Inspire Blog Author: Warren Blyth

Distance Socializing : Exploring tools for remote communication

The Ecampus multimedia team researches emerging tools, and works with our sibling team of Instructional Designers to help support instructors. So lets take a moment to peek at tools we all might be using in the coming years for communicating with teammates from a distance. Multimedia developers primarily use a paid tier of Slack (for instant messaging), Outlook (for email), and Zoom (for meetings with live video or audio). While we play around with many other emerging tools, I believe we’re using the same basic trio as most everyone else. Just wanted to be clear that I don’t have a revolutionary new secret tool in my back pocket which you must start using today. We’re all in the same basic … Distance Socializing : Exploring tools for remote communication

Virtual Reality makes animation easy & speedy

The Ecampus multimedia team creates animations to bring your thoughts and words to life. In virtual reality, creating these 3D objects and animations has become incredibly easy and fast. The old ways … of power tool juggling Developing “multimedia” often means using small aspects of many different tools. “Media” being a means of communication and the plural of medium: a means of doing something. To create an animation for your class, we quickly run through a long list of media. Here’s an exhaustive run through of how the process works at the moment (feel free to skip to the next section! This is detailed): You would typically type up and email over a script that I take into Google Drive … Virtual Reality makes animation easy & speedy

Walking through multimedia

A “multimedia developer” at Ecampus typically creates three or four interactive web pages or animations each quarter. Here is a walkthrough of how one cool project was created which shows the variety of tools we often leverage.

We can revisit and revise multimedia

Recently, we added 24 new birds to this “silhouette shape recognition” interactive for FW312. This was the 3rd time we expanded this interactive tool, and it serves as a nice reminder that Ecampus can continue to help improve your course materials year after year.

Could you use a quick cartoon?

The multimedia developers at Ecampus have the tools and experience to quickly generate cartoons for your course, illustrating hard to describe (or photograph) concepts with a dash of charm. Here are three recent examples of the quick cartoons we can make – each completed in about a week – with some insights into the development process.