Is Videotaping Your Entire Lecture the Best Option?

When deciding whether to videotape your lectures, consider the following:

• Who is your audience? Do they have high speed or dialup internet connections?
• What is the topic or content being discussed? Does it require a demonstration, experiment or simulation? Do you need to show facial expressions or body movements?
• What is your lecture/presentation style? Do you typically lecture with slides? Do you present from a lectern or move around the classroom? Do you frequently write on the whiteboard?

Generally, there is not much benefit to putting entire lecture videos online. Besides the technical considerations of editing, file size, viewing quality and bandwidth, students may easily become distracted or bored watching a long lecture video and miss important concepts. On the positive side, they may be taking notes, but still not watching the video. You should use video only when it offers a clear benefit to the learning process.

Here are some suggestions for putting lecture video online:

1. Use video for visually communicating actions that are difficult to explain verbally. Try to avoid the "talking head" video lectures.
2. Break long videos into several short video clips by task or concept. Videos can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Typically 8-10 minutes is an average attention span.
   
3. Take the time to plan your recordings. Consider the environment, i.e., background, lighting, noise, etc. and your participants.
4. Plan ways to show things instead of only telling about them.
5. Be energetic and dynamic.

If your lecture does not require visual communication, you should consider recording audio only to accompany a slide presentation or lecture notes. To add narration to your slides, consider using Adobe Breeze, which publishes the presentation in the Flash format. Or, simply record your audio and post as an .mp3 file with your lecture notes.

Please help us learn by sharing your experiences using video lectures in your online classroom.

OpenCourseWare Grows Up

Since MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001, this project has grown not too fast but firmly. MIT plans to publish course materials of all its courses online, including syllabi, lecture notes, quizzes, and so on, for everyone to use freely, yes, freely. More than 900 of MIT’s 1800 courses have been published so far. If you would like to know more about OCW, you may read The Chronicle’s article ‘Open Courseware’ Idea Spreads.

Obviously the project needs money, and fortunately, it’s supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. With the foundation’s support, many other institutions join MIT now, although many of them plan to release selected courses instead of all, like MIT. In addition, some institutions have their own features. For example, Yale University announced last year to have the lecture videos of selected courses online.

The other institutions working on the OCW project are: Carnegie Mellon University, Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Open University of the UK, Tufts University, U. of California at Irvine, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Utah State University.

OCW can be a great resource to UHV instructors and students who work on online courses.

Title V News

We’d like to take some time this week to give you a quick overview of the Title V Grant and its current status. If you have not yet heard, UHV is working in cooperation with Coastal Bend College on a grant designed to increase enrollment on both campuses and improve distance learning capacities through three components:

• Component I—Coastal Bend Cougar Connections
• Component II—Distance Learning Academies
• Component III—UHV Connections

UHV will primarily be involved with Components II and III. We won’t go into the details of Component II at this point, but this component will consist of three academies designed to help faculty improve their online courses and save time in the process. A few ‘extras’ will be issued to faculty members who successfully complete the program.

Component III is the mentoring portion of the grant. UHV students who qualify to become mentors will be guiding and motivating CBC students in an effort to close the gap between the community college and university.

If you are a student interested in becoming a mentor, please contact Robert Cortez, Title V UHV Connections Coordinator: cortezrs@uhv.edu

In addition to updates through the LTD blog, a website devoted to Title V is nearing completion. Full details of each component will be available on the site, as well as bulletins and newsletters. We plan to implement a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQ) section on the site, so if you have any questions regarding Title V or any of its components please email bretts@uhv.edu, or stop by UW133.

Jumpstarting Your Course Discussion Board

Well, here it is…the start of another semester online. How do you get your students involved early? Discussions should be an integral part of your online course. But, don’t wait until you dive into content-related discussions to get students talking. Instead, have them jump in with non-threatening, introductory discussions that will 1) acclimate them to the technology and 2) start to build community among participants.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Create an introductions forum/topic for your students to get to know you and each other.
   
