Resources, Tools & Trends « Ecampus Course Development and Training

The instructional designers at Ecampus held a Research & Development Day recently to explore the topic of user experience (UX) design as it applies to Ecampus courses. As part of that day, fellow instructional designer, Dorothy Loftin and I explored how Canvas functions when used on Mobile Devices. Below are some findings from our testing.

Generally, we found that iPads work great as long as a student accesses the course through a browser. It was using the Canvas App (necessary on a smart phone) that presented changes and challenges in functionality. The good news is that many of these can be addressed with a few additions in course design. These additions should not significantly alter the experience for students who are using desktop and laptop computers. Today, I will present one of those strategies.

The most significant impact we experienced in using the Canvas App is navigation, how a student gets to content, activities and assessments. It can take quite a few clicks or taps to get to a specific page in Canvas using the mobile app, or to get from one page to another, and the navigation can vary depending on the device used. This may negatively impact the student user experience, distract, and generally increase cognitive load.

Navigation Strategy

One strategy to improve navigation is to provide alternate links for students to jump to commonly needed items in your course. Turns out, this can also benefit students who are on desktops or laptops.

The Home Page that I often use is immediately available for users on all devices. I have added links and buttons so students can jump directly to important sections of the course from here. This turns the Home Page into more of a landing page with quick links.

Page View in Desktop Browser	Page View on iPhone

The buttons take a student to the Module Page for a particular week. Module Pages, on the App, present students with links to all content and activities for that week. I limited the buttons to 3-across to make clicking them on a phone easier. As you probably notice, the App translates buttons into links. So, simply providing a list of text links would also work on multiple devices.

This Strategy to improve navigation can be used on any page where you want a student to be able to move quickly to new material, reducing frustration and cognitive load by making the navigational journey more immediate.

How to do it yourself resources:

Creating an inviting (and mobile friendly) course home page
Linking to Modules
Information Architecture Basics: A user-centered approach. Help users “find everything they need without big effort”.

By Christopher Lindberg

If you are considering developing an online course with Ecampus, you may be curious how you will translate your lectures to the online format. There are several effective online lecture presentation formats available to faculty. They differ in the type of video recording required and the kind of post-production work required after the initial recording.

Image listing 4 formats for online lecture presentation: Video, narrated lecture, light board, and interactive video. — Online Lecture Formats: Qualities & Complexity

Each of the presentation formats can be effective, however the more complex types can offer additional advantages for your students. Why should you consider producing the most challenging of the five online lecture formats? To answer that question, we need to understand what exactly an interactive video lesson is. Let’s start by first looking at a sample interactive video lesson used in a fall 2017 course titled The Biology of Horticulture (HORT 301). You can watch a four minute excerpt of the twenty-minute interactive video lesson by selecting the image below:

Still image from video of Dr. Ryan Contreras teaching using an interactive video lesson in the Biology of Horticulture (HORT 301). — Dr. Ryan Contreras teaching using an interactive video lesson in the Biology of Horticulture course. Select image to watch the four minute video.

As is seen in this excerpt the interactive video lesson has as its foundation a video recording of a Lightboard presentation. Layered over that recording are interactive elements that control video playback—sometimes pausing, other times auto-advancing to specific clips—or to progress through the lesson, trigger a student’s input of feedback, and, most importantly, increase the amount of student engagement in the lesson. In the case of HORT 301 the interactive element prompts the solving of a temperature indices formula. The base video could have been used by itself. However, it is the melding of the Lightboard presentation with the interactive feature that makes the interactive video lesson a highly engaging presentation for the online environment.

The model below proposes how the elements of personal and mediated communication immediacy are brought together to make an interactive video lesson a compelling experience.

Model showing proposing how mediated communication and personal communication of an interactive video complement each other in an interactive video lesson.

