Designing for individuals

OL moves to Standard Web

One of my first assignments was to change some Paced courses to Standard Web because OL administration believes students want to learn at their own pace and by themselves, rather than part of a co-hort. In doing so, the CoI philosophy was not going to work in this delivery mode. Studying alone, means by definition there is no Social Presence. My goal in these courses was simply to provide access to content that met the desired learning objectives and to provide assessments that measured the students’ abilities to demonstrate proficiency. To ensure that Bloom’s taxonomy was applied appropriately to the level of the course and within it.

After finding my way through the first months, I was in a position to implement design features and develop my practice. For me, a key recognition was that there is not enough variety of media. In the courses I saw, our students were reading, reading, reading. They did not get much visual and/or auditory stimulation.

In this present phase, I’ve wanted to focus my practice on the development of courses that use multimedia and/or video to engage people with the course content. By providing interactive learning objects or video, we are providing different sensory stimulus to our students. We are also presenting a more interesting, modern and effective way to teach.

Video Examples

HLTH 2707 – Seniors Living Residential Management

Arranged for industry leader and seven individuals working in different parts of the industry to be interviewed about what they do on a daily basis. These videos are posted for students to watch and gain insights into the industry that would otherwise not be possible.

Where’s the Senior Living industry going?

COMP 4911 – Computing Science Project

Interviewed past students and employers about there experience in the project based course. These video allow prospective students to better understand the course workload.

Student experiences videos

BBUS 4751 – Entrepreneurship

We interviewed past graduates about their experiences in starting up a business. These entrepreneurs focused on different parts of their business: marketing, strategy and what worked for them.

Franchising experience – Natalie Pearce, local entrepreneur

Multimedia Examples

EDUC 5021 Philosophy and History of Education

Organized an interactive site that placed key philosophers in the appropriate age and sourced links to videos or other contextual information about them. We also interviewed two faculty members with expertise in various philosophers. The videos appear as guest lectures from TRU faculty experts to our OL students.

Philosophers Learning Resource

Appropriate needs to be considered:  HLTH 2505.

I was asked to finish development of the course. It was bogged down for a variety of reasons including the expansive nature of the multimedia requirements. Working with the Media team, we reorganized the content, deleted some of the content and in the end created an effective learning object for the course.

Pathophysiology: Body Systems

 

 

Screencasting

I’ve also become something of an advocate for the use of screencasts by developers of OL courses. I’ve delivered workshops at the Teaching Practices Colloquium and the OLFM training day on this topic.

The work of Richard Mayer to develop the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML) provides evidence to show teaching with video and audio is effective. In fact, it supports the way the human brain works.

The proper utilization of video lectures is pedagogically sound and provides students with a variety of stimulation, enhances engagement with content and as importantly, has been warmly received. 

At TRU, Tony Bell, Faculty of Accounting, is a leader in creating screencasts on campus. His You Tube channel which is dedicated exclusively to teaching accounting concepts through screencasts has received more than a million hits. And in the screencast below Bernie Warren discusses how his students have found the screencasts he created to be valuable additions to the course content.

 

Also, I created a screencast that orients students to the our course material and the Blackboard learning site. We constantly heard that students did not know how to use the site, in spite of there being written instructions. In a seven minute video, I demonstrate to students how to navigate through the main features in Blackboard and their course. When this was announced at the OLFM Day, the session attendees expressed appreciation. So it’s not just getting others to do it, but about using the tools ourselves to facilitate learning.

 

Black Board Learn Orientation video

 

The workshops that I’ve delivered on screencasting at the TPC and OLFM days this past year were well attended and I believe spurred more faculty to use video in their instructional materials.

I’ve facilitated input of screencast videos in ACCT 4251, FNCE 3171, FNCE 3151, and have a commitment to put them into HRMN 4891 and COMP 3611. While in the end we cannot force a developer to use this technology, I’ve found most are open to learning about it because they understand that it will help their students learn.

 

In designing for individuals, I’ve focused my practice on bringing multimedia and/or video learning resources to OL courses with the intent of providing students a variety of stimulation to increase their interest in the material and enhance their learning experience.

This is possible due to the resources that OL has available. We are a modern university. We need to have a modern approach to curriculum delivery.