Pedagogy for Media Assets—3
Media assets and learning objects for online courses include activities built on common web site capabilities. RSS feeds can supply a steady stream of relevant current content. A search bar can permit students to search the online course content or go outside to the World Wide Web. A calendar can show due dates, test dates, and other course benchmarks. Internal and external links can lead to articles or readings, a glossary, and other reference materials or course aids or supplements. Polls can work as information surveys or as pretest and posttest assessments.
A course on personal finance, for example, could begin with students responding to a poll on their current financial thinking and habits. Do they have a budget, for example, do they have a savings account, do they have a mortgage, do they carry credit card debt, are they risk averse, do they participate in an employee benefit plan, how old will they be when they retire, etc., etc.? This type of questionnaire serves a number of functions. The respondent begins to focus on key topics and anticipates learning more about them. The exercise activates their prior knowledge, confirms personal relevance and usefulness, and arouses motivation to learn. For the instructor, the poll may provide insight into the learners' levels of knowledge and mindsets about the subject, which may guide instruction. The poll may also be constructed as a test, self-administered before and after the course as a general assessment of learning.
Other built-in capabilities adaptable to online instruction are message boards, discussion lists, and email. The ability of learners to communicate with each other as well as with teachers or mentors is a critical component of effective learning. Learners become engaged through interaction, and interaction may be even greater and more inclusive in online environments than in physical classrooms.
Dialoguing in message strings, attending chat rooms, blogging, or teleconferencing, students can discuss course topics, ask and answer questions, debate issues, and develop collaborative projects. The most inclusive form of online interaction is the wiki, in which instructor and students generate, contribute, and edit course content. The types of communication or interpersonal interaction made available in an online course are limited only by the software and technologies employed.
Open source software has made sophisticated means of communication widely available at low cost. A web site developer could develop a site for an online course in Drupal, for example, or Joomla, Wordpress, or other free software. Depending on the level of technological commitment, an online "course" could be as simple as a blogsite with comments or a series of podcasts (basically slideshows with voice) or webcasts (basically online broadcasts of events), or as complex as an intranet site or academic portal with comprehensive hyperlinked text and multimedia. Like Facebook or MySpace or Linked In, a course can even create its own social network--the ultimate enhancement, perhaps, of the classroom as a learning environment.
The initiation and response patterns that communication technologies introduce also permit the development of test item files with answers, scoring, and answer feedback. Student assessment and course evaluation are key components of any instruction. Thus, just as pedagogy can be added to articles and media assets, pedagogy can be added or incorporated into the very capabilities that are built into software programs for developing web sites.
Labels: academic portal, distance learning, e-learning, e-textbooks, media assets, online courses, online textbooks, open source software, pedagogy, wiki-textbooks
Pedagogy for Media Assets—2
In my work I have found it challenging to locate good media assets to treat pedagogically in aid of learning (and also, alternatively, to find good content to convert into digital media assets). Some fields are more forthcoming than others. For science subjects, for example, the Web abounds with good cheap or free authoritative images, animations, and videos unencumbered by cookie captures, registration requirements, restricted access, random pornography, marketing campaigns, advertisements, pop-up contests, or monetization schemes. In contrast, unencumbered videos and graphics on business and finance subjects are harder to come by. Most are network or cable television news clips, video blogs by amateurs, student spoofs, or storefronts for commercial enterprises.
Images are plentiful online and there are good free or low cost sources. I usually first go to Google Images—Advance Search to find what I'm look for. Depending on the course subject, my personal favorites are the Library of Congress, NASA, and open source sites such as http://www.arthist.umn.edu/aict/html/. Stock photo sites with royalty-free images also can be good sources, but in many cases you must pay for the use of an image to embed it or to download a high-resolution version of it for print publication.