In this project instructional design, in conjunction with visual design, video staging, and interaction design, was focused on solving the issue of how to teach a self-paced formula-drive lesson in the online environment. The result is an interactive video lesson that presents as a unified visual space that fosters an actual “see through” psychological perspective. Although clearly a media production, this approach to online lesson presentation implies an unmediated learning experience.

It is enhanced by the camera literally seeing through the Lightboard glass to the instructor conducting the lesson fostering a sense instructor presence. This type of interactive lesson design is desirable because it presents classroom-like learning in a student-controlled online environment. The result is an interactive video lesson that is new in design format but familiar experientially.

Is Interactive Video For You?
A decision to adopt this approach to lesson design will likely be successful if you have a lesson that is formula driven. Certainly math subjects and many science subjects might benefit from this approach. Is it also applicable to humanities courses? Can you imagine teaching language, music, or poetry with an interactive video lesson? If you can, contact Ecampus. We would be glad to help you adopt this approach to lesson design for use in your online course.

Colorful pie chart illustrates student's mastery of various math topics. — The dashboard in McGraw-Hill’s ALEKS courseware shows a math student’s progress on a learning path.

The just-released 2017 Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium identifies adaptive learning technologies as one of the most important developments in technology for higher education. The report notes that adaptive learning technologies “can adapt to a student in real time, providing both instructors and students with actionable data. The goal is to accurately and logically move students through a learning path, empowering active learning, targeting at-risk student populations, and assessing factors affecting completion and student success.”

To raise campus awareness of adaptive learning technologies and their potentials, last spring OSU held an Adaptive and Personalized Learning (APL) Open House featuring 12 adaptive software providers and hosted an Adaptive Learning Systems Workshop with Arizona State University adaptive learning expert Dale Johnson. OSU is now in the first year of a multiyear grant from the Assoc. of Public and Land-Grant Universities to accelerate the adoption of adaptive learning technology.

Are you interested in finding out more about the possibilities for adaptive learning in your online and hybrid teaching? Suggested resources:

View recordings of demos by each of the providers at last spring’s Open House on the APL Task Force blog.
Learn about evaluating and implementing adaptive courseware from Dale Johnson’s workshop slides.
Check out two excellent resources for faculty and universities considering the adoption of adaptive courseware: the Courseware in Context (CWIC) framework and EdSurge’s Higher Ed Product Index to search for, learn about and evaluate digital courseware.
Read EDUCAUSE’s 7 Things You Should Know about Adaptive Learning.

What sorts of potential do you see for adaptive learning technologies in your teaching?

So you’ve located your open materials, Now what?

Providing attributions for open educational resources (OERs) is not only required for Creative Commons (CC) licensed materials, but citing sources for collected works is a good practice to follow in general. Documenting the material that you are using by including the author’s name and the name of the license, as well as where you found it can be especially helpful…

When embedded content is malfunctioning or fails to appear. You can refer and go to the URL of the content item.

When learning what permissions are granted for the content. You can refer to the license name, which informs you what you can do with the material as well what is permissible.

When determining what changes have been made for any derivate work. You can go to the URL of the original work that is provided to determine the changes that have been made.

When researching the author, organization or project of the content. If you would like to know more about the author of the project or the organization or project in which the work is created, used or derived, you can conduct a search using the author’s name and the organization and project title or go to any provided URLs in the attribution.

Is there a tool to help me generate attributions for open materials?

Open Washington Attribution Builder is a tool that you can use, which automatically generates attributions for any open materials that you’ve located. Just go to the site and complete the online form. After filling out the provided fields, an attribution is generated complete with active links and a html code for you to cut and paste into your project.

Screenshot example of an attribution generated with Open Washington Attribution Builder [CC BY 4.0.] Managed by WA SBCTC.

Open Washington Attribution Builder Screenshot

Try it out!

Go to Open Washington Attribution Builder and try it out for yourself. It’s that easy!

When was the last time you really sat down and looked at the ‘bones’ of your course?

