This blog is a discussion of the technologies, designs, and applications for developing eLearning courses. It is maintained as part of the Online Course Design class offered by the Department of Instructional Technology at Bloomsburg University.
So this blog could have come about two or three weeks ago for the purpose of our Blackboard project. For me, I had trouble coming up with a course banner, and even something for the group Wiki project. I don't have Adobe Photoshop and have no idea on how to use it (I hear its difficult). Adobe Photoshop is not free, but Paint.net is! It is compared to Photoshop and Microsoft Paint and considered the free alternative. "It is a powerful editor with support for layers, blending, transparency, and plugins." (from Wikipedia) There are tutorials that show you how to create excellent graphics. I watched the tutorial on how to create a collage. Check it out! (here is a snapshot of the interface)
I recently stumbled upon the site of instructables.com, and it may very well be the greatest stumble I have ever had.
instructables.com is a site where you can learn to make just about anything... And I do mean anything. There is a step by step tutorial for making such necessities as "Build the Starship Enterprise from useless office supplies" or "build a (somewhat) historically accurate Viking Costume " or "how to make a Universal bike light battery out of a Parmesan cheese container." I eprsanlylam excited to try the USB Batman Spotlight, where you can make the bat signal out of a USB lamp.
This site is like the Red Green show on steroids. Instructables
Having just created a course in Joomla, I am curious about the other content management systems. This CMS was difficult to work with mostly because I had a lack of training. From the way it sounds, udutu would have been much easier to work with. Joomla also had several templates from which to choose and start. Changing things around did not so much require knowledge of programming languages, but rather an understanding of the infrastructure. There are so many interactive things I wanted to incorporate but did not know how and could not have learned on my own in a timely manner. So, this post is more or less to pose a few questions: Which content management systems you have used and which have been easy to work with? Which ones were best for interactivity?
I found a free web-based elearning authoring tool with a WYSIWYG interface. The tool is called udutu (pronounced (You do too). The nice thing about this tool is that you don't need advanced programming knowledge because there are several templates available for use. Aside from content development you can develop interactive quizzes, scenarios and assessments and provide instant feedback to the users of the system. Often as trainers there is a need to collaborate with SMEs and since this tool is web based with no need to install software, collaboration is made that much easier. As you add items to udutu you are also developing a library of reusable objects. No more reinventing the wheel. Publishing is also a breeze because udutu is SCORM compliant and you can either host on your own LMS or post on their site for a fee. Take a look at a brief overview here.
Microsoft in the second half of 2009 will be releasing a free anti-malware (rootkits, spyware, trojans and viruses) tool code named “Morro”. They are releasing this suite of software due to the increasing demand of PC security.
The current consumer security offering, Microsoft Live OneCare will be discontinued at the latest on June 30, 2009. The new Morro suite will use many of the same technologies found in Live OneCare. It will lack several features currently found in the Live OneCare suite (printer sharing and automated PC tune-up) in order to minimize the use of system resources.
The package will be able available for the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems via download.
The only problem with this suite is many independent reviews have found Microsoft’s current offerings for Anti-Malware, the OneCare Anti-Virus and Windows Defender, lacking in capability and often missing infections. Let’s hope that Microsoft has improved their overall product for this release.
I will freely admit that I'm addicted to Google. I'm not sure how I survived without gmail, Google Docs, iGoogle page, Google Maps, and even basic Google searches before the site was around. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't use Google for something. It seems that they are always adding new features and apps that make using Google even more fun and useful.
I noticed when I logged in the other day that they've added yet another new feature called Searchwiki. Basically, this will allow you to customize your search results, save your results, and make notes about the search pages that you find. This brief video from Google can explain it better then I can.
I haven't gone and played around with this at all in my own Google account, but I thought it looked interesting. It seems like a form of social bookmarking. I could see myself using this to save the sites I go to often or to make a note to remember something about a site. The possiblities could be endless!
Sloodle is an open source project that brings together Moodle (an open source course management system) together with Second Life (3D Virtual World) to provide interactive game-technology and various tools for supporting learning in the virtual worlds.
Moodle and Second Life as illustrated by the following image:
To learn more about Sloodle, YouTube has many videos explaining how they work together.
If you are interested in learning more about Sloodle, there are introductory classes that run in Second Life every Wednesday at 5:00pm EST in the SLOODLE classroom.
