This document provides guidance on developing engaging online courses using multimedia. It recommends using the Quality Matters rubric and Standards 3, 4, 6, and 8 to guide course development. Presentations should be aesthetically pleasing, aligned to objectives, and accessible to all students. Multimedia can enhance learning when used appropriately based on principles of multimedia learning. Tools like Echo360, Camtasia, WebEx and YouTube are suggested for recording and sharing content. Captions should be included to ensure accessibility.
2. Use the Quality Matters rubric and Standards 3,
4, 6, & 8 to help guide your course development
Create learning materials that are engaging and
aligned to course objectives
Design and modify presentations that are
aesthetically pleasing and appropriate for your
audience
Use multimedia to enhance the learning
experience for students
Use media that is accessible to all students
3. Standard 3 and 4 go
hand in hand, speaking
to alignment of course
objectives to
assessments and course
materials
Standard 6 looks at the
tools and technologies
used
Standard 8 relates to the
accessibility of those
materials to all students
4. There are many people
out there with rules
and ideas about the
“best” presentation
style; see
http://www.presentati
onzen.com
5. Billboard test: print it out and drop it on the
floor – if you can still read it, you’re good!
No font smaller than 18 point
Combine text with images for greater impact
Include full link URLs in any slide you are
giving out as handouts – otherwise, use
shorter links
High-contrast colors and graphics
Create a presentation transcript or notes for
added accessibility
6. Multimedia effect: words and pictures are more
powerful than words alone
Continuity: related words and pictures should be
near each other onscreen
Personalization: students learn better from more
informal, conversational styles
Coherence: Extraneous or “nice to know”
information does not help student learning
Modality: Students learn better when their visual
channel is not overloaded (words as speech rather
than onscreen text)
7. Prezi – for the cool factor
VoiceThread – for the interactive and
collaborative factor
There are literally dozens of others!Vuvox,
Animoto, PreZentit, you name it!
Check out
http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Pr
esentation+Tools for many choices
8. Sometimes, a video is
needed to show crucial
concepts and
demonstrations
Luckily, the Internet is
full of wonderful
videos for all sorts of
subject areas
10. ECHO360
Live
Available for streaming on-
demand about 24 hours after
the recording
Can be scheduled for your
class time – no button
pressing!
Share one link with students
for the whole semester
Example of Echo360:
http://163.245.1.110:8080/ess/
portal/section/ed51c2d7-
4906-4d27-9f84-
ce599daedee4
CAMTASIA
Pre-recorded
Captures everything on the
screen, plus voice and camera
Excellent for presentations,
or showing students how to
do a task on the computer
Can take video of any portion
of the screen that you wish
Can be uploaded directly to
YouTube or saved for
uploading into
Kaltura/BlackBoard
11. WEBEX
You can conduct classes
online via WebEx at
http://purdue.webex.com
Sessions can be recorded
for later viewing
Links appear in “My
Recorded Meetings” OR
your Kaltura Mediaspace
(through BlackBoard or
http://mediaspace.itap.purdue.e
du
SKYPE OR GOOGLE HANGOUTS
Cannot be easily recorded
for later viewing but great
for meeting with students
online
Sessions can be recorded
via screen capture software
like Camtasia
Audio can be recorded with
software like Audio Hijack
(Mac) orTotal Recorder
(Windows)
12. Find out if Echo is in your classroom:
http://www.pnc.edu/distance/echo-360/
Get your account set up: email
echoadmin@pnc.edu or fill out a ticket request
Echo can be automatically scheduled to come on
when you are teaching, and shut off when you’re
done
Each session has a unique link but are all
assembled at your EchoCenter, which has one
link
13. Purdue has a university license for you to have
Camtasia in your office and on your home
machine (Mac and Windows)
Visit
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/learning/tools/camt
asia/ to download the license request form and
wait approximately 24-48 hours for response
You will be able to download from a secure
Filelocker the Camtasia version of your choice,
along with SnagIt – a great tool for capturing
and editing still, single-frame screen captures
14.
15.
16.
17. YouTube (free – time
limited)
Google Drive (free)
Screencast.com (space
limited without paying)
Save as MP4 and use
through Kaltura in
BlackBoard (can be slow
with large files)
Learn more:
http://www.pnc.edu/dist
ance/camtasia-and-jing/
18. Ideally, the videos you create should be
captioned or a transcript made available for
ADA accessibility
There are several tools and resources
available to help you caption videos you
produce
Camtasia has captioning built-in
YouTube has online caption editing services
The GEL office can caption videos for a small
fee to your department
19. Mayer’s multimedia theory: http://www.learning-
theories.com/cognitive-theory-of-multimedia-learning-
mayer.html
Common but questionable principles of multimedia
learning:
http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/clark_five_com
mon.pdf
10Tools to FlipYour Class (tip: most are screen-capture
related!):
http://electriceducator.blogspot.com/2011/04/10-tools-to-
help-you-flip-your.html
Flipped class best practices:
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-best-
practices-andrew-miller
20. Reach us at:
pncolt@pnc.edu
Twitter and Facebook: @PNCOLT
http://www.pnc.edu/distance for all
workshop notes, links, and training needs
Hinweis der Redaktion
Welcome to a workshop on developing learning materials with flair through presentations and video!