Course outcomes form the backbone of a course – telling us what students should be able to do by the end of the term. All content, assignments, assessments and other activities should support the course outcomes. We call this concept alignment. According to the Quality Matters rubric, a national benchmark for online course design, alignment is defined as “the critical course elements working together to ensure that students achieve the desired learning outcomes.” Reviewing the alignment, or lack of, within your course can help you identify areas for future improvement.

A course-planning chart is a tool that you can use to begin examining the alignment of the elements in your course. It can help you identify orphan content or activities that do not support a corresponding learning outcome – or if there are learning outcomes that lack associated activities. It is also useful in determining if there is a good mix of activities to engage students and whether the course meets workload requirements for a class.

Sketching out how all of the elements of your course align with each other is a good first step in identifying where you can strengthen your course.

Resources:

Ecampus course planning chart
Learning Outcomes: Tools for You
Quality Matters

Want to add an engaging “wow!!” factor to your teaching, on-campus or online? Try using augmented reality (AR). It’s simple, easy, and there is a wide range of educational apps for iOS and Android devices, many for free. Best of all, AR taps into the eager desire many young people express to use technology in innovative ways, including as part of their learning experience.

Per a recent survey from Adobe Education, 93 percent of Gen Z students said that technology in the classroom was essential for their career preparedness, as reported in a 2016 EdTech article. The survey found that “Gen Z students see technology and creativity as important and intersecting aspects of their identities.”

jan17blog_surveygraphic

2017blog_pokemongo

Remember the headlines for Pokemon GO? Maybe you, too, got hooked. If so, you were one of about 21 million users who were playing every day! This is the compelling aspect of AR–it’s fun, engaging, innovative and for some, nearly addictive. The astonishingly realistic and detailed displays of many AR apps, such as those for physiology, add an exciting and engaging dimension to learning. And with AR instantly available in the palm of your student’s hand, there’s no reason not to explore this creative and exciting technology.

(Image by Paintimpact pokemon go)

But AR isn’t just for fun or entertainment. It got serious and life-saving applications as well. AR, and related technologies like virtual reality (VR), are being used in medicine with extraordinary outcomes. In 2015, a baby in Florida was born with only half a heart. Surgeons used a cell phone, 3D imaging software, and a $20 Google Cardboard VR viewer to “peer into the baby’s heart.” The surgeon, Dr. Redmond Burke, said, “I could see the whole heart. I could see the chest wall. I could see all the things I was worried about in creating an operation,” as recounted in How Virtual Reality Could Change the Way Students Experience Education.

Though many AR apps are geared towards a K-12 audience, there are still plenty of ways to effectively include AR in the college classroom. Nearly every discipline has AR apps, including anatomy and physiology, physics, geography, American history, language translation, astronomy, science, geometry, chemistry, marketing and advertising, mechanics and engineering, interior design, architecture, and more! Check out the 32 Augmented Reality Apps for the Classroom from edshelf, or simply do your own internet search for “augmented reality education” and explore.

You might be wondering how to employ AR technology in the online classroom. For apps that make AR targets available online (many do), just provide the URL and have students download and print. Some apps use the natural world as a target; for example, Star Chart uses GPS to calculate the current location of every star, planet, and moon visible from Earth – day or night – and will tell the viewer what they are looking at.

The possibilities are endless! Give it a try yourself. I am willing to bet that you will exclaim, “Wow, that’s so cool!”

Icons for Multimedia and Web tools

Who doesn’t like free stuff? But in the field of education finding free materials that fulfill your needs often proves difficult. In this blog post, I have annotated a short list of websites that provide free resources that can be used by anyone (instructional designer, teacher or student) and for any purpose from a personal or professional website to a multimedia presentation to an online course or assignment.

Picture Image Icon

Pixabay
What is great about Pixabay is that not only can you use these images, but you can modify them to suit your needs and even use them for commercial purposes without having to pay any fees. Nearly all are free of copyrights, which means attribution is NOT required…so no need to worry about citing sources here.