I guess you might have seen Google Chrome doing big roars in the world of bites for being the new light browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
Features of this new browser include:
One box for everything
Type in the address bar and get suggestions for both search and web pages.
Thumbnails of your top sites Access your favorite pages instantly with lightning speed from any new tab.
Shortcuts for your apps Get desktop shortcuts to launch your favorite web applications.
Safer downloads
Better crash control......But I am not sure how long will this last. As we all know firefox was very efficient for crash control when they started in 2004 but after all those plugins its now a heavy application almost capturing more than half of my memory resources and susceptible to wild crashes.
Check out the notes from the developers themselves on why they built this browser. "A fresh take on the browser At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they're doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago. Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build. So today we're releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome. On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go. Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers. This is just the beginning - Google Chrome is far from done. We've released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we'll continue to make it even faster and more robust. We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward. The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better. But enough from us. The best test of Google Chrome is to try it yourself." Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..................................... You guys simply rock what would be Google's next project. A Operating System?????????????Who knows time will tell.........Sayonara....adiós....GoodBye folks.
In lieu of a burgeoning finiancial crisis, (if you really consider it a crisis, and not just a media ratings driver) it seems sensible that training directed at financial and money management would be piggybacking this "crisis".The National Council on Economic Education (NCEE) is a nationwide network that leads in promoting economic literacy with students and their teachers. They have actually created an interactive learning game (sans poor graphics) that is targeted at teens to help them do basic personal finance tasks, such as understanding credit, interest rates, how to live on a budget, etc.
It's called "it all adds up" and it's a serioes of games and simulations geared with a pedialogical approach to teaching personal finance.
After playing a few of these games, it's pretty clear that these games are not just beneficial for teenagers. in fact, if more people understood some of these basic concepts, we probably could have avoided the housing crash, IMHO.
It's actually practice on basic common sense practices that get lost in the shuffle a lot of the time. The only downside is the games are hardly but free, whoever created them perhaps rushed a little bit too much putting this stuff together, or maybe they just didn't have a budget. it's hard to say. Still, it's worth a run through if you still think you can afford that BMW. :)
I've been reading the eLearning blog that Dr. Nic suggested and it's really interesting. First of all, I was surprised by how informal most of the posts are. I guess I thought that because these people are presenting at the conference, they would be very professional and well, kind of dry. But they are far from it! I think I even saw a smiley face " :) " in one of them. Ha ha. I enjoyed Patti Shank's post about Past Promises and Present Challenges of eLearning, found here. And also, the comments in response to her post by Curts Bonks. I even enjoyed reading Thomas Reynold's post about j-walking and open container laws in Las Vegas. The interview with keynote speaker, Dr. Ellen Wagner is great, too. She even shows us some of the produce she grows in her garden! It's hard to imagine her getting busted for j-walking in Vegas. If you haven't checked it out yet, do so, there's a lot of great information.
Thinkfinity is an educational resource provided by the Verizon Foundation and all materials are absolutely free. There are eight resource providers shown below that are currently affiliated with Thinkfinity - each image is a link to that tool. All of the tools allow you to search for lesson plans by state standard, by grade level, by interactivity, etc and most of the lessons offer interactive media resources and some even have primary sources digitized for viewing. Such incredible resources! Link directly to Thinkfinity or check out sites of interest below:
If you are like me and graduation is fast approaching it is Job Hunting time! However, the current global economic situation is dicey at best and jobs might become difficult to come by. Here are some helpful tips. Happy job hunting and good luck!
Find a Job You Love onmoneymaking.com's advice in finding a career you will enjoy.
Use the Right Words A CareerBuilder CNN article that lists 25 words that could actually hurt your resume and hinder your application.
I've been selected as the Lead ISD on a project with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and I must say, I am a little nervous about working with this client because of the size of the corporate university and the size of the contract. This paper, titled "Size matters—but not in the way you think" that I stumbled across, explains how Instructional Designers should use the size of their client to their advantage. The author says that for all of us who plan to become Instructional Designers and create courseware for large organizaitons, there is nothing to worry about. I consider this to be good information for recent graduates in the field of Instructional Technology.