• Introduce yourself and introduce the course
• Ask students to introduce themselves—they will generally take their cue from your post, so if you include information like family, hobbies, study interests, etc., they will likely do the same
• Create a fun or unusual icebreaker activity, i.e.:
  
• One word—students post one word (or animal, city, piece of clothing, etc.) that describes them and why.
• Unusual fact—students post an unusual fact about themselves
• Unusual travel story—students post a brief story about a travel/vacation incident
• Three things—students list their three favorite…websites, people, foods, jobs, etc.
  


2. Create a casual forum/topic for your students to interact with each other on non-course-related topics, i.e., “Coffee House”, “Cyber Lounge”, etc.
3. Create a technology help forum/topic for students to seek assistance on technology issues.
4. Create a course help forum/topic for students to post course-related questions, i.e., where do I find…? when is the test again? etc.

Reminders:

1. Define expectations. Create a rubric for graded discussions identifying your expectations for quality and frequency of posts.
2. Define conduct rules. Provide netiquette resources.
3. Clearly state the purpose of each topic/forum, including any social or help topics.

Building an active and engaging discussion board is critical to conducting a successful online course. Stay tuned for more tips and strategies to build and facilitate interactive online courses. Please share your ideas and experiences using the comments below.

Improve Your Syllabus for Better Planning and Communication

Welcome back to UHV! It must be very hard to say Goodbye to the holiday break, but the new semester is also exciting with all the plans. One of the most important plans is the syllabus—the plan of your course, which is also the basis of the students’ personal studying plans. In this post, I would like to offer some resources or suggestions that you might find helpful when developing or revising your syllabus.

Being Informative
As standard practice, a syllabus needs to include detailed information about course content, textbook, prerequisite, instructor contact information, grading policy, course schedule, university policies, and so on.
Syllabus Checklist A pretty clear checklist created by University of Minnesota.
Writing a Syllabus The author asks ten inspiring questions on developing online syllabus. Several resources are also recommended.
Creating an Effective Online Syllabus A good article with a sample syllabus.

Being Clear
A good online course syllabus should be easily understood, accessible, and reflecting current content ("The ABCs of online course syllabi: anticipate, build on objectives, and collaborate. " Online Cl@ssroom, May 2006). A good idea is to use various font styles, such as bold, italics, or different fonts, to highlight the important information. This is especially useful if your syllabus has long paragraphs. One tip is to ask a family member or friend to read the syllabus draft from a student’s perspective, and it’s easier for them to identify the points that are not clear enough.

Be Interactive
As part of an online course, the syllabus can be interactive by using hyperlinks to link to relevant resources. The advantages are: 1) it’s easy to keep the content current; 2) the students have the opportunities to find more information by themselves as needed. "The information that may be linked includes:
· Publisher website
· Information for organizations/affiliations to course or program information
· Reference materials for weekly discussion areas
· Classical research
· Graphics
· Sound bites
· Video clips
· Photographs or slides
· Instructor’s email address"
("Interactive syllabus improves course accessibility." Online Cl@ssroom, June 2005.)

Please share your ideas and comments on developing online course syllabus in the comments area below.

Happy Holidays!

The holidays have arrived and we are taking a break. I want to wish all our readers a very happy holiday season and a prosperous new year. I hope you get everything on your list ;-) I'll be looking for the iPod (or Zune or Creative Zen Vision:M) under my tree!

We'll be back in January with more tips and strategies to help you design an effective and engaging online course.

Happy New Year!

20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have

This is an interesting list in which the author listed the skills that she believes an educator should have. They look very basic at first sight, but read it again…do you have all of them? Do you think you need all of them? What technology skills do you think are needed to teach online?

Link to the article: http://thejournal.com/articles/17325

Media in the Lives of our Students

My apologies to you as I have been remiss in posting here. Lots of stuff going on and more to come on that later. For now, I have a couple of resources that I think are important in helping us understand the technology-savvy student.

First, are you feeling exhausted (as I am) just trying to keep up with all the latest technology? Multi-tasking might be the solution. At least that’s what our young people seem to be doing. They are still spending a little more than 6 hours a day using and interacting with media (just as they did when surveyed six years ago), but this study shows that they are now typically using multiple types of media at one time. Now they can pack over 8 hours of media content into the same 6 hours by multi-tasking!

