Monthly Archives: January 2017

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Make Your Voice Heard, Part 2: Audacity Audio Recording and Effects

See Part One: Choosing the Right Microphone

Now that you have a good recording setup in place, the next steps are getting something recorded and making it sound good. There’s a huge variety of options for recording audio, but I’ll discuss using  Audacity in particular here. To be sure, there are much more powerful programs than Audacity, but they tend to be costly and very complicated to use—which won’t help people who aren’t interested in professional audio and just want to record something for people to listen to.

Here’s why I recommend Audacity to most people, especially beginners:

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Make Your Voice Heard, Part One: Choosing the Right Microphone

The more we create and share resources with others online, the more important it is to make sure that our voices are heard…literally. Choosing the right microphones, recording room setup and techniques, and audio file formats can make a startling amount of difference. This article is the first in a series that will help you know what to look for, what to avoid, and how to get the best sound wherever you are. This time around, we’ll focus on microphones.

The first step in recording good audio is choosing the microphone that will be listening to you. Every microphone has a particular pattern in which it receives sound waves from an audio source, called a pickup pattern. The most commonly used types of microphones are omnidirectional, bidirectional, cardioid, and shotgun. Continue reading →

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What Blue Apron Recipes Can Teach Us About Online Course Design

Blue Apron is a meal delivery service that provides all the pre-measured, raw ingredients and instructions customers need to quickly prepare home-cooked meals. When I signed up for the service last year, I was pleasantly surprised by the concise, well-designed recipes that come with each set of ingredients. The folks at Blue Apron must have known their target demographic would include a lot of anxious, inexperienced cooks like me, and they clearly invested in a top-notch team of graphic designers, photographers, and writers to create their recipes. Continue reading →

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Happy New Year. Here’s 15 Hours.

A new year is a good time to press the reset button on many things, and I like a healthy, rigorous technology and technology-centric practice clean-out. You may already be using some of the tools I’ve listed below, but a new year is a good time to revisit those spaces, tweak your practices, or delete items that you’re no longer using.

But! If you’re new to all of these items and you integrate them in 2017, you’ve just earned yourself 15.65 (approximately) hours. You’re welcome. Continue reading →

Adaptive Learning using the Knewton Engine in MyMathLab

We have been exploring the use of the Knewton Adaptive Learning engine built into Pearson’s MyMathLab. We began with a limited study during the summer of 2016 with a trial in 4 developmental math courses. The results from the trial courses using Knewton were compared to sections of the same courses in which the adaptive engine was not used. Before continuing, you may be wondering what is this adaptive learning?

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