Beyond YouTube: Great Places to Find Video for Your Online Course

Here’s a statement I have been hearing a lot lately that some may find surprising:

“I wish there was a video online about X. I searched on YouTube, but I couldn’t find anything.”

Now, X could be anything—Biology, Economics, Politics—and while I doubt the search came up empty, I understand the sentiment.

The great thing about YouTube is there is a great video about practically any subject or concept you can imagine. The problem with YouTube is there are a thousand awful videos about practically any subject or concept you can imagine. If you are looking for a specific video, you can probably find it on YouTube, but if you are interested in discovering video that be used in an educational context, YouTube can be really frustrating.

To end the frustration, I thought I should give a list of some my favorite places to find educational content and post an example video for each. I will use “Biology” as my search term, and I promise not to spend more than two to three minutes searching on each site.

 

Academic Earth

Academic Earth offers a great collection of classroom lectures and course materials from leading universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, and Yale. It’s not original content. The videos on Academic Earth are the same ones on YouTube or on the individual Universities Open Course sites. Academic Earth acts as an aggregator and curator of the videos and presents them in a manner that makes them easy to find and embed. The Academic Earth videos offer a great way to present a survey of prerequisite material as a review before delving into your course’s more specific objectives.

The biology test:

Biochemistry I

Watch it on Academic Earth

 

Fora.tv

Fora.tv is another video aggregator that hosts discussions, panels, and debates with leading experts and researchers.

The biology test:

Genomics: Where Have We Come and Where Are We Going?

 

Big Think

Big Think also offers interviews with experts and deep thinkers. Big Think is different from Fora.tv and Academic Earth because Big Think offers original content that is available no place else.

The biology test:

E.O. Wilson on the Century of Biology

 

TED Talks

If you haven’t ever taken a look at the TED Talks make some room on your calendar to have your mind blown. TED is an organization known for its annual conference on “ideas worth spreading,” an invitation-only event that asks its speakers to give the “talk of their lives.” Since 2006, the Talks have been available online. While originally focused on technology, entertainment, and design, hence the name TED, the Talks scope has expanded and includes a wide array of subject matter including business and science.

The biology test:

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail

 

The Daily Show

Did you know that every segment from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is online and keyword searchable? How is Jon Stewart educational content? Finding an interview with a popular author or finding a humorous piece that’s related to your course is a great way to build a connection between your students and the materials and to create a “lean-in” moment.

The biology test:

Doing a quick search for “biology” on the Colbert Web site yielded this great interview with author Stephen Johnson.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Steven Johnson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Religion

Confessions of an Online Student: Voyeur or Classmate?

Until I had to withdraw due to family obligations, I recently spent four weeks as an online student in one of DePaul’s Cinema and Digital Media courses. While much of the experience was positive, I’m left with some negative impressions as well.

Readers of my earlier posts know that while I design multimedia for DePaul’s School for New Learning online program (SNL Online), I’m usually not enthusiastic about actually taking online courses myself. I normally like the experience of sitting in a physical classroom and interacting with my classmates. For this course, though, I felt that online would be perfect. It was a subject that didn’t lend itself to a lot of group interaction and discussion. There were clearly defined learning objectives supported by a comprehensive textbook, appropriate learning activities and assessments, and a proprietary LMS that would deliver recorded classroom sessions with video, audio, whiteboards and presentation screens that I could view at my convenience. I would read, watch, and produce. What could be easier?

Well, the online classroom experience was completely unsatisfying. I had anticipated being able to supplement the readings and clarify key concepts and directions by downloading and efficiently viewing the classroom presentations. I had, in fact, found this to be a useful perk when in the past I’d taken CDM courses on-ground, where I could note the time a key concept was discussed, then search for and review it later.

This time, however, with my only classroom contact being virtual and asynchronous, I found that I was by turns bored or frustrated. Removed from the distractions of a live classroom I was struck by how much of a three-hour class was filled up with empty space; the instructor shuffling papers or searching for files or waiting for something to load from the Web. Painful waits for students to respond to questions seemed to stretch into hours. And while there were certainly segments of the recording that were useful, there was no way of knowing where those might actually be without sitting through the entire session. It seemed to me that there was about a three-to-one ratio of dead air to useful information. This was not what I’d anticipated.

