Ecampus Course Development and Training

This storyline project was created for CS 325 on General Recurrence. Katie Hughes the developer has this to say bout her experience:

While this is a seemingly simple project, I really consider it the turning point in my Storyline experience. On one slide, the instructor wanted the student to input a text response, and if that response contained a certain word it would be considered correct. Storyline has nothing supported that does any sort of text comparisons, so this is the project I learned how to integrate JavaScript. Learning JavaScript and how it works in Storyline really opened up a lot of options for other projects after this one. Also, this series of CS 325 lectures is really the first one where I began using a consistent layout for each Storyline project.

Click here, If you would like to experience the storyline yourself.

Interested in scientific visualizations? Read on to learn how we tackle them.
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This animation shows where (and when) a certain kind of plant grows its buds for flowers and new stalks, over the course of several years.

This animation was mocked up, tweaked, discussed, and completed within roughly three weeks.

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Digital portfolios can be interactive, meaningful, and engaging assignments in online courses. According to Ecampus Instructional Designer Jonan Donaldson, “Well-designed learning environments organized around published digital portfolios can increase not only academic achievement but also intrinsic motivation, student autonomy, collaborative learning, and digital literacies.”

Read more about digital portfolios in Jonan’s article for Educause, Digital Portfolios in the Age of the Read/Write Web.

You or your students might encounter a bug when playing Adobe Presenter lectures where the audio track will not produce any sound or “No Audio” will be displayed. Try re-installing flash and playing the lecture again, if that does not prove success then try this workaround:

Open up a youtube video on a new window.
Play the youtube video.
Now reload the Adobe Presenter lecture, audio should now be playing.
You can now close the youtube window.

Chrome is not a supported blackboard browser, you might encounter flash interactives not being displayed correctly for the student using Chrome.

Courses that use audio in assessments should not be using Chrome, as the audio player will not display correctly.

Please recommend Firefox if your course contains any flash.

In building online courses, we try to create three forms of interaction on a regular basis throughout each class:

Student-Content, where the interaction is as active as possible for the student;
Student-Instructor, where the students have a chance to ask instructors questions, engage in facilitated discussions, and receive feedback from their instructors on assignments;
Student-Student, where students have an opportunity to communicate with peers and learn in the framework of a learning community.

Sometimes these interactions are formal and graded, such as graded class discussions, group projects, or multimedia presentations. Other times, though, we want a more informal means of generating these three forms of interaction.

Wallwisher is a free online tool that can be used for this purpose. Wallwisher is a simple website that allows participants to visit and post quick, virtual sticky-notes that include text or links to audio or video content. Wallwisher is easy for instructors to set up and easy for students to use.

Here’s a Sample Wallwisher page we set up for you to try. This page asks students to quickly note which concepts they’ve found most difficult so far during the course of a term. An instructor might use this tool to gather opinions, gauge assumptions, check comprehension, or to help students prepare for an exam.

Looking for ways to make your online class more interactive? Wondering what your students are thinking about a certain topic in your class? Wondering if your students are struggling?

Surveys are helpful tools to help us meet these needs in online classes. Google Docs offers a free survey tool, Google Forms, which you can use in your online class by following a few simple steps:

1. Go to your Google Docs account.

2. Create a Form.

3. Choose a Theme.

4. Write your questions.

5. Share a link to the live form.

6. Collect your responses in one convenient location, your Google Form spreadsheet.

Click the image above to watch a brief video that explains how Google Forms can work in your class.

Did you know that the OSU Library offers Course Guides? Course Guides are webpages that the librarians can help to create for your class. Then Ecampus can place these webpages in your Blackboard class.

Course Guides are a great way to …

Guide research projects
Put students in touch with the library and library staff
Guide students beyond Google and Wikipedia
Focus your students on specific journals or even on specific articles
Provide plagiarism prevention information
Provide citation formatting information
And more …

Visit the library course guide webpage to browse through course guides from courses in almost every discipline. To start setting up a Course Guide for your class, please contact Stefanie Buck (stefanie.buck@oregonstate.edu) or your subject’s librarian.

Are you searching for a way that students could post a presentation to you or your class online? One option might be Zoho Notebook. This online program allows you to easily create content and collaborate with others using a familiar notebook-like interface. Combine text, images, audio, video, or live web-content in one place. Other uses of Zoho Notebook include using it as a location to aggregate research for a project or as a device for you to create and tell a story using a variety of multimedia resources.

Check out this short tutorial for more information about how to get started using Zoho Notebook.

Providing inspiration for your online class

Articulate Storyline – General Recurrence

Molecular Maya Toolkit – a powerful visualization add-on for Autodesk Maya

Hort349 – Plant Growth Animation

Digital Portfolios

Adobe Presenter and Macs

Chrome and Flash

Wallwisher

Google Docs — Forms

Library Course Guides

Zoho Notebook

Contact Info