QM Standards 3, 4, 6, and 8 touch on different levels of course development, including ensuring that course materials and assessments are aligned with course objectives, that you are using technology that adequately supports your objectives, and that everything you include is accessible to all students, including those with disabilities. In this workshop we’ll look at ways to make your course materials more interesting and attractive, too, as many of us find this to be very helpful in improving the overall “welcoming” nature of a course.
Standards 3 and 4 work together to ensure that your assessments the course materials that go along with them are properly aligned, while standard 6 addresses the technology itself and what you have included to use within your course. This includes the use of BlackBoard but also the tools that students use to create their work, such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, or any Web 2.0 tools you might be using. Standard 8 ties it all together by ensuring that the technologies and formats you choose are accessible to everyone.
There are many writers and speakers out there with many ideas about the best way to “do” presentations today. Depending on the message you need to convey, some people say that everything should be in pictures, or everything should be in short sentences, and some even say that no presentation visuals should be necessary at all. Some of these rules we can use, some seem a bit silly for the classroom. The bottom line is that students need some visuals to help anchor their attention while a presentation is being given, but they should not necessarily be assaulted by hard-to-read slides with too much text or graphics. Something similar to the types of slides that Steve Jobs used to use during his famous Apple keynote speeches may be a great happy medium between too much and not enough when it comes to text and graphics on slides. PresentationZen.com is a great site as well, with many articles and insights on what makes for great presentations.
A few key rules of thumb that educators can use include:
Use the billboard test – print a slide and drop it on the floor. If you can’t read it without squinting, the type is probably too small.
You should, in fact, use no fonts smaller than 18 point unless the text is some sort of caption or something else that is not integral to the message.
While in many cases, giving a full URL looks unattractive and is recommended against, when you are using slides as handouts, it is helpful to give the whole URL for a hyperlink, as people will still be able to visit that link even if they only have the print version of your work.
Some more general rules of thumb for educational presentations include:
Be sure to use high-contract colors and graphics so that text is always viewable even to readers with visual impairments or color blindness.
Also, try not to use too many graphics, especially if they are not necessary for you to make your point. Use graphics when they help enhance when you are saying, but never when they may detract from it.
Limit your points to one major concept per slide. In other words, don’t throw too much out at students at once – it will be hard for them to keep track of what you are saying and they may spend more time thinking about what’s on your slides than what you are saying.
Finally, use lecture notes and transcripts to ensure maximum accessibility for your presentations. We will talk more about this later, but students with disabilities will appreciate and need your presentation in a textual format that they can read or have read to them through a screen reader software product. Even those without physical disabilities may benefit immensely, so it is always a good idea to have a transcript, as detailed as you can make it, available in some fashion. Here, this presentation uses the notes tool in PowerPoint to accomplish this, but you could also provide a Word document separately as well. This is especially useful for those using Prezi or other alternative presentation tools.
Richard Mayer is somewhat famous in the instructional design world as a major contributor to the body of research in multimedia. He has studied how people learn through computers and multimedia (the mix of text, graphics, and video on a screen) for many years, and has come up with a few important theories. Here are just a few of these research-tested theories. Of them, the modality principle and multimedia effect are probably the most helpful to teachers and instructional designers, as they help us understand how words, images, and audio can be most optimally used to enhance learning.
When you’re looking for something beyond PowerPoint, consider options like Prezi.com, a very interactive and “fun” tool that produces very attractive presentations. There is also VoiceThread.com, where you can create something that’s more like a cross between a video and a presentation. It also allows you to collaborate with others to turn your work into a truly interactive presentation experience.
Of course, there are many other tools out there as well, such as Animoto, PreZentit, and several others. The Cool Tools for Schools wiki has a lot of excellent options that are worth exploring in more detail. Try something and see what you get! You never know – you may be pleasantly surprised by how powerful a free piece of software can be.
Many students appreciate video because it can illustrate important points even better than just text or graphics alone. Good videos, of course, implement those multimedia principles that Mayer researched, and will include voice, onscreen text, moving images, and sometimes still images to fully explain concepts across both channels of the brain (audio and visual). And luckily, the Internet – especially YouTube – is absolutely stuffed with amazing videos on just about every subject available. It is really worth checking out what is available through YouTube, Vimeo, and even your textbook publisher, to find helpful supplements to your lessons.
“Mashups” in BlackBoard refer to bringing in content from other online sources such as YouTube, Slideshare.com, Flickr, and other places. These little gems within BlackBoard can turn an otherwise boring course into one that is rich with different sorts of media, all without you having to do a lot of extra work! With each of these tools, you can search the available libraries right within BlackBoard, saving you time.
Note that Kaltura is the only exception – here is your repository of your own videos, such as things you record from WebEx. When you create a WebEx recording (and more about that in a moment), the recordings go to your Kaltura library and can be pulled into BlackBoard from there.
