Have you thought about creating media for your teaching, research, and outreach? Does limited time and money subdue your enthusiasm for creating your own media?
Now your answer to quick and quality media creation is the Faculty Media Center (FMC) in Kidder 100 on the Corvallis campus. Your colleagues are already producing a variety of media for their courses, research, and outreach at FMC. You can too!
Senior Instructor Alan Fudge self-produces a video for BA 515
The FMC video and audio studios
have been designed for your ease-of use. This is as close to one-button
production as it comes. This approach puts media capture on the level with
giving a lecture or presentation. Now you can turn your lecture and
presentation skills into well-made video and audio.
Intuitive touch controls make it easy to record you and your learning content.
Here is a sample workflow for
creating a mini-lecture video at the Faculty Media Center:
Schedule a consultation with FMC staff.
Prepare your content (text and images).
Make and capture your presentation in the FMC studio.
Edit your video as needed online from your office (it may not even need editing).
Publish your video to your Canvas course.
A review of the literature on
instructional video in biology (Brame 2016) shows that:
Instructional video helps students prepare for class
Instructional video enhances focus on key points of the content
Instructional video may serve as an effective means to teach some content independently – Instructional video works best in the context of an overall teaching strategy.
Come experience your Faculty Media Center to see what your colleagues are successfully creating.
Faculty Media Center Kidder 100 Drop-in times M-F 9-5pm PST Other times by appointment 541-737-7484 https://is.oregonstate.edu/fmc
Brame, C.J. (2016). Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content. CBE Life Sci Educ. 2016 Winter; 15(4): es6.
Pressbooks is a book publishing platform that faculty and students may use to produce a wide range of written, web and multimedia works. Pressbooks was developed in 2017 by a Montreal company, Book Oven, which is run by Hugh McGuire who also founded the no-cost audio book service LibriVox.
Built upon the WordPress plugin architecture, the Pressbooks plugins add a suite of capabilities to WordPress that allow the author and collaborators to create, edit and distribute their work in a wide variety of formats and end user permissions and copyright options. These formats may include, not only traditional e-books, but web books, even with embedded multimedia elements, as well as traditional web or print formatted pdf’s.
OSU Academic Technology, in collaboration with Unizin, maintains a PressbooksEDU installation for use by the OSU academic community. It provides you with a no cost, and no commitment, other than your time, document publishing solution. By using OSU’s PressbooksEDU platform you do not give up any intellectual property rights, and in fact may select a copyright and distribution scheme most applicable to your situation. The Academic Technology OSU Pressbooks is intended for academic teaching and research uses, while another instance of Pressbooks at OSU is hosted and maintained by Open Oregon State. Open Oregon State uses the platform to produce and distribute open educational resources – no-cost and low-cost texts – available to students. Contact Open Oregon State if you are interested in participating in the Open Educational Resources initiative.
Introduction to PressbooksEDU
View this brief video for an overview of Pressbooks.
Who is Using Pressbooks?
Pressbooks is publicly available in addition to being available to the educational community. A few other institutions of higher education using Pressbooks include the University of Hawaii, UC Berkeley, Indiana University, Illinois University, and Athabasca University among others. The Unizin Consortium, of which OSU is a member, offers Pressbooks to its member institutions and Pressbooks is integrable with other Unizin offerings such as Canvas and Engage.
What does it do?
Pressbooks simplifies aspects of book preparation and publishing through style themes and workflows that occur across the entire publication.
When you are satisfied with your work, a number of output formats may be selected for export and distribution, from your publication being available on the web, downloadable, or to be distributed as e-books.
Specific formats include: PDF (for both print and digital distribution), EPUB (for Nook, Apple Books, Kobo etc.), MOBI (for Kindle), HTMLBook, OpenDocument, XML (Pressbooks and WordPress), Common Cartridge 1.1 (Web or LTI Links) or several other formats.
