Here is a series of relevant short instructional videos for commencing the semester when it comes to D2L Brightspace Learning Environment.
If you are thinking about requesting the courses you teach in the Fall, these videos can be a refresher for setting up your courses ahead of time.
Michael Smedshammer, faculty instructional design coordinator at Modesto Junior College, wrote for Faculty Focus on creating effective instructional videos. Here is a recap:
Richard Rose wrote for Campus Technology on “6 Dimensions for More Effective Online Instructional Videos” (click here to view full text). Here is some of his advice:
1) Sound-to-Silence Balance
Sound-to-silence balance is the ratio of talk to empty space on the soundtrack of your video. Tools like Camtasia and Captivate show the soundtrack as a display of the visible waveforms, which makes it easy to see this balance at a glance without listening to the content itself.
2) Visual Context-to-Detail Balance
Visual context-to-detail balance is the control of how often your video editing tool is zooming in and zooming out. Some video tools, such as Camtasia’s Smart Focus, allow the software to make these decisions for you, based on the movement of your on-screen cursor, but the top-end instructional designer will always want to control location and magnification precisely and, therefore, manually.
3) Feature-to-Application Balance
This is the balance between showing program features in the context of the entire application and giving specific examples of their use. One of end of this continuum is the feature/function/benefit (FFB) approach, popular in the early days of computer software instruction. It could be summarized as, “It has this, which does that, which allows you to achieve this type of task.”
4) Balance Between Framing/Assessment and Substance
The old military training model had three parts:
Today we call this framing and it is supported by David Ausubel’s classic Advance Organizer model. Having a sneak preview graphic at the front-end and a review graphic at the back-end of a step-wise training segment is often a fine idea.
5) Personality Balance
Personality balance is how much of yourself as an individual you choose to express in your instructional video. The ideal tone for most presentations is that of a clearly competent and enthusiastic professional who is visibly excited about the great stuff he or she has to share, and is delighted to be the one who is sharing it. Once this persona is established, the talent gets out of the way and lets the subject matter be the star of the show. But this is not always the right balance, depending on subject and audience
Lynda.com is an online training resource that offers thousands of video tutorials in various areas such as technology, business, software and creative skills. Training modules are available for Microsoft Office (2013, 2016 and Office365), Adobe Creative Cloud, graphic design, e-learning, social media, customer service, project management, and much more.These videos can be used as supplemental material for classes or a learning database for students. In addition, LinkedIn purchased Lynda and is offering learning opportunities to their users through this integration.
Other county library sites such as Anoka, Dakota, Carver, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott and Washington also provide similar free access to Lynda.com with an active library card.
Attention instructors!
Please refer your students to their D2L/Brightspace home page that will show the academic support services for them or Tutoring Services/Options.
This leads our students to the listing of all SCSU on-campus tutoring services and Smarthinking.
Smarthinking is a 24/7 online and on-demand tutoring service, available at no charge to all enrolled students (each student is assigned 15 hours per semester by default). They can use Smarthinking to schedule live tutoring appointments, participate in drop-in live sessions, ask questions, or submit writing assignments for feedback.
Students are able to access the Smarthinking website via a link on their D2L/Brightspace main page.
Finally, just below this new resource, remind them that there is a list of free self-registration offerings as well as student help documents and student overview videos for navigating D2L.
Attention instructors!
A quick way to find really short and concise videos on any feature of your D2L Brightspace course can be found here.
If you are interested in a specific feature, you can quickly search (e.g. discussions, dropbox, calendar, assessment, quizzes, chat, classlist, etc.).
Also, when you log in to your D2L, in the right upper corner you will have a box named “Instructor Help” which has the link as well.
Photo credit: https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/learning-to-teach-online
By Paul Keyworth
LTTO (Learning to Teach Online) is “a free professional development resource designed to help teachers from any discipline, whether experienced in online teaching or not, to gain a working understanding of successful online teaching pedagogies that they can apply in their own unique teaching situations” (COFA.online Gateway, 2015). Currently, I am participating in a MOOC of the same name via Coursera, which is still accessible if you are interested. It is also available freely through iTunes.
Award Winning Resources
The project is the work of COFA Online, part of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, and is supported by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd. Co-creators, Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson from UNSW, have won the following awards for LTTO:
2012 MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources – MERLOT Classics (USA) Faculty Development Editorial Board Award - Learning to Teach Online McIntyre, S., Watson, K.
2011 Ascilite Innovation and Excellence Award Exemplary and research informed use of technologies for teaching and learning in tertiary education - Learning to Teach Online McIntyre, S., Watson, K.
Learning to Teach Online Episodes
So far, I have discovered a wealth of resources and pedagogical information relating to implementing and evaluating OERs (Open Educational Resources) and institutionally-supported technologies. In particular, you may find these LTTO Episodes to be a valuable resource as you plan your online or blended courses. The instructional videos are compiled into three categories: “Context, Planning and Teaching,” “Case Studies,” and “Technical Glossary“ (COFA.online Gateway, 2015).
References
Learning to teach online. (2015). Retrieved from http://online.cofa.unsw.edu.au/
