Here are some courses I either designed myself or redesigned from a previous version.
Click on the sections below to expand them.
- Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU)
- Northern Illinois University (NIU)
- University of Illinois (UIC)
Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU)
Course: HRD 490: Multimedia: Design and Application
Summary of (re)design: This one is currently in progress as of autumn 2022 and I will teach it as a 16-week course in spring 2023.
Course: HRD 406: Instructional Design in Human Resource Development
Summary of (re)design: For this course, I was hired to teach as an adjunct for spring 2021. Northeastern Illinois University uses D2L / Brightspace as their LMS. I am more familiar with Blackboard due to my other work at another university, so it took a little time to get familiar with the system. I requested to not see a version of the course taught by other previous instructors so I could start fresh and make it my own. In spring 2021, I taught it as a 16-week course. In 2022, it was an 8-week course, which required a rethinking of readings, attendance requirements, and weekly activities.
Northern Illinois University (NIU)
Course: ETT 561: Human Resource Development
Summary of redesign: I worked closely with my mentor Dr. Cindy York to review the sequencing of instruction and ensure readings and other materials were relevant to current practices.
Course: ETT 555: Media Design: Multimedia
Summary of design: This course is fun to teach and I have done so twice at NIU. I reworked the sequencing of instruction for the second offering and would have liked to teach it a third time so I could further hone it. It’s challenging to have students work with software that is either not free or is not provided by the university. Other software which would have been fun to review with the students like Articulate is too intricate and only allows for a 14-day trial period.
Course: ETT 553: Ethics & Professional Standards in Instructional Technology
Summary of design: I worked with the instructor, Dr. Cindy York, to revise sequencing of instruction and ensure materials are current to today’s standards and practices.
Course: ETT 535: Distance Education – Design and Delivery
Summary of design: This one was very fun to redesign and teach. I have over 20 years of distance education experience which affords me a great depth of history from which to recall and share with students. This one was taught prior to the pandemic where it seemed the whole world went online. NIU has a strong history with distance education so even if there had been a pandemic during the teaching of this class, it would not have changed the format very much. That’s how strong NIU is with distance education.
Course: ETT 310: Instructional Design Models, Strategies, and Tactics
Summary of design: I was able to pull from my experiences in the field as well as research in instructional design during my doctorate studies. For this course, since it is for undergraduates, I kept it a bit more simple and talked about the history of instructional design and ADDIE to discussing some tangentially related models like SAM for students to compare and contrast.
Course: ETT 510 Instructional Media and Technology
Summary of design: This course is similar to two other courses at NIU on multimedia design and distance education. Therefore, it was quite challenging to ensure there was no unplanned redundancy with the other two courses in case students took those as well.
Course: ETT 740: Seminar: Educational Technology Foundations
Summary of design: I worked closely with my mentor, Dr. Cindy York, to revise some of the content for this course. I had taken this same course during my first semester as a doctoral student, which helped me as I was able to augment the existing content with additional content I thought would have been helpful during my first semester.
Course: ETT 511: Advanced Instructional Media Design
Summary of design: This is a follow-up course to another one on instructional media and technology. In a perfect world, I would prefer that students took both so the advanced course could truly be a follow-up and essentially continue the conversation. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works so you must start the instruction with a basic review of instructional media so everyone has the same level with which to begin.
Course: ETT 229: Computers in Education, Spring 2017-Spring 2019
Summary of design: This is a course almost all graduate / teaching assistants in the doctoral program have had experience with – I taught it many semesters in a row during my doctoral studies. It is more or less a ‘canned’ course though TAs are allowed a bit of freedom in how the content is delivered. I found the job aids that all instructors were supposed to use were incorrect so I worked with the course director to ensure they were more accurate and succint.
University of Illinois (UIC)
Course: ELEC 599: Radiology / Surgery / Anatomy
Summary of design: I was approached in fall term 2014 by a radiology faculty member Dr. Ejaz Shamim at UIC to help develop a hybrid course called Radiology / Surgery / Anatomy (RSA). I worked closely with Dr. Shamim and other faculty to develop modules, activities, rubrics, and assessments for the course. This course, still being taught as of 2022, has an online component in Blackboard though that online component serves mainly as a space for students to receive assignment information and to submit their work. The students who take this class are required to give weekly presentations (in person prior to the pandemic of 2020-?, and via Zoom during the pandemic) on a radiological image and discuss aspects of related surgical and anatomical information.
Feedback: I received from the key faculty for this course: “Thanks, Max for your guidance and instruction in adapting Blackboard to the specialized needs of RSA.”
Course: ELEC 494 Genes, Drugs, & Practical Application in Medicine
Summary of design: In spring 2021, I was approached by faculty and staff at UIC College of Medicine (UICOM) Rockford campus to help them design and develop a new asynchronous online course about genes, drugs and application in medicine. I met with the faculty and staff to discuss the length of the course, objectives, and what they expected students to be able to do by the end of the course, which helped us to design appropriate assessments and assignments. Once we had a general blueprint, I then worked closely with a key staff member to build the course in Blackboard. We edited the course design a bit after receiving evaluations from students in preparation for the next delivery of it.
Feedback: One of the faculty members who run the course, Dr. Linda Chang, sent me and a staff member with whom I worked closely on the course this feedback after week 1: “Week 1 pharmacogenomics course went well and we want to thank you both very much for your support. BB looks and functions beautifully. So grateful we have you both.”
Course(s): ELEC 670: Advanced Radiology, ELEC 670: Radiology
Summary of design: The original course(s) for radiology to be taught asynchronously online were proposed by Dr. Karen Xie, a master educator at UICOM in 2017. I worked closely with Dr. Xie to design the look and feel of the course within Blackboard based on her learning objectives and expectations of student performance. I encouraged Dr. Xie and other faculty involved in the course to record a short ‘welcome’ video and they were very positive about this suggestion. I helped them locate appropriate technology with which to record this video and others. As we do not upload video (or other large files) directly to Blackboard, I created a course and section in Echo360 and then connected it to the Blackboard course. A few years later, as Dr. Xie moved on to other responsibilities, Dr. Ketan Shah reached out to me to update the course. His version of the course was a bit more complicated and involved assessments with multiple levels of adaptive release. I also worked with Drs. Xie and Shah to use Poll Everywhere as they deliver live content to their students and include interactivity elements.
Course: ELEC 600: Artificial and Augmented Intelligence in Medicine
Summary of design: I partnered with colleagues in pharmacy, allied health, and medicine domains to develop a course on artificial and augmented intelligence and uses in the practice of medicine. I consulted with the faculty on sequencing of material and utilization of various Blackboard tools. They wanted a way for students to confirm they read the syllabus that the faculty could verify. At the time of this course creation, we did not have adequate tools available so we did the next best thing which was to have students answer a 1-question quiz that they read and understood the syllabus, though the latter is difficult to ‘grade’ unless you ask more specific questions about the syllabus content, for example.
Course: CLER 672: Laboratory Medicine
Summary of design: I worked with Dr. Amy Lin to sequence instruction during a very fast-paced two-week course. Dr. Lin taught this course as a team-based learning exercise for every day of instruction which was unheard of in our school at the time. I assisted her with creating directions for students to use in video recording their final project and the process for submitted the video assignment.
Course: ELEC 620: Narrative Medicine
Summary of design: This was a consultation with Dr. Anna Maria Gramelspacher at UIC for how to use the different tools and features within Blackboard for a new course she developed.
Courses: Neuropsychiatry; Neuropsychiatry Perspectives
Summary of design:
Course: Ophthalmology
Summary of design:
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