Resources, Tools & Trends « Ecampus Course Development and Training

Where can I find Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Here is a list of Websites that offer (OERs) – open source (copyright free) materials, such as images, audio, and textbooks.

Search Creative Commons
This site allows you to search for resources using Europeana, Flickr, Fotopedia, Google, Google Images, Jamendo, Open Clip Art Library, SpinXpress, Wikimedia Commons, YouTube, Pixabay, ccMixter, and SoundCloud. Along with providing a selection of search services, Search Creative Commons allows you to filter your search for materials that you can use either for commercial purposes or for materials that can be modified and adapted in order to meet different needs.

OER Commons
This site offers support services and open educational resources (OERs) in a multitude of subject areas, grade levels, and material types (all of which are categorized and offered in a searchable database).

The Orange Grove
This site is Florida’s digital repository, which allows free and open access to its collection of instructional materials (including textbooks) to the public.

“Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” –Ron Mace, NCSU Center for Universal Design

A fundamental of online instructional design is that learning materials should be accessible to all students. Ecampus works closely with faculty to ensure accessibility of course content for everyone. For example, since some students cannot hear an audio track on a lecture video, it’s essential that a transcript of the narration or closed captioning is provided.

Martha Smith and Gabe Merrell are OSU campus leaders in universal design and accessibility, and frequently discuss universal design for instruction with OSU faculty and staff. Martha is Director of Disability Access Services, and Gabe is Senior Accessibility Associate and Deputy ADA Coordinator in the Office of Equity and Inclusion. They note that the principles of universal design offer guidance for the design of every element of an instructor’s “toolkit,” from syllabi to presentation of content, course activities and assessments. They point out that universal design benefits all learners. For instance, some students who can hear the audio track on a lecture video find that they learn more if they take a few extra minutes to read the companion transcript.

Gabe and Martha emphasize the importance of considering universal design up front in the development of teaching materials, instructional methods and means of assessing student learning. This is the approach the Ecampus Course Development and Training team takes with online and hybrid course development. As Ecampus serves an increasingly diverse student population, universal design enhances learning in the online classroom.

Ecampus instructional designer Melanie Kroening has created a great guide called 5 Accessibility Tips for “DIY” Course Designers that provides practical techniques for instructors to enhance the accessibility of course content.

To find out more about universal design, speak to any Ecampus instructional designer, contact Martha Smith or Gabe Merrell or visit the Center for Universal Design in Education.

One of the trends of 2014 is the explosion of infographics. Although they have been around for centuries, the creation of infographics has been limited to specialists such as cartographers, graphic designers, and others who specialize in data visualization.

The popularity of data visualization experienced a surge in 2006 when Hans Rosling created the free Gapminder tool and presented The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen on the TED stage. He demonstrated the need for easily accessible tools regular people could use to transform complex information into easy-to-comprehend visual format.

The word infographic has undergone a shift in popular usage over the last three years. In the past, it meant anything that conveyed data or complex information in visual format, including charts and graphs. It now refers to digital posters in which graphics are used to present any type of information. This shift is due in large part to the proliferation of many online tools which make the creation of infographics incredibly easy.

Leading the pack among the vast number of online infographics creation tools are Infogr.am, Pictochart, and InfoActive.

The ease of use makes infographic tools ideal for student use. Instructors can create assignments in which students are asked to create infographics which they then share with their classmates. These can be highly engaging when used as discussion starters.

Here is an example of an infographic we created for the course GRAD 550–Introduction to Online Course Development and Facilitation.

The 2013 Survey of Online Learning Report was released last week on the Sloan Consortium website. This annual series tracks trends in online higher ed in the U.S. through use of institutional data and responses from chief academic officers at colleges and universities nationally. Among key findings of the 2013 survey, three-fourths of chief academic officers think the learning outcomes in online education are the same or better than with face-to-face instruction, but more than 40% of them say that retaining students in online courses is more difficult than in face-to-face courses.

