Providing inspiration for your online courses
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.
There is an exciting new feature in Blackboard which will help instructors provide more detailed feedback in less time. This is the rubrics feature. What are they? Rubrics are tables of assessment. Blackboard uses the most common layout, which has columns of proficiency with the greatest levels of achievement on the right moving down to the lowest levels on the left. The rows indicate what is being measured. For example, a piece of writing may be assessed on measures of grammar, structure, clarity, formatting, and citations. Points are attached to each aspect being assessed, with the highest possible points in the right column. Different aspects can have different values. For example, perhaps the focus of this assignment was proper citations, … Rubrics
Digital timelines are a great way to display a series of events in your online course. They can be used to capture historical events or a series of steps that occur in specific order, for example, a lab activity. TimelineJS is an easy to use online tool that allows you to create a timeline by pulling in various types of online media such as video, images, and maps from easy to integrate sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, and SoundCloud. The magic happens in a Google spreadsheet and it is as simple as inserting dates, links, and text into the appropriate columns. If you are interested in having Ecampus create a timeline for you … Digital Timelines
For every concept you want to convey, there is a scale of understanding (from those who’ve never heard of it, to those who have PhDs in it). In many cases, those who really understand something well have trouble putting themselves into the shoes of others who are just setting out to learn it. This is why it is often hard to give a stranger directions when they don’t know the local streets or landmarks. The key to good explanation is: empathizing with your audience. In May, I had the pleasure of seeing Lee LeFever speak at WebVisions 2013 in Portland, Oregon. His session, “The Art of Explanation,” was about crafting explanations in video form and it delivered my favorite takeaways … Building explanations for your online courses
Have you ever wished you could record whatever you are doing on your screen while narrating? Well, doing so is becoming easier every day. Screencasting means recording your screen, or an area of your screen, along with a recording of your voice. Screencasting has become insanely easy because of new online tools. You don’t need to download any software or deal with any files. Your recordings are saved on the internet, so links are the way you share your screencasts. When would you use a screencast? The most common use is to demonstrate how to use a website or piece of software. You can also open up a free online drawing tool and sketch something to demonstrate a concept as … Screencasting Made Easy
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