Audio Sound Icon

Freesound & SoundBible
These sound effects sites are “open source” which simply means everyone can create and share. Great for teachers providing feedback for students or for anyone to use for creative purposes. For these sites please check the “terms of use” as some require attributions or have restrictions on use.

World Wide Web Internet Icon

H5P
This open-source authoring tool site can be used to create multimedia presentations or activities and games that involve drag and drops, hot spots, fill-in-the blanks, etc. To create content all you need to do is register with the site (which is free) and either install the web plugin or embed the content on your site.

Let’s keep this list going…For this I encourage you to post a blog comment listing any free resources (images, videos, sound effects, games, tools, etc.) that you have found. Let’s see how many OERs we can collect and share here with the OSU CDT blog community.

Happy hunting!

If you’re searching for an engaging, authentic, and personalized way to assess your students’ learning, consider developing an ePortfolio assignment for your online course. The benefit of ePortfolios, or digital collections of student learning artifacts, is twofold: you can formatively assess your students’ learning over time, and you can help your students craft a personalized, customizable end product that serves as both a networking tool and a professional presentation of their skills and abilities to showcase to future employers in a more humanized way than a standard resume.

There are multiple approaches to structuring an ePortfolio assignment. One method is to ask your students to gradually add to their ePortfolios each week. This allows you to assess your students’ work over the course of the term, and it allows your students to make meaningful connections between all of the learning artifacts they collect.

With any ePortfolio assignment, consider building in a reflection requirement to help encourage students to connect their learning. Reflection helps students make connections between what they learned, what they still hope to learn, how these things connect to the next course in a series, and how these things apply to experiences beyond their online class. Reflection is also an opportunity for you to encourage your students to connect the dots between their academic, professional and personal lives.

As a starting point, OSU’s College of Liberal Arts has some great reflection tips and questions for you to provide to your students.

Two Tools: Canvas ePortfolios and Google Sites

You will need to select a tool for your students to build their ePortfolios. If you are looking for an integrated tool in your LMS, consider Canvas ePortfolios. This tool is useful because it is not specific to your course, but rather specific to each Canvas user. This means each student can create as many ePortfolio sites as they wish, and they can continue to access these even after your course is over.

Canvas ePortfolios also eliminate the submit it and forget it experience with digital assignments; with a few simple clicks, students can quickly add assignment submissions they are proud of to build structured digital archive of their achievements throughout their online college experience. They can also export their ePortfolio at any time, meaning they could save a copy to take with them after they leave OSU.

Another option is a Google App called Google Sites, which is a free platform to build a website. All students and faculty have access to Google Sites with your ONID login. The benefit to using this tool is the flexibility of platform; students can apply a previously created template or build a custom site of their own.

When considering any ePortfolio platform, it is important to remember to play with the tool as an instructor to understand how the tool works and what the student experience will be like. Consider setting up a model ePortfolio to familiarize students with what you generally expect, but encourage them to go above and beyond to personalize their ePortfolios. This will empower students to engage with the process of customizing their collection.

ePortfolio Tool Resources

References

Miller, R., & Morgaine, W. (2009). The Benefits of E-portfolios for Students and Faculty in Their Own Words. Peer Review, 11(1), 8-12. Retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/benefits-e-portfolios-students-and-faculty-their-own-words

Barrett, H. (2011) Balancing the two faces of eportfolios. Retrieved from: http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/balancingarticle2.pdf

Looking for a simple way to evaluate whether your teaching practice is staying on track or jumping the rails?

Mark Francek, a Central Michigan Univ. geography professor, has devised a simple mnemonic to look at his teaching: CAR. Try it out; see if it works for you! There are three elements:

1 – Community: Building community within your class can pay dividends in terms of learner engagement, positive collaboration, and a supportive environment in which to work toward shared learning goals. Francek says, “promoting camaraderie and mutual respect in the classroom should be a teaching priority,” and that it’s incumbent on instructors to foster community. He also encourages instructors to consider how student learning can be applied to the broader community through service learning projects and activities.