To direct my efforts I always ask up front if there is a photo research and/or permissions budget for the course and if the author has any photos for use, potentially, in the course. I guess I'm thinking here of the author I worked with who had a collection of slides of apes and monkeys, which I had added to the companion web site for his textbook--back in the days when web sites for textbooks were a novelty. Imagine the images, videos, audios, and animations one might assemble today for an online course on primate evolution!
Video repositories such as YouTube and Google Video have search bars, but it often takes too much time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Edutainment or infotainment can be difficult to distinguish from uncontaminated efforts to inquire, inform, or educate. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) (http://www.ted.com/) is an example of the kind of video sources I look for when developing online courses.
Animations also abound, but most gif files are clip art or expressions of popular culture. Educational animations are mainly for elementary and high school school students, although there are wonderful animations for science and medicine. See, for example, http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Physics/Education/Interactive_Animations/. Software and tutorials exist for animating images, maps, and graphics and for creating 3-D animations, but I usually recommend investing in the services of professional digital animators to support important learning objectives using original content.
Good wav and MP3 audio files also exist online, but they may have limited applicability to most textbook subjects. For a literature course I could envision using links to Librivox recordings, for example, of people reading passages from classic works. I always encourage academic authors to record audio files or tape their lectures for use in online courses. Voice recordings of key points, pronunciation guides, or glossary terms and definitions aid the learner. An audiobook is a useful addition or alternative for many students as a content delivery platform. Providing voice recordings also makes online courses accessible to students with special needs.
Embedding files may be the best option for some projects, but care must be taken to obtain permission or, for free sites, to obtain appropriate information for the credits. Citing or linking to a URL is easier and avoids permissioning issues. This is especially true for articles. I always choose sources that do not require subscription or purchase, although in some projects I have encouraged authors and publishers to license the use of articles through repositories such as EBSCO, Gale, or ProQuest.
Google Scholar has proven to be a useful source of articles and there are many other good online open source professional association, university, and government-archived articles. It typically takes me much longer to screen articles for use in a course than to pedagogize them. Articles often provide theoretical or historical or statistical background, but in most subjects the best use of articles, I find, is to provide concrete examples for teaching and learning chapter/module concepts.
There are many good online news sources as well, if you can find stable URLs for them. Ability to update and frequency of updating is an important consideration when linking to news. Some academic portals, for example for college courses on marketing, economics, archaeology, education, astronomy, etc., may benefit from having an RSS news feed targeted to the course subject.
Other than images, videos, audios, animations, articles, and feeds, online courses can have original interactive features that are pedagogically effective and use the built-in functionalities of the Web. These features will be the subject of my next blog entry.
Labels: academic writing, e-learning, e-textbooks, higher education, hyperlinks, media assets, narrative context, online courses, online textbooks, pedagogy, textbook
Online Courses, Continued
No, I haven't abandoned my blog--just a very busy spell when I could not make time for it.
I was talking about online course development and have expanded my studies on this topic in preparation for participating in the 2008 convention of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) in Las Vegas, June 19-21. On Saturday I will be in a publisher's Q&A roundtable and also will be giving a presentation on the future of textbooks (e.g., how textbook authors can continue to make money in the digital world of free online content). I also signed up for some 15-minute mentoring sessions with textbook authors on Friday. On Thursday I look forward to attending Michael Spiegler's workshop on writing a textbook. Michael has used my book as a text (Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, 2nd Edition, Atlantic Path Publishing 2008). TAA is a great resource for textbook authors and editors (www.taaonline.net).
Topics for my mentoring sessions cover standard areas in textbook publishing, such as writing a prospectus, finding the right publisher, the publishing cycle and process, textbook organization and headings, apparatus and pedagogy, working with co-authors and editors, and doing revisions. My presentation/discussion focuses on the online environment for instructional materials, however, and is called "Textbook 2.0" (at a TAA member's apt suggestion). The deeper I go into this subject, the more I find out, and the more questions arise--an exciting prospect as I love both the research and the puzzle. I look forward to writing and speaking on this and learning even more.
