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Demonstration: New Online Teaching Strategies: Bringing Theory to Life for More Effective Learning (Robert Brown, Nora Reynolds, Scott Brewster)

  • Production office that creates online materials (learning objects), collaborating with faculty
    • Whole staff that develops these learning objects
    • Some students in the office, tell what’s dull and what’s not
    • Want faculty to stay on top of content; this office stays on top of technology (too much for faculty to have to do both)
  • Game designed to let people tweak numbers and see how data changes. (demo)
  • Also develop games that are whole courses
  • Looking for ways to add essay grading
  • Software
    • Flash, ALEX tool, java, Maya animations
    • Take Flash, export to html, create page, open within Blackboard
    • Use LDAP authentication to track how students are doing
      • Looks seamless to students, they don’t even know they’re not in Blackboard
      • Can look and see where each student clicks, where lags are
      • Faculty can supplement with podcasts to help with concepts folks are having a hard time with
  • Core design:
    • Deliberate practice, feedback, teacher
    • Manipulation, text, visual, audio, practice, immediate feedback, 3 or 4 ways to learn the same concept
      • Combinations at the same point in the session (text with optional audio annotation, etc)
    • Exercises to be done in one sitting: pretest, exercise, post-test
      • Autonomy, if they score well on first test, they know they don’t need to complete that unit
    • Software can remember what student misses, if a later topic requires previous information but the student has missed it, they are prompted to learn that information again
    • Using real-world examples
    • Supplementary video to complement learning object
    • Consistent symbols: same symbol for sound across the pages
  • Easy to see the application of games in courses that deal with practical applications (math, economics, etc)
    • Harder to see application in theory
    • Virtual Philosopher: discusses topic, asks what you think and gives option, students choose one (branching tree), and the prof. follows up on their answer
      • Faculty who is doing this says it’s even more effective than lecturing to a group of 70 students; 100% participation
  • Faculty presence
    • Students want “high touch” faculty interaction
    • Students have to apply theory to advance in game
      • If not applied correctly, sent back to learn again
    • In moment where come up with some question in game, can IM LO staff to get help at the moment of need
    • Games fill up as soon as they post
  • My notes:
    • Smooth corners, nice graphics/text/LO combinations, very professional look and feel
    • I really like how they talk about “play and manipulate” in this presentation. They don’t necessarily mean this in the traditional “game” sense, but just in interacting with the data.
    • The course pages feel like blogs, with the center column & sidebars
    • There’s a woman on the front row with a NEW looking iPod and microphone hooked up to it. She’s not taking notes madly on a laptop the way that I am. I’m completely jealous.
    • Amazing session, I am totally inspired.