Definitions

These are the master copies of each unique course. They all have course ids that have the prefix “DEV_.” They are internal for our team and do not have students or active instructors. Before each term start, for each course, we get the DEV section right and then copy it over to the Blueprint (BP) copy of the course, from which we push the content into the live sections. The DEV is always the latest version of any course. Even if a fix is too late to make in the live section itself, we make the fix in the DEV for future terms. When we’re updating courses, we make the updates in the DEVs.

Blueprints are where all content is staged to be pushed into the live sections. No students or instructors are in the blueprints. Before each term, blueprints are

1. Unassociated with the live sections from the previous term (this is done by going to Settings and turning off Blueprint functionality in the BP);

2. Reset (go to Settings and then click “Reset Course Content”) to remove all the content and due dates from the previous term;

3. And imported with the content from the DEV_ copies, where all the most recent improvements have been made and the due dates have been updated. The sequence is: DEV-> BP-> Live Sections. Blueprints allow us to make changes to all sections at once, rather than going to each one individually. If there is an issue in a live course that needs to be addressed immediately, make the change in the BP and then push that change out to all the sections, thus fixing the issue everywhere.

These are the live courses with the students and faculty. Course codes have two formats

• DE5W01.08.24 for Undergrad

• DE8W01.08.24 for Grad : The one thing that is always different in the live sections from what is in the BP copy of any given course is the Homepage. Before each term start, we’ll update the Homepage with the instructor photo and bio for the instructor assigned to that section.

While not technically refreshes, these often precede them. Sometimes a dean will be worried about whether a course that is coming up in our schedule meets our standards. You will probably be assigned a few audits, in Trello. The basic structure of an audit doc is to make notes each week on what you notice in the course that may not be up to snuff, then pull the major notes out of their weekly context to the top. This is a good example: COMM 201 Audit and here is the Audit Template.

Courses we are building from scratch, with a SME, with most of the development work happening in course project folders in Google Drive (like this one for Sea Turtle Rehabilitation or this one for Spanish 101) before the course is finally refined into a final draft, then copied into Canvas. Copying into Canvas is basically a copy/paste process, but it’s also an opportunity to make final refinements to the course in its functional context. Things that make sense in Drive don’t always make sense in Canvas. New builds constitute the bulk of our responsibilities. These can be for 1, 2, or 3 credit courses (UG) or 3 credit (Grad). UG courses are 5 weeks long and G courses are 8.

Refresh is sort of a catch-all for courses that have already been built but we’ve identified something substantial that needs to be changed in the course. This could be anything from the Course Project to the course textbook. We generally partner up with a SME for these, but not always. They are some of the more dangerous development “types” in terms of your own time commitment, as the scope is often poorly defined and it can sometimes be complicated to keep scope-creep in control. Some particular types of refreshes, in addition to those we may be doing because we’ve identified something specific in a course that we want to improve, are:

Updates are where a lot of your work will start to help you get a handle on our common course structures, and their variance. Basically, updates are just a maintenance pass through existing courses before they run again. Updating dates, checking links, making sure DE-wide standardizations (such as specific wording in the syllabi) are propagated everywhere they need to be. It’s comfortingly boring work, actually.