Early on in the development process, you and your learning designer will meet with the Multimedia and Programming Teams to talk about your ideas for media integration. The list below may help you identify some ideas for developing creative ways to help students engage with the content. Since many of the courses we develop are based on existing face-to-face classes, think about what you do in your current class and try to answer the questions below. This is your chance to get some of the "wouldn't it be nices" into your course. Once they are built, you will be able to use them in both your online and face-to-face classes. So, what are your ideas?
- Is there a particular part of your course that students struggle with that some kind of media might help to explain?
- Have you ever found yourself saying, wouldn't it be nice if ...?
- Or wouldn't it be nice if students could ... instead of ...?
- Or a student would really benefit if they had experience with XYZ?
Well, now is your chance. Take a few minutes to read through the common options below and turn on your imagination!
Common Options
- Images - Our media specialists can recreate your images in a higher resolution to add some detail and polish. If there are images/graphs from books or journals, we will either need to request permission for these or create something new for you.
- Complicated images - For images that have a lot going on in them, using a voice-over to explain them with some simple animation would go a long way to helping online students understand complicated images more fully.
- Flow chart diagrams - Flow charts, organization charts, etc. may benefit from adding animation.
- Other diagrams - Certain diagrams could be candidates for simple animation to help students understand the meaning better than a static image. An example of this might be a diagram that layers information.
- Graphs/charts - Graphs and charts can be made into animations or simulations so a student can change some values and see the results in real time to show cause and effect. Math might make more sense if students can see what happens. Something like this could be created to test a hypothesis as well.
- Classwork - Classwork can be integrated into the lesson page. We can add knowledge checks for terminology and other lower level knowledge skills. Drupal can keep track of student responses and create a spreadsheet for you to keep track of those who did the assignments and those who didn't for class participation.
- Weekly Videos - Recording a weekly video to kick off the lesson and possibly wrap-up the previous lesson would be valuable to students. It makes the course more personal for online students, and it also serves to focus students or bring clarity at the end of a lesson.
- Content Videos - Video can be used to help you teach the most complicated topics that are difficult to thoroughly explain with text alone. They can also be used if faculty need to physically demonstrate something, work out an important equation, or clarify something that seems to be causing confusion for students.