DELTA staff collaborated with Lori Holcomb in the College of Education to revise the existing ECI 515 into a new Distance Education (DE) course, ECI 719: Web-Based Tools. The purpose of this course is to provide students with an overview of new media technology by working with various multimedia and web-based tools. This project was supported by an IDEA Grant.
Instructional Challenges
- Revise the course so that it introduces students to current web-based tools that could be useful when teaching. Specifically, have students focus on the use of more Web 2.0 tools
- Find ways to group students so that their existing skill and familiarity with web-based tools are a good fit with other group members
- Implement a constructivist teaching approach
- Create a public course website so that students can continue to be engaged with each other and with the course material after the semester
Solutions
Web Development:
A WordPress site with a customized theme, plugins and Google Analytics is used as the main course website. This helps students understand some of the power and opportunities provided by web-based solutions and gives them the option to continue visiting the course website after the semester. Weekly overviews give the students a structure to follow and keep them on task and engaged.
Skill Assessment:
A survey is administered at the beginning of the semester to determine the student’s skill level with technology. The results form a basis to determine cohort groups.
Resource Development:
Tutorials were created to aid retrieval of images from Flickr using Creative Commons. Checklists were also created to assist the team members and the instructor regarding what must be completed for the course to go live. Six asteroids with capability to display HTML content were created in Second Life so that students could practice and present.
Links
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