The Kaiser Foundation released a report (2005) on the use and effect of media on the lives of children 8 – 18 years old. To view a free copy of "Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8—18 Year-olds", go to http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm

So, what should we do as educators? The students of the "Net Generation" (those born in the 1980’s and later) have different expectations and attitudes about the world around them. They can’t imagine their world without technology and it impacts everything they do, from playing to communicating to learning to working. To help educators understand this generation and their learning expectations, EDUCAUSE published the electronic book "Educating the Net Generation".

“This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.” View this book in its entirety or by chapters, either online or as PDF at http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=5989&bhcp=1

This is an excellent resource and I will be referring to excerpts in the future as we talk more about technology and learning.

Next time....what's on your technology wish list?

Get reluctant students enthusiastic in online courses

When the students start their first online course, they have different levels of enthusiasm. All enthusiastic students are alike; each reluctant student is reluctant for his/her own reason. No matter what the reason is: the fear of technology and computer, or the concern of social isolation, there is a way you can deal with it. Errol Craig Sull shared some tips in his article “10 Ways to Get Reluctant and Downright Scared Student Enthusiastic About Taking Online Course” (Online Classroom, June 2006)

1. An informative and friendly welcome email is very important.
2. “Address possible student concerns before they’re brought up”.
3. Anticipate student concerns and be ready in advance. (Find the answers; draft the email announcements, etc.)
4. “Never make yourself out to be a computer god”.
5. Communicate with the students using WebCT tools frequently, instead of waiting for their WebCT mails. Some students are just not used to online communication at the beginning.
6. Talk to your students when needed—face to face or on the phone. Let the students know it’s still an option to talk to you even in an online course.
7. Never accept computer awkwardness as an excuse for later assignments. (The students will be more enthusiastic to solve the computer problems.)
8. Have resource and contact information ready.
9. Keep reminding the students of the advantages and benefits of online courses over f2f courses. Give the students motivation and confidence.
10. Archive the questions and problems your students have met, so you will be more ready and experienced for next semester.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This week we won't have posts on instructional technology. Enjoy your turkey and have a great Thanksgiving! See you next week.

Benefits of Online Education

Mark Kassop made a good summary of the benefits of online education in his article ‘Ten Ways Online Education Matches, or Surpasses, Face-to-Face Learning’.
Click here to view article.

UH Faculty Showcase - Reflections

Wow! There’s some really interesting stuff going on in UH and UHV courses! If you didn’t have a chance to attend the 2006 UH Faculty Showcase, you missed a chance to see and hear about how some of our faculty are using technology to engage students and improve learning in their courses. The showcase was held this past Friday, Nov. 10th at the UH campus, M.D. Anderson Library.

The opening and closing keynote was delivered by Dr. Curtis Bonk, Indiana University professor and Senior Research Fellow with the DOD's Advanced Distributed Learning Lab. His enthusiastic and inspiring presentations offered many examples, tips and techniques for integrating new technologies effectively into your course for a more engaging, interactive, and visually-appealing learning environment.

Faculty presentations ranged from extending the classroom through podcasting to digital storytelling to instructional uses of tablet PCs. Two UHV faculty also presented—Dr. Richard Gunasekera presented “Forensics on the Web and in the Lab—“Online CSI” and Dr. Barba Patton presented a session on “Using Breeze for Synchronous Meetings and Collaboration”.

Recordings of the sessions will be made available soon on the UH website and I will pass that link along as soon as it is online. In the coming weeks, I will also share more of the highlights from these presentations and discuss ways you can implement them in your courses.

