Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Creating the BEST Online Course Ever

From Miami University:

Online courses: how to encourage interactivity with new (often cheap or free ) tools.

The approach they're taking is that they are addressing problems with the technology, not finding a problem for the tech. to address. That's an important distinction.

Hey, here's a concept: poll your online students to see what kind of access they have!! 85% have high speed access in home. We could use SurveyMonkey for this.....I should encourage the online instructors to do this.

Tutorials for Just in Time learning about embedding YouTube, etc. I really need to start using CamTasia ($299) or CamStudio (opensource and free)for that!! this is for screencapture with audio. Wink (also free) can do this, but the sound seems a bit muddy for me. You can add add callouts, have them click next, etc. On a plus, the Flash files are very small. And you can narrate after you record the screen capture.

LectureScribe (free from Clemson...go Tigers!) for caputuring whiteboard lectures with speech from a tablet or a SmartBoard or a Wacom Tablet.

There is a FREE PDF Maker at Sourceforge: missed the URL but I'll go back and get it later to add it in here.

They are also using HotPotatoes for creating quizzes and interactions. That's the tool that I have always meant to work with and never quite got to it. And I mean ever since grad school!

yet more accolades for google Docs. I just love it!!! And it seems mine is the majority opinion.

Low cost video conferencing: perhaps we should investigate this? Flash Meeting it's freee but you need to create a wiki account on their server. Coolness!!!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Coolness! Thanks for all the info.

My school is experimenting with Moodle... do you know anything about it? So far we're just doing a "question of the day" thing. I like it, so far!

Laura said...

We are in the process of choosing a new CMS. I'm playing with Moodle for a separate project and just getting my feet wet. But I know there's a huge user community backing it, and when it's an open source software, the user community is the most important thing.