Teaching frequently involves demonstrating skills or sharing information with learners. Whether it is in the face-to-face or virtual classroom student routinely ask the "How do I....?" question. Many students are very visual learners who respond more fully to instructions that are visually compelling, while others are auditory learners who can hear an instruction once and have committed the content to memory. Therefore, content or instructions that can be combined in a multimedia way has the best chance of appealing to a wide range of learners.

When it comes to computer-based learning, there are a number of screen capture tools that instructors can use to rapidly create multimedia instructions that can easily be shared with colleagues or students. Some of these tools, such as SnagIt capture static image of the computer screen that can then be used to augment textual information. Other tools use video-capture of an ongoing computer task, such as showing students how to access an online journal article in the library database, so that the instruction is a 2-3 minute real-time instruction that includes the full demonstration of the multiple steps it takes to complete a task that is augmented by audio comments from the instructor completing the task. Most would agree that if many task-related questions could be answered with a clear, concise multimedia demonstration, that could be created once but used many times, that this would be very helpful to learners.

Jing is an example of a free tool that can provide these types of compelling instructions. Jing can be used to show students how to navigate online courses, to show colleagues how to use new features of a new piece of software, or any other short (less than 5 minutes) video capture from a webcam or other source. Here is an example of using Jing to capture my computer screen as I showed students how to set-up an RSS-feed. These videos can also be embedded in online courses or other webpages like this:



If you want to give Jing a try you can download it or watch the Overview Video on Jing homepage see if it is something you want to try.

Tim

Research Team- Technology Focus

Research Team with a Technology Focus

Several multi-disciplinary research teams were launched last fall in order to promote collaborate research and increase the research activities available to RHCHP faculty. The focus of the teams varied but addressed themes such as delivery methods, learning methods and the use of technology to achieve learning outcomes.

All teams are well on their way and are in various stages of the research process. The Technology Research Team comprised of Barbara Berg, Deb Bennett-Woods, Margaret Mulhall, Kathleen Whalen, Nicole Marcisz, Traci Snedden, Lisa Zenoni, Karen LeDuc and Lora Claywell is chaired by Sheila Carlon with Tim Noteboom as the research consultant.

The team sought to replicate a previous study conducted on business students in an online environment that surveyed the student’s perceptions of “presence” in online classes. Using the Community Of Inquiry instrument first used by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) the survey measures students perceptions of teaching, cognitive and social presence since learning occurs as a function of the interaction of these three elements within a community of students and faculty.

Our team also sought to validate the instrument on students enrolled in health professions programs since the instrument was previously tested on business students. We also wanted to see if there were any statistically significant differences between these two samples. Since our sample included students from three academic programs – Physical Therapy, Nursing and HSA, we were also interested in any differences between these student populations and their perceptions of these three constructs. Initially we also thought there might be differences in their perceptions simple due to their differences in ages (our students were older than the business students in the earlier study) and because we had a significant number of graduate students in our population.

The tests used were the same as in the original study (factor analysis, factor analysis with oblimin rotation, Eigen values were obtained) and a scree plot was analyzed for comparison to the original study.

While the results have not been analyzed in detail, there were not too many differences. We did, however, validate the instrument on the health care discipline students even though the original study’s factor analysis loaded into the three dimensions a little differently than ours did. Two questions from our study loaded into different presence factors than the original study.

We will disseminate these results after more analysis and hope to use the results to inform future course design around the areas of “presence” in the online classes. This study has also been accepted for an E-Poster presentation at the Madison Conference for Online Teaching and Learning in August of this year.


Dr. Sheila Carlon

Change!

Are you one of those people that always know when the weather is going to change before anyone else does? Does the time change in the fall and spring throw you off? You may be a person that is sensitive to change or just a person that needs time to process change. Whatever your comfort zone is, change can be difficult for everyone. Technology seems to be moving at the speed of light and it is hard to believe that the World Wide Web has been in existence for less than 20 years. A recent article by Curtis Bonk, Overcoming the technology resistance movement (2010) discusses 10 ideas to help overcome the resistance to change related to technology. The majority of ideas presented are focused on internal support and are common to any organizational change. Change is sometimes best accomplished in “baby steps” as Bill Murray states repeatedly in the movie What about Bob? The Education and Technology Committee wants to become a clearinghouse of ideas about supporting all faculty in learning more and becoming more comfortable with technology. What are some of your ideas to help overcome resistance or sometimes fear of technology? Feel free to add a comment to this blog post to share your thoughts.

Here are our top ideas:

1. Take advantage of Faculty Development Sessions. Learn something new or brush-up on developing skills and techniques.
2. Don’t ignore change or sweep it under the rug, PLAN for it. Set aside time on your calendar to learn a little bit at a time.
3. Stay abreast of news and developments in technology. Subscribe to a blog or technology based news source.
4. If you are using a technology tool and you are comfortable with it, share your best practices and experiences with others to make it easy for them to ‘make a change.’
5. When you need just in time support for a technology or tool check out http://rhchp.regis.edu/facultyresourcesite/home.html AND http://rhchp.regis.edu/DE/tutorials/faculty/index.html
6. Perhaps, find something you are passionate about and see if you can add that to the changes that are occurring.
   