Oh, and did I mention the actual recording quality? As I peered through my two-inch video portal, I strained to see the instructor, hear what was being said, and make out what was being written on the whiteboard. Though each session could be displayed full screen and had zoom capabilities, the video was very low quality and heavily pixelated even at smaller display sizes. The whiteboard captured input intermittently. Adding to my frustration, the instructor would physically interact with projected data, pointing out and clarifying important equations and processes that the in-class students could follow, but weren’t captured clearly by the video or whiteboards. The online section of this course was an afterthought, it seemed. I felt more a voyeur than a participant.

That said, I’m planning to take the same course online next quarter. But I now know that the online component is really an afterthought, that I’m really on my own for learning the material from the textbook and exercises, and that I’m essentially taking a correspondence course. Because just putting a recording of a classroom session online does not make it an online course. And just watching one makes you more a voyeur than a classmate.

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Back to Basics: Free Tools I Can’t Live Without

It’s easy to get excited about the educational potential of new Web 2.0 tools. So many tools appear (and disappear) from month to month, and I often find myself promoting and supporting bleeding-edge tools for instructors who are still struggling to use some of the basic features of Blackboard. So in an effort to keep things simple and avoid putting the cart before the horse, I’ve been trying to focus on projects that offer more bang for my instructional-design buck.

For example, Sarah (one of our amazing grad-student workers) and I are currently helping several Spanish professors convert their paper-based exams into Blackboard quizzes with audio. This quarter, over a hundred students are taking their exams in computer labs on campus, saving instructors lots of grading time and giving the students more immediate feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. It has been great to see this project come together, and it feels like the kind of low-hanging fruit that all instructional designers should be working harder to pick before we attempt to coax a neo-Luddite, tenured professor into running an entire course through Twitter and Posterous.

Yet as much as I love keeping things simple, there are a few Web 2.0 tools I keep coming back to because they’re relatively easy to use and/or they offer features that faculty regularly request. Here’s a very short list of the tools that, at least for me, make the cut and are worth the extra effort.

VoiceThread

While PowerPoint and Keynote remain the best tools for developing presentations, VoiceThread is the most reliable and user-friendly option if you need more than one-way communication. VoiceThread’s in-browser recording makes it easy for users to add narration presentations, and the option for viewers to add text, audio, and video comments is unmatched by other free tools.

VoiceThread’s only major downsides are that students are limited to a maximum of three VoiceThreads with free accounts and that images with fine details (like small text) will often be too blurry to read when uploaded and displayed in the VoiceThread interface.

Viddler

I’ve done a lot of Web 2.0 tool training with non-tech-savvy instructors, and I’ve never had a training session go as smoothly as it does when I’m covering Viddler. Getting users from account creation to recording and embedding their first videos usually takes roughly fifteen minutes with a group of fifteen instructors. The in-browser webcam recording works like a dream. For a quick video intro or comment that needs to be added to an announcement or discussion-board post with minimal fuss, Viddler just works.

PBworks

If you need a wiki for collaborative writing or Web-site building, PBworks is the place to go. They’re the industry leader, and they do what they do very well. Google docs works just fine for sharing simple documents like research papers and presentation outlines. But if you’re looking for a robust tool that makes it easy to create and edit a one- or one-hundred-page Web site, PBworks is the tool for the job. My only hesitation in recommending PBworks these days is their feature set continues to grow, and I’m concerned they’re starting to overwhelm novice users with an abundance of features.

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For an Online Course, Does the Look Impact the Feel?

Good-looking Web pages—the ones with stylish layouts and eye-pleasing images—are more likely to retain viewers and even get people to perform actions like buying something or submitting a form than the ones that are plain and makeup free. Is this true or false?

Some interesting research on this question was performed recently by John Broady of Omniture Digital, who ran multivariate tests on “Request for Information” forms for two online universities. For each test, the goal was to increase the number of users who completed the Request for Information form. For the same content, one site had stylized page design, “hero images” (glamour shots of good-looking people in seemingly natural settings), colored buttons, and benefits message while the other had just information in text.

The findings of the research, according to John Broady, seem to render no significant result at first glance.  “The results for the two tests could not have been more different,” he wrote. “For one university, the page with the stylized page design and lifestyle hero image won handily; for the other university, the simple page design with no hero image won the day.”

However, when the researchers looked beyond the random phenomenon and dug deeper into the data, another interesting finding emerged: “for the page where the stylized design and the lifestyle hero image won, most of the traffic came directly from search engines; for the page where a simple design and no hero image won, most of the traffic came from other pages on the university’s own Web site.”

