The college’s MCO liaison will coordinate the nomination process, but all entries must be approved and made in conjunction with the institution’s MCO Liaison. Receipt confirmation and follow-up correspondence will be sent to the campus liaison.

• Each MCO institution may nominate one online course and one blended course.
• There is no requirement to nominate courses for COD designation. Your institution may nominate both an online and blended course, just one of either modality, or none at all.
• The nominees will be honored on June 3rd , MCO Conference on eLearning at Fitchburg State University . COD award winners will receive a plaque of recognition at the conference.
• The nominated courses should be based on content created by the nominees. Courses that are substantially based on publisher-provided content and content not developed under the direction of the instructor are not eligible for nomination. An online course nominee must offer more than 80 percent of its content online.
• It is expected that the faculty nominees will present a 15-20-minute overview/Q&A about the course at the June 3rd  conference.
• SHORT VIDEO TOUR
  COD award winners, with the support of their institution’s liaison, are encouraged to provide a short video “course tour” that will be posted on the MCO website. The video length should be no longer than 5 minutes and it should be fully accessible.
  Permission from students should be solicited if necessary and/or personal identifiable information should be removed.
• The nomination forms must be submitted online by May 1st.
• In order to avoid privacy issues, an instructor should solicit permission from the nominated course’s students to allow conference participant access, or a version of the course can be created with specific student identification removed.

Every effort has been taken to streamline the online nomination form. Care should be taken in providing the requested information, since it will be used in developing the conference program, and award ceremony introductions. A sample of a representative nomination is available as part of the nomination form.

The COD distinction should provide the colleges with an excellent public relations and marketing opportunity. Liaisons will be asked to coordinate these efforts with their institution’s PR staff.

Second Category: Courses of Distinction for Blended Courses

Each MCO institution may nominate a second course designated by the institution as a blended course. Although definitions may vary, a blended course combines face-to-face interaction such as in-class discussions, active group work, and live lectures with typically web-based educational technologies such as online course cartridges, assignments, discussion boards, and other web-assisted learning tools.

For purposes of the COD nominations, the Sloan-C definition will be used: a course will be considered a blended course if 30-79 percent of the content is delivered online.

To be nominated, the course should be based on content created by the nominee. Courses that are substantially based on publisher-provided content and content not developed under the direction of the instructor are not eligible for nomination.

There is no requirement to nominate courses for COD designation. The institution may nominate both an online and blended course, just one of either modality, or none at all.

COD Descriptions:

In the past you were asked on the form to write a summary based on the following.

Why is your college nominating this course to receive an MCO Course of Distinction Award?
Briefly describe the course and explain why it is unique and deserving of this award. Include a description of its overall instructional design and explain how the course promotes mastery of its learning objectives.

You might wish to describe such factors as how the course incorporates communication, retention, and interactive instructional strategies; uses multimedia, how it has been revised and the type of student feedback that has been received.

This is still very helpful to do to as you coordinate publicity on the award with your marketing department…..HOWEVER….

We are changed the structure of the presentation ceremony and the conference program. We are asking you to submit in the nomination form a description of the course using no more than 500 characters to summarize and  highlight  its COD-worthiness. (In reality, this may take longer to write than the previous two page approach…but it will assist the committee greatly.)

This description will be printed in the conference program and used to describe the COD at the ceremony. Ideally, the committee will be able to use your verbiage exactly as you wrote it.

For example:

PHY212 Introduction to Nuclear Energy
(388 characters Course title is not counted in the character count)