I don't know about you folks but I have enough trouble trying to keep myself sane in reality let alone in a cyber-relationship too. This article and its related links go to show how wrong things can go either in real-life or with a fantasy relationship. This article and the links with it just blew my mind. Now I see why I haven't visited this Second Life site. I guess you can take anything too far. I want to know where these people find the time to spend on developing these online relationships when real life is so time-consuming. They must not do anything with their free-time other than this Second Life site - affairs, divorces, rehab, killings... these are all a bit much for me to understand. Read this article and the associated links and see what you think.
The Effectiveness of Instructional Games: A Literature Review and Discussion.pdf, Hays Robert T., Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division retrieved 2008-09-14.
It is amazing how much we learn by experiences we encounter! During this course, we have discussed many issues regarding the development of online courses in terms of planning, reusability, interactivity, styles of e-learning and more. One topic that we have not talked about is color.
In observing a student teaching a lesson to a class on Monday night, I saw a great lesson on adjectives and adverbs. The student prepared a descriptive paragraph and color the adjectives and adverbs. All of the adjectives were type in red, and all of the adverbs were typed in blue. The students were asked to find things in common among the red words. At this point, I watched a student quickly begin asking questions to his partner. A few minutes later, we realized that the student was color-blind and couldn't identify which words were in red text.
Ah! How does this play into the development of online courses? I think it brings about a very important topic of which I need to consider when I develop an online course. To provide a little more insight on the topic, I would like to pass along a website that was sent to me. It provides suggestions from a gentleman who is colorblind.
Somehow or other, the wonderful and convoluted maze of hyperlinking led to me elearnity, which is a UK-based consulting service for corporate learning innovations. Like most corporate entities with an online presence, elearnity maintains a blog. I confess that I find most corporate blogs to be boring regurgitations of corporate speak, designed to market to a target audience. The Rapid E-Learning Blog, for instance is so biased in how it filters in comments, and while I enjoyed my first 6 months of reading it, eventually I realized that it's author was basically just writing variation after variation of leveraging Powerpoint and how great that is for a tool like Articulate. I realize the author is employed by Articulate, so some marketing copy is bound to be on the blog, but if you already know how to do some great things with clipart and the pixel real estate of Powerpoint, and you can appreciate a good job aid over a full course, the Rapid E-Learning blog gets old pretty quickly.
Sometimes however, a corporate blog throws you a curve ball and comes up with something really interesting.
In this case, the elearnity blog suggested tapping into the power of viral marketing and using it as a learning tool. Specifically, the author noticed SplashCast, which creates "embeddable entertainment." The full text of the blog post can be found here.
What interested me about the post wasn't so much SplashCast as it was the idea of repurposing tools that have already proved their success. We're often on a race to find the newest, most cutting edge web 2.0 tool, and there's certainly a lot to be said for bringing these tools and their innovations to learners, but what about using something else, that's already proved effective or even addictive, and using it for eLearning rather than its intended purpose? Kind of like repurposing a game for elearning, but in this case, taking the ideas behind viral marketing, and repurposing the marketing tool for socially transmitted education.
I found a terrific website for anyone who is interested in Science. NASA has a website that features video clips geared to kids K-5, 6-8 and 9 to 12th grade. They are short, 5 to 10 minute video clips that are designed to inspire kids to learn more about science, technology, math, and engineering and are free to every student and teacher in the country! There are over 220 NASA eClips that range in topics (K-5) from What is a Tide, What is Weather, Digging in Moon Dirt, and The Math Behind How Gears Work. For 6th to 8th graders the topics cover subjects such as Lunar Habitats, Hurricane Hunters, Scale Models and Ratios, and Solar Power on Earth. Ninth to twelfth graders can learn about Space Food, How Global Positioning Systems Work, NASA and NASCAR, and Invention of the Doppler Radar. There are also videos for the general public such as how NASA technologies help archeolgists discover ancient artifacts in the NASA 360: Episode 4 video. I watched a few and they are fascinating and I learned a lot like there are always 24 satellites circling the earth but 12 only available to you (for GPS) because the other 12 are on the other side of the world! And the new applications that scientists are finding out that GPS is useful for that it was never designed for! Curious? Go check out the site, there is something for everyone!
