First, Happy Birthday to mom!

This is a terrible time at work -- I'm doing monkey work to help our dev team get a truckload of courses out the door in time for Christmas. That means that I'm working long hours doing some of the most tedious stuff you can imagine. As we develop courses online, there are bits and pieces of those courses that are built by some, and bits and pieces built by others. Content is submitted by our subject matter experts, shaped into course pages by instructional designers, uploaded by course developers into our online software tool, and then the onerous job of setting up each course begins.

Why onerous? Because you have to do stupid stuff like setup the grade book for each course, and sometimes it doesn't work right, and sometimes the links between the assignments and the score in the gradebook break. We recently upgraded the software, and that introduced a whole slew of problems for the courses developed on the earlier version. So most of the grade books and settings have had to be recreated one by one. And guess who's been doing that?

Call me Gradebook Monkey. Seems like I spent all week on it.

At the same time, I'm faciltating a mini-course for a group of 24 online instructors, wherein they learn what they need to know to teach for our schools in the online software. The mini-course is a confusing piece of dook that itself has been made hard to update because it has to change with each new version of the tool. It's hard to facilitate as well, as the student's pathway through the material is anything but intuitive. And I have no time to improve it!

As will be obvious, I'm in the dumps this week. And that's likely to be the case for the next two weeks, as we are cranking out courses as fast as we can.