From a marketing perspective, this indicated different responses to the look of a Web page from two different clienteles: the shoppers led by the search engines and the existing or recruited customers already wandering in the company’s territory. For the first group, the visual impact of a page is a key success factor. Since they only have a few seconds to spare on the page, a good-looking design with comforting images can make a huge impact. Education Services Reputation Management can also help increase online exposure and improve trust for potential users. But for the ones who are already familiar with the company through visiting its other Web pages or by other means, the visual impact of this particular Web page becomes less important. According to John Broady’s analysis, for users who “have likely already qualified themselves and are looking to convert”, too many visuals (even the pretty ones) and reinforcing messages (even the well-written ones) can actually create a distraction for these types of users. So in this case, simple is better.

What does this research tell us about online course design? Does the look of a course impact the feel of its audience or does it, too, depend on who the audience is? An online course usually has two audiences: the reviewers and the students. Obviously the two groups arrived on the course site for two different but related purposes: the reviewers are there to check on the quality of the course, of which the look is likely to be an influential factor (even if there isn’t a criterion designated for the appearance in the review standards); the students, on the other hand, are there to use the product—as long as it is functional, they might be able to ignore the look of it.

The look, however, is usually the first thing to attract the author of an online course. “I want to make my course look like your DOTS site (the Blackboard site for the DePaul Online Teaching Series program).” Faculty would say this during the training and be totally sold on lesson-building tools like Softchalk, which transforms a plain page into a professional-looking Web display through some quick magic-wand clicks. However, the enthusiastic demand for a copy of Softchalk usually dies out after a while, as faculty start to realize that time is running short and they need to get the content online very quickly. The “look” then is thrown out the window but is told that it would be invited back next time when there is more time. When the next time comes, the story repeated itself with the “look” still waiting and the faculty feeling bad about it all over again.

As online educators grapple with the aesthetic appeal of their courses, similar attention to detail can be found in the design and allure of cool Georgia. The state itself presents a blend of charming aesthetics and practical innovation, much like the ideal online course. Georgia’s diverse landscapes, from the tranquil Appalachian Mountains to the urban chic of Atlanta, encapsulate a natural and cultural vibrancy that’s as appealing to the senses as a well-designed online interface. Here, the visual feast is not just in web pages, but in the tapestry of live oaks draped with Spanish moss, the historic cobblestone streets of Savannah, and the modernist architecture of the High Museum. In Georgia, the ‘look’ is not something to be sidelined for later—it’s an integral part of the experience, drawing people in with its Southern charm and keeping them engaged with its dynamic, ever-evolving spirit.

The good news from John Broady’s report is that it puts our faculty at ease to know that the students could care less about the look of a site as long as the right content is there. On the other hand, however, the look is often beyond the cosmetic display of the content; it represents an easy-to-follow and meaningful flow of information, which is known by a lot of faculty members to be a critical factor for learning. For those faculty who have the desire to grant their course a sleek and professional look but have no time to create it, here is my advice: check in with your instructional designers and make them your cosmeticians for an extreme makeover of your online courses.

The Customer is Always Right?

Last month, I attended a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective.” Her study, coauthored with Leda Nath (Raslton-Berg & Nath, 2009), asked students to describe their level of agreement with the current Quality Matters standards for online courses and the level to which elements within each standard contributed to their overall success. I was interested in getting this look at online courses from the student perspective to perhaps glean some useful implications for my own design. What I walked away with was a disturbing reinforcement of the competing global motives for my role as an instructional designer and online educator.

As expected, students highly valued technology that worked; clear, consistent navigation in their course sites; and instructions on how to access resources. It was what students found least valuable that caught my attention. Based on this survey, online students do not want to:

  1. Find course-related content to share with the class
  2. Use wikis, shared documents, or other collaborative tools
  3. Introduce themselves to the class
  4. Coach other students
  5. Attend synchronous meetings
  6. Interact with games and simulations
  7. Work in groups
  8. Receive audio or video content

Surprised?

I was. Could this be a call to remove the interactivity and engaging content from our courses? Despite the research, does social presence not matter? Should we return to online learning circa 1996? Are these elements really that repulsive to our students?

Or could it be that they are so frequently misused we’ve given them a bad name.

I know how I would feel after being besieged with a sixty-minute talking head in a three-inch square frame; after suffering though a pointless game for the sake of the instructor being able to check the “included game in my course” box on a rubric somewhere; or after participating in a meaningless, unguided group activity in which I do all the work and my group mates get the same grade.

