The semester starts in two weeks and your Department Chair calls you in to say that you will be teaching your class fully online. Of course, you say “yes” right away and leave your department chair’s office with a big smile, when in fact, you are thinking, “How am I going to do this?"
As you return to your office, you remember a conversation with a publisher's sales rep who mentioned e-packs to you: “Have I got a deal for you. We have online content specifically for your book. Content that can make your students’ online experience the best you’ve ever seen. And guess what, it’s all built. You don’t have to do a thing.”
What should you do?
Well, before you make the choice to use e-packs, the Distance Education instructional designers encourage you to consider their pros and cons.
Pros:
• The content, according to the publisher, is built.
• The content, according to the publisher, matches the book.
• The content, according to the publisher, will match your course’s goals and objectives perfectly with little or no effort on your part.
Cons:
•Publishers are disseminators of content, not facilitators of knowledge.
• My students spend more time trying to get to the content then actually interacting with said content.
• My students have to pay more for my class then other class they are taking through DE. Students pay an extra fee between 60 and 125 dollars per e-pack.
• My students don’t get the one-on-one support from UNLV for these resources. OIT and DE can’t help with e-packs because they are a third-party resource. I become the tech support for students.
• My students are confused as to why they don’t have instant access to the publisher’s content, after all, they’ve logged into WebCampus. They need to leave the course in WebCampus, log in to the publisher's website and navigate to however the publisher organized the content.
• My students find the presentation / organization of the content confusing. I have to write emails explaining where to find the pertinent information. The way the content is presented is causing students to focus more on the presentation and less on the actual content being presented.
• My students don’t have access to the content after the class ends.
• My students are finding differences between my presentation of content and that of the e-pack. I have found I have to spend more time correcting the misinformation.
• My students are complaining about disconnect between the content provided and my assessments. The content doesn’t match my goals and objectives to for the class.
• My students aren’t challenged enough to pass my evaluation at the end of each module. Activities in the publisher resources only focus on low level (in Bloom's Taxonomy) remembering and understanding tasks, and not on higher-order, thinking skills.
• Distance Education does not pay development monies for courses where the primary means of instruction is through an e-pack.
So now that we've identified the systemic problems associated with e-packs — additional cost for students, lack of UNLV tech support, and inability to organize content for ease of navigation and conceptual clarity — let's consider what Distance Education can do for you.
DE's staff of instructional designers, technologists, artists, and interactive designers can help you create the educational experience you desire for your students. Because this work is done in house:
• Your students’ DE fees already pay for this. It’s always DE’s goal to help you and them get their money’s worth.
• The content resides within our learning management system (WebCampus) and not that of another company’s.
• There is no question of copyright. The content belongs to you and to the University.
• Students get the one-on-one support they need when they need it from OIT and DE.
• Your content is current and *accurate. It is unique to your class and meets your instructional needs.
• The activities are developed according to your specifications, allowing you to create learning experiences that ask the student to apply, synthesize, and create a new idea based on the information provided.
You have a better option than using an e-pack.
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*Accuracy depends on the accuracy of the content provided by the instructor. The Instructional Designer for the project and the Design and Development team member will not make any changes, edits, or corrections to the content provided without the expressed consent of the instructor.