11 Time-saving Tips for Teaching Online

Do you feel teaching online is more time-consuming than you expected? Errol Craig Sull, who teaches English composition for Excelsior College, shared some interesting tips on the August '06 issue of Online Cl@ssroom.
1. Always keep a hard copy of your online grades to avoid the possible technical difficulties.
2. Keep copies of all substantive student emails, papers, etc. you might just need it sometimes.
3. Remind your students to use the Internet for research. Build up their research skills, and get yourself fewer questions.
4. Always reach out to students for additional resources. Encourage the students to build up the course with you together.
5. Keep an excuse file to tell the true ones from the false ones, and to track the students’ attendance.
6. Make editing/correcting templates, so by copying and pasting, you save the trouble of typing common comments repeatedly.
7. Make use of free electronic greeting cards to help with student rapport, and let the students know you are there!
8. Keep the best examples of student work for the future students. The students would love to see a peer’s successful project.
9. Look over your emails waiting to be sent at least twice before sending them to avoid the errors.
10. Play student for one day prior to the beginning of a new class—double check your course much more effectively from a student’s perspective.
11. Always look at your actions in the course as both instructor and student for same reason as above.

What do you think about these tips? Do you have some good tips to share? Drop a line in the comments.

Add Breeze Virtual Meeting Spaces to Your Online Courses

What can you do in a Breeze meeting room?

• Upload PPT slides or JPG images in advance or on-the-fly
• Annotate slides as you discuss them
• Write or draw on blank whiteboard spaces
• Share your computer screen with participants (desktop or applications)
• Broadcast your audio and video (video on broadband only)
• Facilitte Q & A through an open text chat or moderated Q & A format
• Query participants through prepared or on-the-fly polls
• Share files with participants
• Customize the meeting room layout
• Record meetings for future playback

When could you use Breeze with your online courses?

Breeze can be used as a supplement to your existing online course, anytime that real-time interaction could enhance learning. Here are just a few ideas:

• Explanation of complex topics, especially where visuals, e.g., equations, diagrams or drawings, can improve understanding
• Software demonstrations
• Guided website tours
• Online office hours for one-to-one attention
• Review sessions for exams
• Group presentations
• Guest speakers or experts

For more information about Adobe Breeze at UHV, please visit our website at http://www.uhv.edu/breeze, request an account and schedule a training session.

Synchronous Communication in Online Course

The lack of live communication has often been considered an inherent drawback in fully online courses and the accompanying feeling of detachment through distance and time can frustrate instructors and students. But, through the development of instructional technology, synchronous communication can return to your online classroom.

Mary Brady, an Education professor at Wayne State University, tried virtual, synchronous online lectures by using the Virtual Classroom tool in Blackboard (Online Cl@ssroom, June 2006). Students spent up to one-fourth of their class time in the synchronous sessions where she gave live lectures, and students worked on group projects.

With synchronous meeting tools, you and your students can have similar teaching and learning experiences to those in a traditional classroom, with virtual tools like slides, whiteboards, multimedia, document sharing and so on. Adobe Breeze Meeting is one of the tools.

The idea of real-time communication in the online world can be exciting. However, as with planning any new course element, you should consider the following questions before jumping in:

-Do I need synchronous communication or collaboration in THIS course?

-How will synchronous sessions fit into the whole course and connect with the other components of the course?

-What will I and the students do in each synchronous session?

-How many synchronous sessions will there be?

-How long will each session be? (Brady’s were between 45-60 minutes.)

Another big concern about adding synchronous meetings to your online course is finding a time convenient for everyone. We all know how HARD that can be. But, what Brady did is to post a sign-up sheet in her course at the beginning of the semester for the student to register for several available dates. And, if you set up group sessions, it may be easier to find times for smaller groups of students.

Think about what you do in your face-2-face classroom, and then consider using a synchronous communication tool such as Adobe Breeze to accomplish similar tasks in your online class. What do you think? Please share your ideas.

Enhancing Your PowerPoint Can Be a "Breeze"

PowerPoint can be an effective tool in a face-to-face classroom because the slides can help to organize your content and keep you on track with your discussion. They can be a medium to display charts and diagrams that relate to your lecture. But, the key to an effective lecture is what is discussed “between the bullets” and the Q & A between you and your students.

But how do you provide an effective lecture in an online class using those same PowerPoint slides? One way is to add your audio narration to the slides—to give your online students that content “between the bullets”. Another method is to create some interaction with the slides—have your students answer questions to check their understanding as they move through the slides. Break your slides into logical stopping points (maybe every 5-6 slides) and throw in a question or two that they must answer before moving on. This gives them a mental break and a chance to review what they have just heard (and read).

