Ecampus Course Development and Training « Providing inspiration for your online class

Are you looking for a new way to engage your online students without leaving your Blackboard course site? Consider using a wiki, blog, or journal! Wikis allow your students to collaborate on a single document within Blackboard and you are able to track their participation. This is a great tool for brainstorming, collecting research, or producing a student-created FAQ or glossary.

A blog is meant to be a place where students can post their opinions or climb on a ‘virtual soapbox’ and deliver a message. There are opportunities for others to comment, but the focus is on the initial posts and what the student had to say.

A journal is usually intended to be used as a private space for reflection. It is a space that can only be ‘written’ on by the student and the instructor, although you can control whether the rest of the class can read each others’ journals or not.

Sometimes using a different tool for a week or two gives the students a break from the traditional discussion board routine – -and that in itself can improve student engagement in a class. Instructions for setting up a wiki, blog, or journal are found here.

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.

plant detective title — the title screen

Often an instructor will bring us media (like a collection of photographs) and ask if we could help create some sort of interactive exercise (like a microscope simulation, to explore their photographs). We’re happy to do what you ask, but when time and interest permit – we like to push a little further. Sometimes we will ask if it’s all right to make a game.

This past term in Botany 350, we created an anime-themed adventure game, Plant Detective, which let students collect clues and present their findings to a humorous caricature of their instructor. You can play it here, and I’ll discuss how we made it after the break.
Continue reading →

Some instructors are surprised when they first hear that they should begin preparing for a recorded lecture by writing a script. Some instructors believe that writing a script will take a lot of time, and that using a script will make the finished recording sound like they are reading, and that they should approach their online lectures the same way they do the on-campus ones – without a script.

Preparing a script for an online lecture is an essential step, however, that actually helps to save time and create a higher quality finished lecture.

So why script your lectures?

To Save Time
To Keep Online Lectures at an Ideal Length and Quality
To Make Lectures Accessible

On-campus and online courses meet the same learning outcomes, but the online learning environment is different from the face-to-face environment. Writing a script as the first step in creating your online lecture content is a great way to help you create content that will be effective for online students.

A great example of a lecture that was recorded with a script was done by Julia Goodwin for her HST 104 course World History I: Ancient Civilizations, here is her lecture for week 8

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.

Part 1 and 2 are both only 1 slide long, however they exemplify the change in the design. These were created after I found the Oregon State style guides, so they were created with official colors and a more streamlined layout. These allow students to practice identifying kids that might need alternative learning options. These don’t feature any groundbreaking changes, however they do show how I’ve become more layer oriented with a cleaner display.

Experience Part 1 or Part 2 of the storyline yourself.

This storyline project was created for CS 325 on General Recurrence. Katie Hughes the developer has this to say bout her experience:

While this is a seemingly simple project, I really consider it the turning point in my Storyline experience. On one slide, the instructor wanted the student to input a text response, and if that response contained a certain word it would be considered correct. Storyline has nothing supported that does any sort of text comparisons, so this is the project I learned how to integrate JavaScript. Learning JavaScript and how it works in Storyline really opened up a lot of options for other projects after this one. Also, this series of CS 325 lectures is really the first one where I began using a consistent layout for each Storyline project.

Click here, If you would like to experience the storyline yourself.

Interested in scientific visualizations? Read on to learn how we tackle them.
Continue reading →

This animation shows where (and when) a certain kind of plant grows its buds for flowers and new stalks, over the course of several years.

This animation was mocked up, tweaked, discussed, and completed within roughly three weeks.

Continue reading →

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.

Ecampus Course Development and Training

Providing inspiration for your online class

Wikis, Blogs, and Journals – Oh My!

Want your students to do Smore?

Plant Detective – What a custom game can bring to your course

Why you should be scripting your lectures.

Hybrid Course Design

Articulate Storyline – Exercise Sports Science

Articulate Storyline – General Recurrence

Molecular Maya Toolkit – a powerful visualization add-on for Autodesk Maya

Hort349 – Plant Growth Animation

Digital Portfolios

Contact Info