Information for New InTeGrate Authors

Events

New team members will have a face-to-face meeting that will: orient you to the authoring process, allow you to meet your team members and begin working as a team, jump-start your plan for moving forward, and introduce the assessment guidelines for InTeGrate materials. The face-to-face meeting is proceeded by a webinar that will help ensure the face-to-face meeting is as productive as possible. As they become available, logistics and agendas are listed on the Team Meeting Index.

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Expectations and Stipends

Throughout the process of materials development, there are specific expectations that each author must meet in order to receive stipends for their work. Please be sure that you have read and can agree to all author expectations for work and receiving stipends prior to beginning work.

Working Together as a Team

Working together to collaboratively create materials may be a new experience for you, as well as working remotely with others. We have provided lots of support for you to be successful in those two endeavors.

A good starting place for working together is to talk explicitly in your group about how you're going to coordinate work and handle communication:

• Decide when and how you will conduct regular meetings to discuss progress, to ask questions of one another, and to review one another's work.
• Develop a tentative timeline for reaching each development checkpoint that makes sense for all team member's current and future schedules that will allow you to finish creating materials well in advance of when you need to implement the materials.
• Divide the work up among your team based on each individual's expertise and interest.

Read more tools for working together as a team.

Documentation Pages

A series of documentation pages have been developed to provide you with the details of the materials development process including information about how and when to obtain IRB approval from your institution, how data will be collected, information about copyright, and information about how your webspace works. Please be sure that you read the documentation pages prior to beginning work on your materials. You can access all the pages from the Information for Materials Developers page.

Module/Course Description and Timeline Form

Once a team is accepted and ready to begin work, the first step for your team is to collaboratively write the description of your module or course and explain how it will address each of the five overarching themes of InTeGrate. If you are not attending an in-person author orientation meeting, you will submit this work to InTeGrate using the Module/Course Description and Timeline Form. (If you are attending the author orientation you will have an abbreviated form and work on the module components at the meeting)

Submitting the form is a critical step that will trigger three things:

1. Project staff will set up your contract. You will receive the contract by mail/e-mail using the contact information your provide. You must sign the contract and return it with a completed W-9 form to activate the contract.
2. Your authoring team will be assigned an assessment consultant and webteam liaison based on when you plan to implement the materials and the content area of your module or course. Read more about the roles of the assessment and webteam below.
3. Your web team liaison will set up your webspace (described below). Your webteam liaison will contact you once the webspace is created. Your team will need to learn how to use the team's webspace to create materials by scheduling a call with the webteam liaison.

The Authoring Process

The full details of the materials development process can be accessed on the Timeline page. Materials development is a three-phase process. Teams will reach several checkpoints during the process. A summary of the process is provided below.

Phase 1: Materials in Development (as a team)
Each team's authors work together to create detailed descriptions of materials for faculty use and student versions of the materials when necessary. The Materials Development and Refinement Rubric describes the types of InTeGrate materials the project is creating. The team leader (Tim Bralower, Anne Egger, David Gosselin, David McConnell, John Taber) and the team's assessment consultant provide guidance to the team to help them understand and meet the elements of the rubric. At the end of Phase 1 the materials will need to pass through the rubric, demonstrating that they have all of the desired attributes. In Phase 2, student data will be collected, so authors must prepare by obtaining IRB approval from their institution.

Phase 2: Classroom Pilot (individually)
During the classroom pilot phase, module/course authors take their newly developed curriculum and try it out in their own classroom. Authors collect data that supports the evaluation of the team's materials and of the projects overall goals. Learn more about the design of the assessment and evaluation. Piloting allows authors to understand and document the learning that is taking place in the classroom. This helps ensure that the desired level of learning is being achieved and demonstrates pieces of the curriculum that may need revisions. Since each team member individually pilots the materials, there will be multiple sets of data to inform the material revisions. The classroom pilots also contribute to the evaluation of the larger InTeGrate project effort by gathering data that is common to all InTeGrate classroom pilots. Read more about the assessment data being collected and how it relates to your module/course and the overarching project on the Assessment Data page.

Phase 3: Post-Pilot Materials Revision (as a team)
The materials development team uses data collected during their classroom pilot along with assessment team feedback from the rubric review to guide the team toward meaningful revisions. Authors create individual case studies based on experiences and reflections from implementing the materials, and finalize the information that supports other faculty in using the materials. By the end of the process, the teaching materials and case studies will become publicly-available web pages that other faculty may access and implement in their own classes.

Support for Teams

Materials development teams are comprised of faculty members from three different institutions. Authors work collaboratively in a webspace that is created solely for the team to create materials. Working together as a team requires communication over email, virtual conferencing, etc. To assist in these efforts, teams are supported by:

• A team leader who is also a member of the InTeGrate leadership team (Tim Bralower, Anne Egger, David Gosselin, David McConnell, and John Taber).
• An assessment team member who is trained to be an expert in using the Materials Development and Refinement Rubric.
• A webteam liaison is a staff member at SERC who specializes in using the web authoring tools.

Your Team's Webspace

Your webteam liaison will set up your initial webspace and provide guidance on using the SERC Content Management System (CMS). There is a basic structure for the materials your team will author, and your webspace will be individualized based on your team's content and goals of your material. Materials in progress provides a list with links to materials in development, team email lists, and email list archives.

Webspace Set-up

1. Make sure your SERC account is set up. Visit http://serc.carleton.edu/account and login with your SERC account. If you don't have one yet, create one using the email address you've provided to InTeGrate using the same email address that you submitted on your Module/Course Description and Timeline Form.
2. Visit the webspace (listed on the Materials in progress web page). Once created, there will be a link to the front page of your webspace. You can explore the existing pages that contain placeholder text and make simple edits using the QuickEdit feature, which is invoked by clicking the red 'Edit' link in the upper right of each page. Feel free to contact your webteam liaison for help with using the CMS.
   
3. Once you have made some simple edits, you'll want to explore the more detailed documentation that explains range of editing options you have within a page. The documentation covers how to upload and include images and other files within your webspace.
   
4. You'll want to familiarize yourself with InTeGrate's basic structure for modules and courses in order to envision your webspace as a whole.
   
5. When you have reached Assessment Checkpoint 1, your webteam support person will create 'empty spaces' to accommodate the material you intend to develop. At this stage you'll want to be familiar with exploring your space through the back-door: the SERC admin interface. This view of your space provides more complete control over your content and allows you to reach pages that aren't yet hooked into the main navigation of your webspace.
   

Your path from this point will vary depending on the particular needs of your team.