Ever thought about doing an online course?

The UK-based Oxford Centre offers online courses for academic development. Although pricey (265 Pounds for 5 weeks of online interactivity) - they are a highly regarded service. I would highly  recommend the experience of being an online learner to anyone who wanted to improve their online teaching.  Some of the upcoming sessions are:

1. Researching and Evaluating eLearning 20 April - 22 May 2009 (too late!)
   
2. Engaging learning with Social Software 3 June - 3 July 2009
   
3. Engaging Students with Assessment and Feedback 4 June - 4 July 2009
   
4. Enquiry Based Learning 10 June - 10 July 2009
   
5. Online Tutoring 17 June - 17 July 2009

A sip of Merlot perhaps?

Why not!

The amount of content on the web is growing exponentially - and this includes materials that can be shared and may help students with their learning. 

There are many places that you can search for content to add to your materials - a few of which I have put as a permanent link on the right hand side of this blog - but there is one that has been seriously under-utilised and that is MERLOT - Multimedia educational resource for learning and online teaching. 

Merlot offers a well-established peer-reviewed database of learning objects for sharing: http://www.merlot.org 

For example -  I searched for Merlot for materials by category - selecting Science and Technology > Engineering on the left hand side. There were 595 entries. You can search within this category if you like. There are simulations, case studies, tutorials, quizzes and more.

The first link in this engineering browse was a 'Classic' - MecMovies - by selecting 'Go to material' I arrived here  http://web.mst.edu/~mecmovie/ . MecMovies takes learners step by step through various concepts in Mechanical engineering such as torsion, sheer stress and strain. The community had rated it as 4 and a bit stars and it was included in the personal collection of 17 Merlot Members  (which is pretty good). 

There was also a 2 minute movie from the author http://taste.merlot.org/Videos/MecMovies.html that explains what Tim Philpot was getting at when he designed the tool and how he determined that it was making a difference for his learners. 

So why not give Merlot a go and see what it might be able to offer you?

Putting Defence lecture material on-line

Peter Hamilton (Defence and Systems Institute) writes about his approach to e-learning by using online presentations to replace the lectures.

I had the job of creating an Associate degree in Engineering (Defence Systems) program where all students would be working in industry and needed flexibility for learning. The students were more mature and had worked in manufacturing engineering roles, primarily as technical officers, and needed to retrain for work in companies that service the growing Defence industry.

Below is a presentation that describes the project (UniSA staff can view the web sites linked within the presentation).

Associate Degree in Engineering (Defence Systems) e-learning project

One of the strategies used was a 'lecture capture' technique where we made short recordings of the topics given by our course experts that could be accessed online 24x7. We had financial support from the federal government to implement the program and create the resources.

To make this happen, I purchased 6 licenses for Adobe Presenter 7, the application software underlying the ‘In a Nutshells’, in about Sep/Oct 2008. It works as a PowerPoint add-in that publishes that allows ‘narrated PowerPoint presentations’ to be created and saved on a special server in ISTS. The process of up-loading narrated presentations to the Server is centrally controlled by me.

The tool is relatively easy to use with most lecturers being able to master the tool in under 30 minutes. Narrated presentations have been created in a number of ways depending on the preferences of the lecturer:

1. Lecturers use an existing PowerPoint presentation for which they have prepared a script or, sometimes, good notes. Lecturers then record the script using the Presenter 7 tool. The script becomes the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation.


2. Lecturers use an existing PowerPoint presentation but without a script. Using the Presenter 7 tool they record the narration for each slide speaking ‘off-the-cuff’, prompted by the slide content. The sound file is then transcribed into a Word document by a professional transcriber; is edited by the lecturer to eliminate ums and arghs; and forms the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation.


3. Lecturers present a PowerPoint based lecture in the normal face-to-face fashion. The lecture is recorded using a digital recorder. The sound files are transcribed in the same way as above. Using Presenter 7, the sound files are uploaded to match the PowerPoint slides while the transcribed and edited sound file is used as the ‘Notes’ component of the narrated presentation. This is a quite labour intensive process.

These recordings have been well received by students both on-line and on-campus as they can revisit them as often as they like. We have sometimes just played them as a lecture and still the students appreciated them as they were very clear.

We need to be mindful of the length of the recordings as there is only a certain amount of time that someone will look at their screen to watch a recording. Our average lecture length is about 20-30 minutes, some a little longer, others a little shorter. For a lecture, I consider about 30 minutes to be optimal.