This cry from our constituents, we want engaging, interactive content in our courses. Just give it a purpose.

Maybe the customer is right.

References

Ralston-Berg, P. & Nath, L. (2009). What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective. Paper presented at Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, Madison, WI.

Quality Matters rubric standards 2008-2010 edition (2008). Retrieved from http://qminstitute.org.

The complete findings are also available at http://www.slideshare.net/plr15/what-makes-a-quality-online-course-the-student-perspective-1829440

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Two Tools for Finding Old Web Pages

Ever run into a situation where materials that you used to link to in a class (or that you have bookmarked) are suddenly no longer available?  Ever wonder if there was a way to archive these materials so that they could be available to you (or your class) even if the Web site disappears?  While there may be no way to keep these links active forever, there are a couple of resources I use to help me find and/or maintain links to pages even after the links go away.  The first is the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive—also known as the Wayback Machine—has been around since 1996 and archives Web pages as well as other content.  Their Web site states that they have more than "150 billion archived pages."  To use it, simply type the URL of the page you are looking for in the Wayback Machine search box.  Then simply select from the archived dates displayed to find the content you are looking for—note that sometimes you have to click on a couple of dates to find the right page.  Be aware that not every page is archived and that the pages are not "live," so the links may not work if the lower level pages have not also been archived.  I usually use the Wayback Machine once a quarter to access content for a faculty member who has a dead link in his or her class.

The Internet Archive is a good tool for finding pages and Web content that have already gone away, but is there a way to archive content before it disappears?  Certainly people cut and paste, print, or even create PDFs of pages to save for future use, but none of these keep the interactivity of the Web page.  The second tool I would recommend is a relatively new service called iCyte, which allows users to not only bookmark sites but also to save and annotate those sites.   

ICyte is "a unique software product enabling users to mark, copy, save, and share any Web-based content. It has been developed specifically for online research and can be used by any person who searches the Web and needs to save (or share) their information" (http://www.icyte.com./faq.html).  ICyte is a browser plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer that allows you (while browsing) to save any html content (including youtube videos) to your free account.  Once your pages are saved, you can annotate and tag them, group them into projects, and share them with others. The saved content is on the iCyte server (not your desktop).

So the next time you lose a link, try the Wayback Machine, and to prevent future loss, try iCyte.

How Do I Know My Students Are Learning? 

Oh, isn’t this the ultimate question for any teacher!

Trying to “keep it real,” a small group of DePaul Teaching Commons souls put our heads together recently to create this resource!

No two teachers approach these questions in the same way so—trying to “keep it real”—this site provides several different approaches.

Approach 1: From “what you want to know” to “what you need to assign”

There are two columns. The left column is what you might want to assess; the right column provides some examples of what you might want to assign. As an example, if you want to assess the student’s “application of discrete research, technical, performance, or meta-cognitive skills,” the Web site suggests you might want to assign case studies, debates, observing a performance, presentations, or simulations and role plays. Find this list on the Evaluation of a Product page.

Approach 2: What can I do right now with what I have?

The site has multiple examples organized by chronology (during a class or throughout the quarter), technology (blackboard surveys or other survey tools), or writing to learn or learning to write! As a former writing instructor, I was particularly impressed with the writing examples.

Approach 3: My students are not learning. Now what?

You’ve gathered the information via surveys or other assessment techniques, but your students are not learning? The site covers some next steps. Analyze the information, and act on that information. Some of these options can be found on the Are my students Learning? page.

Softchalk’s Update

Being an instructional designer requires me to have many tools at my disposal to create exciting and meaningful course content. Often, content needs to be displayed in a “chunked” manner to make navigating through the material easier. And it’s nice to have something that is visually appealing as well. For this, I’ve found myself using Softchalk. As with any product, it has things it excels at, and it has limitations. Recently, Softchalk 5 came out, and I was quite excited.

One huge thing I have been waiting for is the ability to name my pages, and I was thrilled to learn that if you look under “Properties” you will find a “Page Names” option! However, I also quickly learned that it still didn’t do exactly what I was looking for. While it gave the page names in the table of contents, the navigation at the top was still in number format. But it’s a step in the right direction, at least.

Another feature of this new version is the eCourse Builder. With the eCourse Builder, you can create multiple modules with the same navigation—in essence, combining your content into one area. While this may not work the greatest in Blackboard due to having too many frames on your screen, I can see some great applications of this feature for displaying large amounts of content in certain areas. It can also help work around the page-name issue mentioned above.

