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Master Course vs. Teaching Site
The Master course has been part of your course development throughout this seminar. How is a Master course different from an “official course”, or what we often call the Teaching course site?
- A Master course is used only to develop and store the content, assignments, and media for your course
- Student accounts are never loaded into a Master course.
- The Master remains on your course list indefinitely so that you can keep it fresh.
When you are finished developing your course within your eCampus Master course, you will copy the content from the eCampus master course into an official Teaching shell. Each semester, you must request an official course shell for teaching (Boise State login required). The Office of Information Technology creates a semester-specific Blackboard course and links it to student registration and instructor accounts. When the request is fulfilled, you will see your teaching shell in your list of courses where you are the instructor. Students will not see the course until you make it available.
NOTE: Your teaching or course shell is not a complete course. In comparison with an on-campus course, your teaching shell is like the classroom schedule that reserves a room for your class. The next step is bringing the course content and activities into the location where you and your students meet. The next steps on this page will outline how to add the content for your course into the teaching shell. This process is repeated prior to the start of each semester.
Maintaining Your Master Course
The course eQIP Master Course life cycle is briefly illustrated in the following diagram.
The eQIP Master Course life cycle is quite simple:
- The Master Course is the one you’ve been using to design and develop your course in this seminar.
- You copy your Master course into the Teaching Site and prepare it for teaching in the specific semester. Instructors typically adjust and improve the course while teaching it.
- After you have taught your course at least once, the coordinator of the eCampus Quality Instruction Program invites you to participate in the Quality Matters™ Peer Review. This fulfills the last portion of your Agreement with eCampus Center. The eQIP Coordinator works with you to clear out your Master Course site, and copy your Teaching Site into the Master Course for the review.
- The Coordinator then enrolls three Boise State faculty peer reviewers with Student roles to review your Master Course and give you feedback on the success of your design in meeting Quality Matters Standards.
- You review their feedback, meet with one of our eQIP Faculty Associates to discuss the review, and then make suggested course improvements in your Master Course site.
- You can now copy your Master Course into your next Teaching Site.
Preparing the Course Site for Students
There are two main ways to populate your Teaching shell with content from your Master: copy all content in one transaction, or copy content m