CTL FOCUS

Over my time working at Cedarville, my department discussed launching a blog as a faculty resource. This project came to fruition spring 2019 after I spent a few months carving out pockets of time to work on the content strategy. In preparing for this blog, I followed the principles outlined in Kristina Halvorson’s book “Content Strategy for the Web,” wrote an outline for stakeholders, designed the layout of the blog, and prepared a sample post as proof of concept.

The project was approved, and the blog launched after faculty returned from spring break. Faculty have responded well to the blog thus far: the blog has over 100 subscribers, I’ve heard many personal testimonies of how much faculty have been helped by the posts, and it was instrumental in training faculty to transition their courses online in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FOCUS has only become more important to both my department and faculty across the pandemic. We’ve been able to use it to put out timely information for our faculty, reminding them of tools they have access to as well as resources they can use, and we’ve also organized much of our flexible learning training using information from the blog! FOCUS is fulfilling its goals — it is the place for faculty to check for information about how to accomplish certain tasks as well as the simplest way for them to learn about what updates and tweaks are coming to our LMS.