As it happens I have also been developing online courses for clients, learning by doing and thus discovering both limitations and ways to get outside the box. I've also discovered how expensive it can be to have software written for online course platforms and applications. I don't know much at all about that, as my involvement has been on the soft side, with content, using templates. I have not even had to learn a markup language (html or xml). I think I would like to do that anyway, though, as soon as I get a chance. There seem to be many good tutorials online, e.g., at www.killersites.com.
One platform you can check out without commitment and at no cost is the beta at www.utilium.com. [Disclosure: I am listed as a partner in that venture (though I'm only a consultant and not a legal partner or an investor).] In any case, I think Utilium and sites like it hold a lot of promise for instructor-led development of high-quality custom course content that can be sold or shared, as desired, without permissions problems, but with the full potential of the World Wide Web and, hopefully, the interactive user interfaces of social networking.
I look forward to sharing on this blog more of what I learn about the future of textbooks in a digital world.
Labels: e-learning, e-textbooks, Mary Ellen Lepionka, online courses, online textbooks, text and academic authors, Textbook 2.0, Utilium, writing and developing your college textbook
Advice on Textbook Writing - 2: The E-Textbook Model
Try developing your textbook manuscript using an e-textbook model. Think of your chapters as modules, your paragraphs as nested learning objects or "content". No need to draft in html; just construct a core narrative text (telling the story) and system of headings (organizing the story conceptually). Then tag or keymark the text for links to learning objectives, supporting web sites, examples, problems, articles, images, glosses, questions, activities, source citations, bibliography, etc. For each module keep a log of these proposed links and supporting materials and their sources as a sort of media log, similar to the permissions logs you would keep. (I model this process in chapters 9 and 10 in my 2005 book on writing and developing college textbook supplements, but already I see I must update! Readers' advice for revising that book is most welcome.)
I see several reasons for drafting to an e-textbook model, some relating to exposition and some to the realities of textbook publishing today:
1. Writing a core narrative is good discipline for saying what absolutely needs to be said in a minimalist (and infinitely expandable) way. Some might argue that this is a reductio ad absurdam exercise, and in some hands it no doubt would be. However, expressing what is most important--the key fact, the main point, the basic chronology, the critical argument or proof, the one thing to remember, the so what?--is an expository writer's duty to the learner. Your mission as a textbook author should be based on what you feel is most important for readers to come away with.
2. Core narratives let you draft a whole-book first draft, to schedule and to length, without being overwhelmed with details. At the same time, media logs let you choose the best and most efficient supporting material for your content for each use--in the print edition, in an electronic edition, and in each supplement, including what you can give to your colleagues, the classroom instructors, to help them teach the course.
3. Media logs let you plan for proving or enriching your narratives in limitless ways at many levels of discourse. These ways offer students and instructors greater choice in what they will use to learn and teach the course content. And this is the way education is headed today. For better or worse, knowledge is becoming unpegged from the minds of its creators--at once personalized and globalized.
4. A textbook manuscript constructed this way can be easily deconstructed and its parts repurposed for applications in web interfaces and e-learning or interactive online courses, in both open-access and for-sale environments. Educational publishing for all levels is headed this way. Publishers use particularized textbook and ancillary content as mix and match media assets. A manuscript that can be easily published in any form has clear added value, including in textbook publishing contracts where the granting of electronic rights has become mandatory for publishers even to begin to compete.
5. A manuscript written to the e-textbook model is easy to revise, as the core content remains largely the same except for any new research, facts, or interpretations. Finding new assets to support the content in a revision can be just plain fun, a playground for invention and creativity and also a way to incorporate the contributions of coauthors and students or other contributors.
There probably are more reasons, and I would like to hear them. There is a downside too, of course, especially for the traditionalists among us, but I'm rather excited by all the changes.
Labels: e-learning, e-textbooks, learning objects, media assets, textbook manuscripts, textbook writing, writing and developing college textbook supplements
