A question -
Do you work at a school with a shared master shell for your classes or is everything DIY? I am trying to get a feel for what is the status of online and hybrid shells.
For the record - at a DIY school now with no consistency between course shells.
DIY, but with some master shells as resource compilations for classes with a lot of different instructors. That's been really helpful in covid times for sharing, for example, online labs.
We're at a DIY university, but our teaching and learning centre has put together some really useful templates that a lot of us are using.
You probably want your own shell, or you will want to get one as soon as you're comfortable with your course and/or your LMS layout.
Master shells limit your autonomy and academic freedom, unless you're the professor controlling the master shell. Functionally, a master shell works a lot like a master syllabus, master exams, master lesson plans, etc...
I only tend to see master LMS shells operated under very specific situations.
- brand new professors getting a "master shell" duplicated for their own use, from a kind colleague who is already teaching the same course type
- co-taught and team-taught courses (which is isn't really a master shell but just multiple professors all teaching the same course section)
- what sprout said (although I've never actually witnessed anybody using a master shell that way)
- graduate students and other "T.A." instructors who are not the Instructor of Record for their course
- sheistier community colleges employing way too many adjuncts as glorified laboratory course T.A.'s.
- for-profit diploma mills
Now a "template", that's arguably something different. A template can be as little as just a format layout. It doesn't require anything specific to the academic content of one's course. Lots of universities will routinely supply a basic template (or give you one on request) when you get your course section programmed into the LMS.
If someone is willing to give you a great template, then take it. Going from scratch when I'd never seen a LMS before I had two weeks to get my shell in place was really, really painful, even with my good friend Google.
Totally DIY, although we're required to use Moodle, which imposes some basic constraints.