7. Don’t fear change – embrace it! Ask questions of a mentor that you trust who will meet you where you are at in your learning curve.
   
   

Barb Cheuvront & Nicole Marcisz

2010 Goals!

The Educational Technology Committee asks: What are your 2010 goals?

The new year is off and running. This month we would like to ask: What are your 2010 goals? Is there a course that you want to revise? Is there a new teaching strategy that you’d like to implement? Maybe there is a new technology tool you’d like to learn and incorporate into your courses?

Here are a few more ideas you might want to consider:

* Start a podcast series
* Create a delicious resource site for your course
* Record a narrated PowerPoint for a tricky concept in your course
* Design a tutorial for a complicated procedure in your course
* Learn how to use Dreamweaver and brush up on your HTML skills
* Incorporate a wiki with your course
* Start your very own blog on a topic or specialty that you are passionate about
* Learn how to use an RSS aggregator


The good news is that for any of your technology related goals The Ed Tech Committee will be featuring a series of faculty development sessions this year on the topics listed above and more!


Whatever your 2010 goals may be, we wish you much success in achievement and we hope we can assist you. Please add a comment to this blog post and share some of your goals.

Quick resources for creating better presentations

One of the appealing things about using Powerpoint presentations is also one of the biggest negatives: it is very easy to create basic slides that consist of a title and list of bulletted content. Unfortunately, this approach is part of the problem as text-heavy slides tend to put audiences into a sleep-inducing trance. These basic slides are just one example of how NOT to create presentations, which is captured in a very funny way by this video.

However, there are many ways to improve your Powerpoint slide making skills. I think of this improvement as a combination of conceptually changing how you think about the delivery of content and ideas in a presentation along with necessary steps you need to know within the Powerpoint (or other presentation software such as Keynote and others) program to implement these concepts.

There are a number of bloggers who regularly discuss presentation design. Garr Reynold's Zen Presentation blog is a good one to read along with his book by the same name. Here is a brief 7-minvideo overview of key design concepts he promotes:



I have found his key principles very helpful in changing how I approach my presentations. I now tend to minimize the amount to text, use simple images to convey meaning, and use key points and repetition to try optimize learning.

Next time I will share resources related to the mechanics of using Powerpoint to achieve your goals.

Tim

Finding & Sharing Presentations

As mentioned previously there are a number of specific search engines that can help you find Powerpoint presentations that may be available online. In addition to these search engines you may also want to access two social media sites Scribd.com and SlideShare.com. Both are free sites and allow full searching of their online content, but once you register you can also use the site as a virtual site to store and share your presentations. For example, I set up a site Regis University School of Physical Therapy that now contains several research posters and slide presentations from our student research night from last spring. Each uploaded item can then be shared with others via a link. In addition, each item can have specific permissions associated with it such as view only or downloadable, which gives users control over how their content is viewed or used.

Another nice feature of these sites is that they provide a number of ways in which you can share presentations with others. One way is to embed the presentation into a blog or web page. These embedded presentations can then be viewed on that site, shareed with others, or even taken and re-embedded on your own site or as a Facebook post. For example, here is an embedded presentation that I sent to my family yesterday that given some context to the earthquake in Haiti (just use the controls below the image to go forward or backward in the presentation:

Haiti Earthquake 12 January 2010

View more presentations from kevinrchapman.

I hope you take some time to explore these sites for content that may help your students and you. Feel free to reply to this post with some favorites.

Tim

5 PowerPoint Search Engines To Seek Out Publicly Available Presentations

5 PowerPoint Search Engines To Seek Out Publicly Available Presentations

This link gives a very nice overview on how to use presentation-specific search engines to find Powerpoint files on the web. Also, did you know that using the Advance Search link on Google search page you can limit your searches to specific file extensions, such as the .ppt file extenstion for Powerpoint files?

While you may not find the perfect presentation for your first day of class next week (if only it were that easy), you may find helpful content or even design ideas from existing presentations.

Next time I will share two sites that are not only helpful in searching for presentations, but are also site where you can upload your existing presentations for the world to see.


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Education and Powerpoint Presentations

For better or worse, the use of Powerpoint presentations remains one of the most common content delivery mechanisms in education. Walk down the halls outside lecture halls at Regis and it is likely that a computer connected to an LCD projector is showing some variation of text from a Powerpoint presentation. While the use of Powerpoint and other presentation graphics software remains high, there are many who feel that Powerpoint contributes to poor presentations or worse.

Over the next several weeks we will be posting some resources that highlight the need for better presentation design, ways in which to improve presentations using Powerpoint and alternative software/websites, and how to perhaps move beyond Powerpoint as the cornerstone of content delivery.

Tomorrow we will start of the series by showing where to find existing presentations that may be living on web ready to be seen and even edited by faculty and students.