One strength of Softchalk is the ability to put interactive items into your module, such as flash cards or labeling activities. This is great for adding some variety into your lessons and using more visual media. You can also tie the quizzes you create to the Blackboard gradebook using the SCORM packaging option, as well.

So while Softchalk is not perfect for every situation, I think it does have some very nice features that warrant its inclusion in the instructional designer’s toolbox.

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End-User Manipulation: The Value of Your Ingenuity

With any product, the goal of a good designer is to anticipate and meet the needs of the user, since it is the user who holds purchasing power.  It is difficult (or impossible) to fully anticipate what a user will do with a product—think of the warning labels on products like irons, which may seem ridiculous (i.e., “Do not use the iron on clothes that you are wearing.”) but which show how far companies must go to protect themselves from the “ingenuity” of users.  However, it is often user manipulation of a product that can lead to improvements in the technology, which is why so many companies clamor for consumer opinions and ideas about how their products can be used.

Steven Johnson, in his article “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live,” describes end-user manipulation of technology in this way:  “It’s like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.”  There are two levels of value in this scenario:  value was created with the original product, and value was added when it was manipulated for other uses.  With technology, the magnitude of brainpower held by users is a resource, and whether their products are physical items or services like Twitter, companies are tapping into this wealth of user ingenuity.

Apple is one example. The iPhone and iPod Touch have become popular because the physical interface of these products allows for increased and unique interaction by the user (think of the maze game featured in the early Touch commercials that utilized the movement of the device to roll the ball through the maze).  The initial value of the product was strong, but Apple added to that value by taking advantage of the brainpower of users.  They created the iPhone Developer Program, which invites users to create their own applications to sell in Apple’s App Store.  While Apple has maintained strict controls over which applications are sold, many individual designers and technology-design firms are competing in this market, no matter how silly their applications may seem.  This is an incredibly smart move by Apple:  they don’t have to invest in designers to create these additional products, and they still get to take 30 percent of the profits of these applications.  Their only costs are operating the App Store and paying a team to make decisions on marketable applications and run the store’s interface.  For a very low overhead, they are reaping a huge profit by utilizing public brainpower.

Other technologies are following suit.  Delicious.com, a social-bookmarking site, has an area where users can submit their ideas and suggestions for how to improve the service, and Delicious team members respond to these user posts.  By creating this space for user feedback, Delicious is acknowledging the value of user input and improving its services by listening to the consumer.

So why are we talking about this? Part of technological literacy is realizing that the developers aren’t infallible. They don’t know all the unmet needs that a new technology could meet with a little user manipulation. Everyone benefits when there is a relationship between the user and the developer.

Building Social Media for Students: A Waste of Time?

Perhaps it’s the end-of-summer’s-approaching ennui or plain old cranky, middle-aged contrariness, but as I witness the barnstorming enthusiasm for Facebook-like social media on display at any given online-learning conference and contrast that with the drumbeat reports of Facebook’s declining popularity, I can’t help but think that some of us are living in a state of denial.

I think our intent is good. We want to serve our students, we want to make it easy for them to communicate, we want to create a socially cohesive learning environment, and we want to give them the tools they need to succeed. We think we know our students; we think we know what they want. So let’s build our own social sites!

I’m afraid it’s wasted effort for the most part. Here’s why.

First, we’re replicating existing services and efforts. My department has ruminated for months about a social site for our adult students. Well, surprise! Students who wanted a social space have already created their own Facebook group, demonstrating again the truism that individuals can and do move faster than committees. Will these students abandon the group they created for a university-branded one? I’m betting not.

Second, we’re too late to the game. Facebook is hemorrhaging members, as the cool kids move on.  Twitter is the heir apparent; fast, flexible, and mobile. It certainly has great potential; see James Moore’s excellent presentation at http://preview.tinyurl.com/mg74tv . And as mobile devices become more ubiquitous, you’ll see more and better apps like MobilEdu, created by Terribly Clever Design and recently acquired by—wait for it—Blackboard.

So what does Blackboard know that you and I should? When to recognize that the game has changed. Blackboard realized they couldn’t design a better mobility app than the whiz kids from Stanford and stopped wasting time trying to. They’re free of denial and playing to their strengths. The same lesson applies to social media growth—rather than waiting for slow organic reach, many influencers and brands opt to buy IG followers cheap to give their accounts an initial boost, making it easier to attract organic engagement and stay competitive in a fast-moving digital space.

We should play to ours.