2 – Accountability: The use of formative assessment throughout a course can aid in student accountability for learning. Frequent low-stakes assignments, such as weekly quizzes or brief reflective writings, not only help motivate students to move forward through the course content, but also give you significant feedback on student learning. This continual feedback gauges student learning is valuable information for a nimble instructor who can make course adjustments and intervene as needed to support learning.

3 – Relevance: It’s natural for learners to be drawn to subject matter and learning activities that appear relevant to their lives, their interests and their future careers. And course content can be more engaging to your learners if you take the extra step of showing them or, better yet, challenging them to show you, how the subject matter relates to their prior learning.

Although Francek’s CAR model is oriented primarily toward classroom teaching, it is every bit as meaningful in online and hybrid courses. Explore the ways that other recent posts here in the Ecampus CDT blog illustrate this by considering how each of these learning activities can build community, increase accountability for learning and/or make a course relevant to students:

Peer review of student work.
Collaborative writing around course texts.
Using social media platforms such as BuddyUp to support group study.
Incorporating written or video reflection into a major assignment or using brief reflective activities such as Muddiest Point or One-Minute Paper.

Community, accountability, relevance. These three elements can benefit your teaching practice and your learners.

Reference: Francek, M. Let CAR drive our instruction. Tomorrow’s Professor eNewletter, 1449. Retrieved Dec. 15, 2015, from https://tomprof.stanford.edu/mail/1449

Half a century has passed since educational psychologist Robert Gagné published his influential book, The Conditions of Learning, but his ideas are relevant to online and hybrid learning even today. He presciently wrote, “The real point to be made is that use of a variety of instructional modes is both feasible and potentially effective. . . . What is needed in each case is thoughtful design and management of the learning environment.”

Gagné popularized the concept of nine “instructional events.” Each represents a step in the teaching and learning process:

Gain learners’ attention
Inform students of learning objective
Stimulate recall of prior knowledge
Present stimulus material (content)
Provide learning guidance
Elicit performance (practice)
Provide feedback
Assess performance
Enhance retention and transfer

Do you regularly use these steps in your courses? To address this question, you might consider what your students experience as they work through a typical weekly module in one of your Canvas course sites:

Are they aware of weekly learning outcomes? If not, state them in a weekly overview that serves as the first page in each Canvas module!

How do you gain their attention? Through video, audio, images, interactivity?

Do you use your students’ prior knowledge as a scaffold for the learning in your course? In fact, do you make it a point to assess what they know at the outset your course?

Beyond simply presenting content, how do you provide substantial learning guidance? Do you foster active learning through online interaction student-to-student, student-to-content and student-to-instructor?

Do you frequently assess performance and provide feedback? Do you use weekly quizzes and/or low-stakes writing or problem-solving exercises?

Ultimately, over the course of a term, have you blazed a trail that fully supports your students’ retention and transfer? If so, bravo!

Additional Resources:

And, for a light-hearted view of teaching and learning, here’s a 3-minute video that will definitely gain your attention and may well enhance your retention of this post: Gagné’s 9 Events Featuring Cats

Ecampus Course Development and Training

Providing inspiration for your online class

Category Archives: Resources, Tools & Trends

How Does Canvas Function on Mobile Devices – Part 1

Navigation Strategy

By Christopher Lindberg

Should You Consider an Interactive Video Lesson?

Diving in to Adaptive Learning

OER Attributions: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

So you’ve located your open materials, Now what?

Is there a tool to help me generate attributions for open materials?

Try it out!

Alignment

“Wow” Students with Augmented Reality

On the Hunt for OER (Open Educational Resources)

Assignment Tool Kit: Student ePortfolios

Test Drive This CAR

Gagné’s Nine Instructional Events Online

Contact Info