When you are satisfied with your work, a number of output formats may be selected for export and distribution, from your publication being available on the web, downloadable, or to be distributed as e-books. Specific formats include: PDF (for both print and digital distribution), EPUB (for Nook, Apple Books, Kobo etc.), MOBI (for Kindle), HTMLBook, OpenDocument, XML (Pressbooks and WordPress), Common Cartridge 1.1 (Web or LTI Links) or several other formats.
Possible teaching and learning use cases include:
– Class/group produced anthology of student writing.
– Student or faculty annotated classic text.
– Collection of faculties, or subject matter exper writing for course use.
– Student produced collections of lab notes.
– How-to manual for labs, software, procedures, or projects.
What can it do for me?
OSU
Pressbooks may bring collaborative authoring to your teaching. Students
may work as teams or one large group to produce and publish a course
book project
Pressbooks may be the tool that helps you write and publish your own book and research. You may upload Word, txt, and PDF files to create chapters of your book.
The
direction, shape, and pace of your project belongs solely to you when
using OSU Pressbooks. In addition to a world-class publishing platform,
you also have support from Academic Technology in this pilot phase of
our implementation.
Pressbooks is a powerful platform with many options, though it can be approached with
minimal options for ease of use. Of course, it won’t write your books
for you, but it will provide a foundation for turning a collection of
written pieces into a whole work.
• Login using the “Sign In” link at the top right of the top menu. Use your ONID ID, followed by your DUO confirmation. If this is your first time logging in your Pressbooks account will be created.
• Create your first Book. Choose the My Books Dashboard option, and next to the My Books page title choose “Add New”
• If you are working with others, have your collaborators create accounts then assign roles to them.
• Create your first Book. Choose the My Books Dashboard option, and next to the My Books page title choose “Add New”
• If you are working with others, have your collaborators create accounts then assign roles to them.
• Create, or Import, your content (Word) into your book. Check out this tutorial for an example.
Importing content.
* Check the generated table of contents and reorganize your chapters as needed in your book’s dashboard.
* Add media; graphics, videos, audios, or interactive elements.
* Choose the output (export) formats from the Book’s dashboard, select Export, then your desired export formats, then select “Export your Book.”
• Publish to the Pressbooks catalog or post your eBook on some other site or push your eBook to Amazon, ibooks, etc., using the Publish Dashboard option.
Contact Mark and Jon at TAC for additional information, technical support, consultation, and advice.
Create an account and upload some work to give Pressbooks a try. We will contact you to find out how to best support you.
Given a successful pilot of OSU Pressbooks with a solid core of effective faculty and student users we hope to implement the platform campus-wide with potential integration into Canvas.
See examples of Pressbooks in action and support materials, including instructional videos, at
Exams may indicate what students have learned, but what do students learn from taking exams?
Try John Selker’s Two-Color Twist exam method and you may find your students valuing exams as learning experiences. John transforms his exam sessions by leveraging both individual knowledge and collaborative engagement in a way that makes exam results more valuable and grading effort more efficient.
“it
took away the very hierarchical structure of a typical course room and made
them in control of their educational experience.”
PODCAST: Conversations and Explorations of Key Teaching and Learning Issues; with Jon Dorbolo, John Selker and Stevon Roberts (Link to transcript, audio mp3)
A Two-Color Twist Exam uses
different colored pens to code different test-taking behaviors. Students spend
the first part of the exam period an answering questions individually using a
blue pen. In the second part of the period they trade their blue pens for
purple pens and record their results from an open period of collaboration. John
grades the blue work at full credit and the purple work as half credit.
Students get the benefit of both
their own knowledge and the thinking of other learners, all without the
humiliation that is often associated with testing. John also finds the resulting
exams easier to grade in less time, partly because the outcomes are stronger.
In greater depth John discussed his rationale for and experience with exam making and taking in a dialog with Technology Across the Curriculum. In greater depth John discussed his rationale for and experience with exam making and taking
“So that created an environment where not only the weaker students had an opportunity to learn, but the strongest standouts had their understanding challenged at a higher level.”
John Selker is 2017 Distinguished Professor of Biological and Ecological Sciences. His research in hydrology takes him to China, Chile, Spain, Israel, and Africa as documented in the following video.