Find all Mashup options under the Build Content menu in BlackBoard.
There are several different lecture capture options available to you, including live, in-classroom recording and software where you can record your presentation at your desk. Echo360 is our live lecture capture option on campus, and it allows for recording everything that happens in your classroom, including the screen of your computer and the audio in the room. After about 12-24 hours, your link is available for viewing. One link is all that is needed to share with others, as every video that goes along with your course will become part of your “EchoCenter”.
Camtasia is the university’s pre-recorded capture software of choice, and it can capture everything on your screen as well as your voice and images from your webcam. You can choose what feeds you wish to have on (such as turning off the camera if you prefer not to be on it!) at any time. Camtasia is fairly easy to use, and can take video of any portion of the screen that you wish. You can upload your work directly to YouTube or the company’s own Screencast.com site, or you can save as MP4 to upload into BlackBoard via the Kaltura Mashup option.
You can also capture your remote sessions with students if you meet online, such as through WebEx. WebEx has its own built-in recording system and the links are provided through either WebEx’s “My recorded meetings” command or Kaltura Mediaspace, accessible through BlackBoard under the Build Content -> Kaltura option.
Some instructors prefer to use other tools like Skype or Google Hangouts for live sessions with students. These cannot natively be recorded for later playback, although you can use Camtasia to record the screen and audio while you are working on one these services. Alternately, you can use a program like Audio Hijack or Total Recorder to just capture the audio from such a session. These programs generally have costs associated with them.
Check our website for information about Echo360, including where it is available on campus and tutorials on how it can be used. You can contact IS through echoadmin@pnc.edu to set up your account and get your sessions scheduled for automatic recording if you so desire. You can also set them up manually or start a recording at any time once your account is set up.
Each Echo session will have its own unique link, but everything gets assembled at your EchoCenter for each class, allowing you to provide one link to students that is good all semester long.
Camtasia is available free to Purdue staff on and off-campus, on both Mac and Windows platforms. It is able to publish to many formats and has features that make it worth learning and using. I personally use Camtasia for the many, many videos that I record for my students each semester, and receive good feedback on them. To request Camtasia, log in at itap.purdue.edu/learning/tools/camtasia and follow the prompts.
The Camtasia interface is relatively simple and provides a place for tools and options, a place to preview your video as it is being edited, and a timeline to show where your tracks are, and where your audio is. You can even see the waveforms in your audio to see whether you have any particularly loud or soft spots, and these can be edited with volume tools, or deleted if you don’t need them. You can use the Red and Green slider tool at the top of the timeline to select portions of the video to cut, copy, move, or delete.
When you start recording you can decide where you will record from, whether your webcam and microphone will be on or off, and you can even test your webcam and microphone before you go to record. Once you’re ready, hit the big red Record button to start. Another floating window will show you your timer of how long you’ve been recording and you have buttons for pausing, stopping, and restarting your recording.
When you have a clip to edit, you’ll be able to use the many transitions, titles, effects, and other tools that Camtasia has available. Each one has a different set of options that are fairly user friendly. You can even create a quiz built inside of your video which will prompt the user and wait for him or her to answer before continuing. The results can even be emailed to you if you want to see them. The tools also have captioning functions which can allow you to add captions relatively easily to your videos.
Camtasia and Jing also make it easy to publish your work to YouTube, Google Drive, or screencast.com, which are free accounts that you can get. YouTube is of course something that many of us are familiar with, and Google Drive works similarly to a disk drive where you can upload files and allow them to be accessed via a link. Screencast.com is like YouTube, although it does not allow for surfing through similar videos or show any “related videos” while you are viewing. There are no comments or other social features with Screencast, making it ideal if you do not wish to expose students to these distractions during their learning experience.
You can also publish your videos to a file and upload them through Kaltura in BlackBoard. To do this, save the file as an MP4 when you go to Publish and Share the video in Camtasia. The Kaltura tool is available under the “Build Content – Mashups” tool when you are creating any content in BlackBoard Learn.
There are a number of captioning tools available, although Camtasia has one of the easiest ones to work with, and is readily accessible to all of us at Purdue. You can write your own captions, use automatic voice recognition to begin the captioning process, or import a transcript.
YouTube also has some caption editing services to help enhance its automatic service, which definitely does not work very well. You will not want to rely too heavily on any automatic tool for captioning your videos, as there are often errors. Machines simply aren’t ready to capture everything humans say in print, and we have to remember this at all times. Otherwise, we run the risk of letting a student turn on automatic captions and being very confused by what we are “saying”!
The Graduate and Extended Learning Office (GEL) has captioning services available for longer videos that may be too difficult for you to caption yourself. Learn more at http://www.pnc.edu/distance/webaccessibility/ or http://www.pnc.edu/gel/.
These are some resources to help with understanding best practices in using Mayer’s principles
Please contact us and visit http://pnc.edu/distance for all workshop notes, links, and training needs. Thank you!