Course Coordinator. After the initial setup of this distribution method, a coordinator from your department will need to manage group access and keep content up to date. If you are interested in setting up this course solution for your department, please complete the interest form below.

Interested in Learning More?

If you’re interested in working with us on your online course or your online program, please submit a request via our interest form, and we’ll get back to you!