Resources, Tools & Trends « Ecampus Course Development and Training

There are many ways to get engaging discussions started in a discussion board, but my favorite is to have students make something to share with their classmates as discussion starters. The tools students can use to create many types of presentations have become incredibly powerful and easy to use. These tools range from the more traditional presentation tools such as Prezi and Google Presentations (part of Google Drive) to the more creative such as slideshows in Vuvox or Animoto, interactive digital posters such as Pinterest or Padlet, animated cartoons with Go!Animate, or digital multimedia timelines with myHistro. Having students create things to share with classmates leverages the “write” part of the read/write web (also called web 2.0) to turn students into producers of content rather than consumers of content. This also creates a greater sense of student ownership of their own learning, especially when they are free to select the tool with which to create their discussion starter. Best of all, it reduces the likelihood that after half of the class has posted their thoughts in the forum everyone else struggles to come up with something new to say—usually ending up saying exactly the same thing with different paraphrasing. The accessibility of Web 2.0 tools varies. Giving students a choice of tools to use is a recommended approach; instructors seeking to create content for online courses should consult with Ecampus for recommendations about accessible tools.

Here is an example of what a typical set of assignment instructions might say:
Part 1: Create a presentation addressing your assigned topic using Prezi, Google Presentation, or Vuvox.
Part 2: Post a link to your presentation in the discussion board by clicking “Create Thread”. (Due Wednesday of week 1)
Part 3: Read at least 5 classmates’ presentations and give in-depth responses. Respond to classmates’ presentations which have the fewest responses. (Due Friday of week 1)
Part 4: Read the responses you received from your classmates and reply to each one. (Due Saturday of Week 1)

Do you find yourself typing the same thing over and over?

Do those fingers and wrists hurt after typing the same comment on every student paper?

I’ve got a solution for you! It doesn’t matter if you are a Mac or a PC, you can find a program to create shorter statements for you to type and have your computer input the entire comment for you.

aText logo

For Mac users, aText ($5 after free trial) allows you to create a typed code of your choice in order to input a longer statement. For example, you choose to type “zzchoice” and the program would put in “I like your choice of voice here. I can hear that you have thought about the content and used the knowledge in order to form your response.” This allows you to give expanded feedback to students in their papers without typing that same statement 30 times. This program runs in all applications as well, making email responses quick as lightning too!

Just think of the possibilities for the time you can save with a text expander program!

Text expansion demo: http://screencast.com/t/vaEiu5q7kEi

aText: http://www.trankynam.com/atext/

For PC users, please see this previous post:

http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/inspire/2011/07/21/shortkeys/

Are you looking for a webtool your students can use to create multimedia presentations? Look no farther than Smore! Smore is a tool used to create online flyers, but it has a lot of potential in the world of online education. With its drag and drop editor, themes, the ability to embed videos, documents, individual photos and galleries, and even maps, students can create quickly great looking media projects just like this one in no time flat! Do you have 75 seconds to spare? Watch the video below to see for yourself how easy it is! The only thing students have to do to submit their project is copy/paste the link. How can a class project get any easier than that? View Video on Smore.

Note: This technology does not yet meet accessibility requirements, so we don’t recommend it for presenting content, instructor to student. However, it is a tool students can use to demonstrate that they are meeting course objectives.

Every term a group of OSU faculty participate in the hybrid faculty learning community. Group members each redesign a classroom course for hybrid (a.k.a. blended) delivery in which a substantial portion of the course learning activity takes place online, and face-to-face meeting time is typically cut in half.

Beyond individual hybrid courses on the Corvallis and Cascades campuses, some entire OSU graduate programs are offered in a hybrid format through Ecampus, such as the College of Education’s doctoral program in Adult and Higher Education.

In what ways are hybrid and online course pedagogy the same? In what ways are they different? For more information about hybrid course design and delivery, visit the Hybrid Course Initiative. And, if you’re interested in participating in the hybrid faculty learning community, see the Request for Proposals for the Fall ’13 program; the proposal deadline is April 30.