Here at UHV, we have licensed Adobe Breeze Presenter. This tool integrates directly into your PowerPoint application and enables you to record, edit and synchronize your audio, add quiz questions, and customize the look of your presentation. You publish your presentation in a web-ready Flash format that can easily be viewed online with a web browser and the free Flash Player. It works well in WebCT, too!

Visit our Breeze webpage for more information.

See ya next week!

Communication In The Online Courses

In the 2006 TxDLA Conference, I happened to step in a room, and heard an interesting presentation, which discussed the abuses and misunderstandings of employing PowerPoint slides in the online courses. As a fact, PPT slides, which were used to show figures, key points, and so on, in the face-2-face presentations have been used extensively in online courses nowadays. However, uploading the PPT slides used in a traditional classroom to WebCT, is that all?

Very often, no. Although the subject matter is the same, many differences exist between the traditional classroom and the online classroom:

-The class settings are different.

-The students are different.

-The way to teach is different.

All in all, it can be regarded as one thing: the approaches of achieving successful communication and information delivery are different. What should we do, then, to adapt to these differences?

Workshop Schedule Is Online Now!

The schedule of the Fall workshops provided by LTD can be found on our website.

Click here to view the details and register now!

RSS Feeds: Following a Blog is Easy!

Of course, if you are only following our blog or maybe one or two others, you can always bookmark the websites or add them to your favorites and just remember to visit often to catch the latest news.

But, one big advantage of blogs is your ability to "subscribe" to it, much like you would subscribe to a magazine or newspaper. RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is the technology that enables you to subscribe to the website or news feed. Think of an RSS reader as the mail carrier that delivers your magazine or newspaper right to your doorstep, so you don't have to visit all the websites (stores) independently to get your news from each one. For a detailed tutorial on RSS, you can visit, http://www.wizard-creek.com/rss/tutorial/.

There are a lot of good RSS readers (also called aggregators) available and they all have slightly different features. Here are three recommendations for users with different viewing preferences. All three will enable you to subscribe to blogs, podcasts and other news feeds. Click the link to view a short tutorial on our website for each RSS reader.

1. CITA RSS Aggregator - a stand-alone application installed on your Windows computer for Internet Explorer users
   
2. Wizz RSS News Reader - a Firefox browser plug-in that works right in the browser window
3. NewsGator - an online RSS reader that you can visit from any computer connected to the internet

That should get you started. Have you found a different RSS reader? Do you have any recommendations for RSS readers? Use the Comments link below to share your experiences!

See ya next week!

Welcome to Our New Blog!

Welcome to “Design. Technology. Learning.”, the new blog of UHV’s Learning Technologies & Design group.

Along with the new semester, a lot of exciting changes have happened around the university. One of the changes was the restructuring and organization of the new Student and Academic Services (SAS) department. As part of this change, Bev Hoerig and I are now a new group, Learning Technologies & Design (LTD), within the SAS department. Although we have moved downstairs to UW133, we are still here to help you with the design of your online courses and the use of various technologies to achieve your teaching and learning goals.

Today is the “Grand Opening” of this blog and the new LTD website. We will use them as the platform to communicate with the UHV online learning community. You will find information about instructional design, technology, events, useful resources and much more. At this time, we plan to post twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday. Of course, I will have no problem if, once in a while, a good post needs to be delivered on Tuesday :- )

As a format for communication, a blog has several advantages over others, such as a listserv, newsletter, or even a standard website. First of all, you can add comments to a blog! You read an interesting post and you have an opinion. Add your comment to that post and there…you’ve started a conversation. As we all know, discussion and the exchange of ideas can often be just the inspiration you need to help you find that great idea lurking in the back of your mind.

A second advantage to using a blog for communication, is the way in which a blog is organized. A blog is displayed and archived chronologically. This always places the most recent blog entry at the top, so you know you are seeing current information and commentary.

Another advantage is the convenience of following a blog by subscribing to its “RSS feed”, so that your news reader will automatically notify you of recent postings. If this part sounds Greek to you, stay tuned. I will recommend some good RSS readers in the next post.

Let’s start blogging!