Center for Online Learning Hires Instructional Design Specialist

Christine Stricker

The Center for Online Learning at CATS provides training, support and services for faculty, staff and students that are involved in technology-enhanced courses. The Center for Online Learning’s new Instructional Design Specialist for Online Learning, Christine Stricker, is doing just that by assisting faculty and staff with their online courses.

Stricker explains: “I look at their course, see where improvements need to be made and then I train them on how to implement those changes.” Offering a good quality online course is a great way to attract more students to Eastern Illinois University, and that’s what the Center for Online Learning is here to help ensure. Online courses are beneficial to a variety of groups, whether it’s student athletes or the non-traditional adult students.

“If a class is able to be offered online, then we want to provide that to students and make it more accessible,” she stresses.

Aside from reviewing online courses, Stricker is also working on providing helpful materials for COL. Currently, she is creating a series of ‘tips and tricks’ that will be posted on COL’s website, eiu.edu/col, where instructors can pick up little bits of information to add to their courses.

Stricker is also working on designing course templates in Desire2Learn, which will help to make the setup of online classes less painful. “They can drag and drop the template into another course and fill in their information so they don’t have to start from scratch,” explains Stricker. She is very keen on stressing the importance of faculty to alter their courses from face-to-face to online. “Instructors may already have a structure they go by, but there are more elements they need for online courses that they may not have in their face-to-face ones,” she stated.

Since it is sometimes difficult for faculty members to change their organizational system to fit the online structure, Stricker does the organizing, which allows them to focus more on the content of their course. Stricker hopes to make all of these new features available online so faculty and staff can access the information whenever they need it. “So much work is done after hours, and I want them to be able to do it easily,” she added.

Faculty and staff can visit the Center for Online Learning offices in 1125 McAfee to receive assistance with their online courses; however, an appointment is recommended and can be made via the website (eiu.edu/col/solution_center.php).

For more information contact Christine Stricker via email: clstricker@eiu.edu.