Fortunately, Blackboard has built-in tools to help you monitor student progress. In addition to the Grade Center, check out the Performance Dashboard and Retention Center in the Evaluation section of your Blackboard course Control Panel. These tools can be used with no set up, though you do have the option to customize the Retention Center. The Performance Dashboard gives you a quick overview of each student’s online course activity (for example, days since last Blackboard course access, and level of discussion board participation). The Retention Center provides a more detailed picture of which students may be struggling or at risk in your course. A glance at the Performance Dashboard and Retention Center can give you a heads-up at any point in the term about student engagement and success, so that you can take steps to communicate with students about your concerns and offer strategies for improvement.

Beyond this, make sure your students know about the Ecampus Student Success links, which direct students to Ecampus Success Counselors, online tutoring support, Academic Success (ALS) courses, personalized coaching services from InsideTrack, and other services available to OSU online students.

What strategies do you find most successful in retaining online students in your courses?

Occasionally in my work with faculty I find them wanting to reproduce a brainstorming session activity from the brick and mortar classroom. They want students to ‘shout out’ ideas, arguments, or topics and create a list so that everyone can participate and the best ideas can ‘float’ to the surface. There is value in pooling ideas to generate all possibilities given the varying background knowledge of students.

In OSU’s learning system, Blackboard, there are tools such as wikis and discussions that can allow students to generate ideas but these tools don’t always have the options needed to take the ideas and vote on them and have the class decide which are the best.

Tricider

So one alternative option is the free digital tool Tricider. Tricider is an efficient online brainstorming and polling tool.

I stumbled across Tricider as I do many tools by reading popular educational technology blogs and bookmarking my favorites, examine any limitations it may have, and then I use it in my own online classroom. After the first term of using it, I found that Tricider required few instructions, did not require a login by my students, and was simple and intuitive to use. Those faculty that use this tool find that it is the only tool that really does what it does.

When would you want to use Tricider:

In an icebreaker activity
To brainstorm and collect ideas (class or small group)
To brainstorm solutions and list pros/cons of each
To brainstorm ideas and vote on them so the favorites rise to the top
Have small groups brainstorm and share or compare/contrast their ideas with others

How to get started?

Go to http://tricider.com, create an account if you want to be able to revisit your “questions”
Type in a question and click on Go
Change the deadline if you wish it to be open more than 14 days
Click on Share and Invite
Copy and paste the URL anywhere that your audience can access the link
Brainstorm and/or Vote!

Try it out: http://tricider.com/brainstorming/1GEq1

Melanie Kroening
(Instructional Designer, Ecampus)

You can create an easy study tool that students can take with them on their smartphones, use on the computer, and easily engage with as they study for your class.

Cram is a free flash card creation tool that allows instructors and students to develop a study tool for their students. You can create study aids without an account . Cards can be shared publicly or be made available only to those who have a link. Instructors and students can create these study aids. Imagine creating a short tool for students and then creating an assignment in which they create flashcards for the entire class to use!

Cool features:

Import information from Google Docs
Copy and paste from Microsoft Word
Create study aids in a vast number of different languages
Create 3-sided cards
Add images

As students study with the cards, they have three options to work with:

Study like a regular set of cards
Self-test, telling the program if they got it right or not to keep score and to allow them to review in the next round only the cards they got wrong
Test themselves using a one of 4 testing options. (Matching, Written, Multiple Choice, and True/False)

See a six-card sample to try it for yourself!

OSU’s Curricular Policies and Procedures specify that every course syllabus should include measurable student learning outcomes. The outcomes are defined as “learner-focused statements reflecting what a student will be able to do as a result of an instructional activity. Each outcome statement should start with a measurable action verb that indicates the level of learning, followed by a precise description of the learned behavior, knowledge, or attitude.”

For guidance in developing learning outcomes, educators have long turned to Bloom’s Taxonomy, with its pyramid of cognitive levels. Two much newer tools can help you refine learning outcomes for a course or find learning activities and associated tech tools that will align with your course outcomes.

1 – On the Ecampus website, the interactive Objectives Builder, created by James Basore, is a wonderful tool to assist in writing learning outcomes. It’s easy to use and can do wonders if you’re grappling with learning-outcome-writer’s block!