Digital portfolios can be interactive, meaningful, and engaging assignments in online courses. According to Ecampus Instructional Designer Jonan Donaldson, “Well-designed learning environments organized around published digital portfolios can increase not only academic achievement but also intrinsic motivation, student autonomy, collaborative learning, and digital literacies.”

Read more about digital portfolios in Jonan’s article for Educause, Digital Portfolios in the Age of the Read/Write Web.

In building online courses, we try to create three forms of interaction on a regular basis throughout each class:

Student-Content, where the interaction is as active as possible for the student;
Student-Instructor, where the students have a chance to ask instructors questions, engage in facilitated discussions, and receive feedback from their instructors on assignments;
Student-Student, where students have an opportunity to communicate with peers and learn in the framework of a learning community.

Sometimes these interactions are formal and graded, such as graded class discussions, group projects, or multimedia presentations. Other times, though, we want a more informal means of generating these three forms of interaction.

Wallwisher is a free online tool that can be used for this purpose. Wallwisher is a simple website that allows participants to visit and post quick, virtual sticky-notes that include text or links to audio or video content. Wallwisher is easy for instructors to set up and easy for students to use.

Here’s a Sample Wallwisher page we set up for you to try. This page asks students to quickly note which concepts they’ve found most difficult so far during the course of a term. An instructor might use this tool to gather opinions, gauge assumptions, check comprehension, or to help students prepare for an exam.

Looking for ways to make your online class more interactive? Wondering what your students are thinking about a certain topic in your class? Wondering if your students are struggling?

Surveys are helpful tools to help us meet these needs in online classes. Google Docs offers a free survey tool, Google Forms, which you can use in your online class by following a few simple steps:

1. Go to your Google Docs account.

2. Create a Form.

3. Choose a Theme.

4. Write your questions.

5. Share a link to the live form.

6. Collect your responses in one convenient location, your Google Form spreadsheet.

Click the image above to watch a brief video that explains how Google Forms can work in your class.

Did you know that the OSU Library offers Course Guides? Course Guides are webpages that the librarians can help to create for your class. Then Ecampus can place these webpages in your Blackboard class.

Course Guides are a great way to …

Guide research projects
Put students in touch with the library and library staff
Guide students beyond Google and Wikipedia
Focus your students on specific journals or even on specific articles
Provide plagiarism prevention information
Provide citation formatting information
And more …

Visit the library course guide webpage to browse through course guides from courses in almost every discipline. To start setting up a Course Guide for your class, please contact Stefanie Buck (stefanie.buck@oregonstate.edu) or your subject’s librarian.

Are you searching for a way that students could post a presentation to you or your class online? One option might be Zoho Notebook. This online program allows you to easily create content and collaborate with others using a familiar notebook-like interface. Combine text, images, audio, video, or live web-content in one place. Other uses of Zoho Notebook include using it as a location to aggregate research for a project or as a device for you to create and tell a story using a variety of multimedia resources.

Check out this short tutorial for more information about how to get started using Zoho Notebook.

Are you currently using Adobe Presenter to add narration to your PowerPoint presentations for your online classes? Consider going a step further and adding short, interactive quizzes within your lecture. Research shows that students have fewer attention lapses while listening to information when active-learning activities are integrated. Adobe Presenter allows you to easily add a couple of quiz questions at various points in your PowerPoint deck. This forces students to stop and check their understanding of the information — as you’re presenting it.

View this tutorial for instructions on how you can add short quizzes to your next online presentation.
Adobe Presenter – Creating Quizzes

Ecampus Course Development and Training

Providing inspiration for your online class

Category Archives: Resources, Tools & Trends

Student-Produced Artifacts as Discussion Starters

Text Expansion

Want your students to do Smore?

Hybrid Course Design

Digital Portfolios

Wallwisher

Google Docs — Forms

Library Course Guides

Zoho Notebook

Adobe Presenter – Creating Interactive Quizzes

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