While reading chapter 10 in the William Horton book, I chuckled a few times. The section on unnecessary scrolling made me think immediately about those 2-column articles as PDF’s that are sometimes required reading. Not that I am lazy, but I find it difficult to determine where to scroll to and so I just print out the articles. If the document is a book’s length, I try my best but do not usually get a full understanding of what the piece may have said. Times like these make me reflect on the assignments I give my students and whether some don’t do their homework because it is more of a hassle than it’s worth. One other thing I considered when reading this chapter was to redefine my terms of legibility. I make it clear to students that if it is not legible, it may very-well be marked wrong. (Unless this is a learning disability, in which case we find another way to communicate). This term “legible” implies the ability to read the text or neat handwriting. There is always that one person who wants to write yellow on white paper and argues that they wrote very neatly! Some of these online design ideas really do apply to pen and paper settings as well. A contrasting color scheme is necessary not only for the visually impaired or colorblind, this is one design element that is crucial for everyone.
R5 Productions This website is, in my opnion, the best compilation site for indie shows in Philly. R5 allows users to access info using Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. Some of the Philly venues that are listed on this site are the 1st Unitarian Church (my favorite venue!), Starlight Ballroom, Johnny Brendas, and The Barbary. The site displays show-listings for each day, offers sample music downloads for the bands playing in that show, a link to purchase tickets to the show, and a brief review of each band. This is a great site for finding new music on the indie scene. Since R5 uses "social networking" tools, I figured it was a good opportunity to post about the site. Enjoy!
This week I wanted to share my views on my favorite part of the instructional design process, the needs analysis. During the past summer I worked for a large Scandinavian insurance company in Finland, and I was responsible for conducting a needs analysis for upcoming development projects for the company’s intranet. My task was to analyze the use of the intranet from the customer service representatives’ point of view. The proposed problem, as presented to me, was that the information necessary for the call center customer service representatives is too scattered and difficult to find while they are communicating with the customers over the phone.
Needs analysis is a vital part of the instructional design process.Needs analysis is conducted in order to really pin down the client’s problem, or the gap between the current and desired situation, as accurately as possible. Knowing the gap will help instructional designers to create training, which will solve the problem or answer to the training need more efficiently. If the needs analysis is not completed and compiled thoroughly, even the best training can completely miss the purpose and be useless in terms of the actual learning results.
Clients, who are not familiar with the process of designing systematic instruction, often doubt the importance of the needs analysis process. They have an opinion as to what the problem is in their minds and they see the proposed needs analysis as an irrelevant t extra cost on the budget. However, as instructional designers, we have to emphasize and explain the importance of the needs analysis to the client as it is in their benefit that it is completed. Even though the client has an idea as to what their problem is, often there is a bias underlining that thought. The client can’t be objective to the problem and on top of that might not have considered all the different angles of it.
I was hired for the intranet development project last summer to bring an outsider’s view to the problem. With very limited knowledge in the field of insurance and no previous experience in using the company’s intranet I was able to look at the situation objectively and with a fresh set of eyes.
During the eight week period I was assigned on the project I tried to compile as much information as possible and from as many sources as possible. I utilized
observations
interviews & discussions
surveys
website statistics
information mapping
to find out as much information as possible. I talked to Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) who were involved in the use of intranet in different ways, for example;
customer service representatives (working in the call centers as well as in person)
intranet updaters (insurance specialists responsible for creating content for the intranet)
web-masters
call center internal trainers
call center team managers
“insurance support center” personnel
After asking millions of questions, spending hours observing, compiling notes from numerous meetings and interviews, crafting website inventories and structure maps, I finally compiled a needs analysis document with my opinion of the problem and suggestions on how to solve it. As a major conclusion I found that the underlying problem was the fact that the process of developing and updating the intranet was very unstructured and not standardized. The customer service representatives are dealing with a vast amount of information to begin with, and as the information is organized and presented in an inconsistent manner, locating it becomes very difficult.
From my analysis, the company gained relevant information for their intranet development projects, and last I heard the efforts were directed towards providing training and better guidelines for the intranet developers as well as creating standards on how the information will have to be structured and organized in the intranet.
I thoroughly enjoyed the needs analysis process and I was genuinely excited as I was able to solve at least a part of the problem for a company. Even though the result of the analysis was not a pure instructional need, the experience I gained from all the SME interactions and tools I used to gather data were wonderful for me.
"We can learn a lot from Crayons: Some are sharp, some are dull, some have weird names, and all are different colors...but they do manage to exist very nicely in the same box."
Paint.net
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