Inspire Blog Category: Multimedia

Narrated Lecture Design: Five Guiding Multimedia Principles

The use of PowerPoint and other similar presentation software, as a visual foundation for recorded narrated lectures for use in online courses is pretty common. These slide-based presentations typically present a series of individual slides that contain titles, visuals, and descriptive text or lists of bullet points with an accompanying voice-over recording. Using this approach to online content presentation seems familiar as it is a technology enabled extension of the traditional slide-based presentations instructors have used in a live classroom lecture. But narrated lecture for online presentation has some structural differences. Whether transitioning a classroom lecture, or creating a new narrated lecture for online use, instructors at Ecampus are also encouraged to rethink their slide-based presentations. The recommendation is to … Narrated Lecture Design: Five Guiding Multimedia Principles
by · December 3, 2019

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
by · September 23, 2019

Games as a Model for Motivation and Engagement, Part 2

Narrative and World-Building For this post, I will focus on two simple strategies you can use to improve motivation and engagement in your online course, narrative and world building. These terms are used frequently in games, as well as in literature, film and other domains. They are a powerful tool, easily applied to your existing course material or as you develop new content. If you want some background about where my thinking is coming from, check out my last blog post, Games as a Model for Motivation and Engagement, Part 1, where I take a deeper dive into gaming and Self-Determination Theory. I would also recommend a post by Dr. Meghan Naxer, Self-Determination Theory and Online Education: A Primer. There … Games as a Model for Motivation and Engagement, Part 2
by · September 16, 2019

Before Recording Narrated Slides: #1 Copyright

Curious what an Ecampus Instructional Designer is looking for when they approve slides for narrated lectures?  It certainly depends on the course content. Generally, the top three things I am looking at are copyright, accessibility, and aesthetics. For this post, I am going to focus on copyright and I will return to the other topics in a future post.  A copy of the slides, which includes links to helpful materials, is available below the video as well as a list of resources. https://youtu.be/49DNaOW82Ho Slides: Copyright Considerations for Narrated Slides Resources: Creative Commons Search (may require attribution) Flaticon (requires attribution) Freepik (requires attribution) Unsplash (does not require attribution)
by · June 5, 2019