2 – Allen Carrington’s Padagogy Wheel has hot links to 63 iPad apps, many of which exist in forms for other mobile platforms as well. Each app is arranged on a wheel to align with learning activities that could be done with the particular app, related action verbs, and the corresponding cognitive domains from Bloom’s Taxonomy. Brilliant . . . give it a try!

Have you ever wished you could record whatever you are doing on your screen while narrating? Well, doing so is becoming easier every day. Screencasting means recording your screen, or an area of your screen, along with a recording of your voice.

Screencasting has become insanely easy because of new online tools. You don’t need to download any software or deal with any files. Your recordings are saved on the internet, so links are the way you share your screencasts.

When would you use a screencast? The most common use is to demonstrate how to use a website or piece of software. You can also open up a free online drawing tool and sketch something to demonstrate a concept as you are explaining it. Some instructors demonstrate how to submit assignments for their online classes. Others like to use screencasts to speak to their online classes about news stories or articles that are relevant to the topic at hand that week. Screencasts using these free tools can be used for “mini lectures” or informal content. Ecampus can help instructors build more formal lecture content using professional tools such as Adobe Presenter or Camtasia.

How does screencasting work? First, you log into an online screencasting tool such as Screencast-O-Matic or Screenr, click the “Record” button, and start recording! When you are finished, you will be given a link which you can paste into your course or an email. The steps are demonstrated in greater detail in the walkthrough below, as well as links to some of the tools.

Walkthrough: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/dce/walkthroughs/screencasting/story.html

What does the latest research say about the most effective approaches to online and blended learning? Consider adding one or more of these peer-reviewed journals to your summer reading list:

International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning – The current issue of this twice-a-year journal is a special edition on the hot topic of open educational resources.

Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks – Articles in the latest issue delve into mobile learning, e-portfolios, and student engagement. JALN is published by the Sloan Consortium, whose website has a wealth of resources about online and blended learning.

Journal of Interactive Online Learning – Recent articles cover learning analytics as predictive tools, the challenge of establishing a sense of community in an online course, and a comparative study of student performance in online and face-face chemistry courses.

Journal of Online Learning and Teaching – The current issue of JOLT (the best journal acronym here!) includes such diverse topics as instructor-made videos as a tool to scaffold learning, comparative usefulness of web-based tech tools in online teaching, and student perceptions of online discussions. JOLT is published by MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, a great collection of peer-reviewed open educational materials that could be useful in your online or classroom teaching.

1. Audio Audio Audio!

Audio is just as important, if not more important, than the video. Most people are willing to tolerate bad video if there is good audio, but not the other way around. Ecampus has wireless lavaliere mics (the little black mic that clips on to your shirt) that can be checked out with the camera to capture good audio.

2. Consider your Background

What is the background of your video is just as important as the subject of the video. Avoid windows in the background or shooting with the sun at your back. Flip cameras have no control over exposure so they adjust according to the brightest light in the frame. If you are shooting in your office with your back to the window, the camera will adjust to the light outside which will make you, the subject, really dark and underexposed. Also make sure there are no plants, pillars, signs or anything right behind your head or that “split the frame in half”. These are common distractions that pull focus away from the subject

3. Keep the Camera Steady

Handheld, shaky, video is very distracting. If you have a tripod, use it. Ecampus has small, desktop tripods, which work well for placing the camera on a table or shelf.

4. Here is a link to the OSU guidelines on shooting video http://oregonstate.edu/brand/video-best-practices

Ecampus Course Development and Training

Providing inspiration for your online class

Category Archives: Resources, Tools & Trends

Locating OER

Universal Design for Learning

Infographics

Retaining Students Online: Pathways to Success

Collaborative Brainstorming (Online)

Tricider

When would you want to use Tricider:

How to get started?

Cram, flashcards that go mobile

Learning Outcomes: Tools for You

Screencasting Made Easy

What Are We Learning about Online and Hybrid Education?

Tip for shooting video with a Flipcam

Contact Info