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Compiled by Steve Acker, Catherine Gynn, Sally Hritz and Susan Metros

New TELR Group Merges Teams

The Office of the CIO recently merged staff from TELR, OIT's Courseware Design and Development and Visual Design Services into one central unit. At the heart of the new TELR is a staff of highly skilled professionals comprising instructional, multimedia, graphical interface and Web designers, illustrators, programmers and technology integration specialists. The realignment is in response to the Distance Education and Continuing Education Committee's recommendation to provide enhanced eLearning support universitywide. The new TELR team provides full-service eLearning training, support and resources for the academic community including both resident and remote students. The group is working towards complementing the efforts of the discipline-based educational technology staff by building a collaborative end-to-end solution to support eLearning from concept through development to delivery. The group also works closely with OIT's video production group, operations, classroom support team, and the CIO's emerging technologies and communications staff. The Courseware Design and Development and Visual Design Services staffs are relocating from Lord Hall to fourth floor Baker Systems Services in early May and will retain their existing telephone numbers.

TELR Activities Focus on Learning Objects

OLN Grants Fund Learning Community Initiative and Institute
TELR, in collaboration with Faculty and TA Development, the OSU Libraries, OSU's Web Media Collective and outside partners, has been awarded one of 31 Learning Communities Initiative grants distributed by the Ohio Learning Network (OLN). With these funds, the OSU learning community is bringing together biologists, historians, librarians, instructional design specialists, and industry professionals to build a learning object on Charles Darwin and his influence on scientific thought. Learning objects are content modules created for use in online and technology enhanced classes. TELR also was awarded an OLN Learning Institute grant to host one of six conferences for groups of learning communities. Ohio State's learning institute theme of "Building and Assessing Sharable Content" brought together learning community teams in January from the University of Dayton, Ursuline College, University of Cincinnati, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Miami University. OLN will host a state-level conference in Columbus in June for all the learning communities.

Metros and Gynn Help Lead EDUCAUSE Learning Objects Initiative
Deputy CIO Susan Metros, who is also executive director of eLearning, and TELR Coordinator Catherine Gynn have been appointed to leadership positions in EDUCAUSE's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII). Metros heads the international Learning Objects workgroup and serves on NLII's advisory committee. Gynn co-facilitates a Learning Objects virtual community of practice, which is a special subset of learning communities made up of those who have common concerns, problems, or interests. Ongoing interaction among community of practice members increases their subject area expertise and ability to manage the resulting new knowledge. Research coming out of the community of practice, the Learning Objects workgroup and EDUCAUSE's Center for Applied Research (ECAR) will inform the activities of a national focus session on learning objects to be hosted by Ohio State in October at the Blackwell Inn. At the collaborative session, participants will reflect on the assumptions and practices being formed around the use of learning objects in higher education. They will explore the emerging best practices for learning object use and investigate issues about and attributes of learning objects and digital knowledge management.

Ohio State eLearning Strategies Events

Two eLearning strategies events took place on May 14 and 15 for members of the Ohio State community. Full details are available on the TELR Web site.

The first day's session focused on "Exploring Digital Learning Objects to Enrich Course Work and Research," and was held in the Younkin Success Center. Its purpose was to show the possibilities of learning objects and spotlight existing collaborations that are developing them. Co-sponsors TELR (Technology Enhanced Learning and Research), University Libraries, and the Web Media Collective put together an agenda that included panels, demonstrations and small group discussions.

The second day's event, "Exploring Ohio State's Options for Course Management Systems (CMS)," took place in the Ohio Union and was designed to encourage campus community input into the selection process for the university's next generation Web-based CMS. The survey featured four vendors under consideration: CyberLearningLabs (Angel), BlackBoard (version 6.0), Desire2Learn and WebCT (Vista). For more history and background on Ohio State's use of course management systems, see Ohio State Evaluating Course Management Systems.

Digital Coursepacks Update

TELR and many others areas of the university are interested in supplementing residential and online courses with digital coursepacks, which are online readings that supplement or replace traditional textbooks. OSU's Introductory Biology program has piloted digital coursepacks with promising results using content from XanEdu and Ebsco, two online information services.

TELR and University Libraries developed a coursepack by assembling reading materials from a variety of sources modeled on traditional eReserves. To see how an electronic library was integrated into a course, visit the course Web page for "Digital Learning Objects: The building blocks of online course design" at
http://morty.uts.ohio-state.edu/Template/jcomm850c-info/jcomm850c-info4.htm. TELR and the Libraries share the goal of better integrating the Libraries' high-quality, credible information sources into undergraduate and graduate level courses. This academic year they, along with the Introductory Biology program, will expand the scope of digital coursepacks to better support OSU Libraries and OhioLink holdings and copyright-cleared digital content.