Inspire Blog Category: Multimedia

The Ghost in the Course Shell

We begin with a ghost story. This story may sound familiar. It begins in a space of learning. You enter as a student. You know you will be in this place for the next two or three months with other students and an instructor. But although you know you are all there in the same space, you can’t see or hear any other students. You wander alone until you discover a pre-recorded message telling you what to do. This should be reassuring, but the person in the video doesn’t look like the instructor listed on your course schedule. “Welcome,” says the man in the video. “In this course you will learn how to apply theoretical concepts in the real world.” … The Ghost in the Course Shell
by · December 16, 2022

Copyright, Fair Use, and More: An Introduction

Copyright, Creative Commons, Public Domain, Fair Use… what are they and how to use them correctly? You might be a course creator in need of images to use in your materials. Or you could be an author wondering how best to share your work. This post features a brief interactive lesson on these concepts, along with recommended resources that you can explore to learn more. You can navigate the lesson by answering the prompts or by using the menu. Click on the image below to get started! Do you have any other resources that you found particularly helpful? Share them with us!
by · January 24, 2022

Video Curation in Course Development

Part I: Role of Course Developer as Media Curator  This post is Part I of a two-part series on video selection and use in online courses. Part I provides the reasoning behind understanding course videos selection by course developers as a curatorial process. Part II will explore video curation in practice in course development and provide a course design perspective on video presentation and management issues. Recent Video Use Trends In September of 2020 the enterprise video company Kaltura Inc. conducted its seventh annual State of Video in Education 2020 report. The report included responses from across the education system spectrum with higher education institutions making up 53% of all respondents (Figure 1.). This report described how remote teaching-driven course … Video Curation in Course Development
by · May 24, 2021

Sound Ideas for Course Design

Audio is a term we all understand on some level. Commonly we think of audio as the transmission, reception, or reproduction of sound. Audible sound is what we hear. So, when we consider audio as an element of course design we are thinking about how sound can be used to communicate or support learning in an online course environment. Integrating audio in course delivery can be quite powerful if done well. Perhaps the most common method of using sound in an asynchronous online course is via narrated lecture. The narrated lecture is typically a voice over a slide presentation or screencast. It can be an essential tool of instruction if designed effectively. Another way the voice of an instructor can … Sound Ideas for Course Design
by · August 3, 2020

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
by · May 25, 2020