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How do you embed presentation and quiz material made in eLearning authoring tools like Articulate, Wimba, Captivate, iSpring, etc. into Moodle?
How does the SCORM format work?
How can you integrate it all with your Moodle gradebook?
Using Articulate Storyline as the example authoring tool, this tutorial shows you how to tackle all of these challenges:
Hope this helps - and don't forget the full menu of Moodle tutorials on the blog here.
;-D
This is an interesting little activity to try out if you are an educator involved in eLearning design.
Grab a piece of paper and pen (or a new browser) and jot down what you believe are your top 10 eLearning design principles. These should be the beliefs and goals that drive your eLearning design process and eventual implementation.
Got 10?
Great. Now watch the video below and note down the 10 eLearning principles presented:
This video was made by Kineo, a pretty amazing eLearning solutions provider with a very impressive list of large corporate clients who appear to be more than happy with Kineo's services.
So how do Kineo's eLearning Design Principles compare with yours?
Anything you and Kineo have in common?
How might you explain the differences? For example, to what extent could context, audience, teachers and budgets play a role?
I'd be interested to read what you come up with!
;-D
Getting a course started in Moodle requires content and design, of course, but it helps to have a nice title/image header right there at the top of the page. This creates a clear professional feel for the course right from the outset.
You can create nice course headers in a variety of ways, but using the text editing and image insert tools available in Moodle probably isn't one of the best ways to get a nice looking result. The method demonstrated here involves creating it in MS Word first, generating a JPEG image, and then inserting it into your course header.
Check out more Moodle Tutorials from English Raven here.
;-D
Being interested in all things edtech, I (like many of you out there) have been following the developments associated with Khan Academy for a while now.
I tried out the maths program on Khan myself this morning, and was really impressed with it. Then I considered some of the criticisms I have seen circulating around the Blogosphere, alongside what I can only term a rigid reluctance to even consider the model from a maths-teaching colleague, and contemplated the very tricky issue of context.
When it comes to context, this -- apparently -- is where Khan and any other online automated instructional model appears to fall down. To that we might add the idea of applied, in that numeracy and other major skills like literacy need to work in the real world and be applied to real life problems or situations for them to incorporate any sort of legitimacy.
I agree. Numeracy and literacy skills need to be contextualised and applied.
But I don't agree that this makes programs like Khan Academy illegitimate. For a variety of reasons.
For one, who decides when, where and how skills are contextualised and applied in the real world? Do we need a context before we can contemplate a problem and learn the necessary skills and processes to handle it? Or can we build certain skills and bring them to bear on the situations as they arise?
If you're telling me that, via our traditional education models with a teacher-fronted classroom and workbooks, context is automatically guaranteed then I would claim you are deluding yourself. Quite clearly, learners are often building numeracy and literacy sub-skills in school well before they ever need to use them for practical purposes. The assumption often is that learners need certain skills before they can be applied to broader real-life problems.
Based on that argument, something like Khan is just as legitimate as any school-based learning program, and possibly more so given that learners can progress through their skill building at their own pace, in more places than a classroom, with efficient application of time based on their individual needs.
Okay, so even if this is the case we still need teachers to facilitate context-rich situations in order to help learners apply the skills for real. Right?
To some degree, yes.
As I've already alluded to, not all teachers actually do this, and not all the time. Many teachers are just as good at presenting a theory and calculation on the whiteboard and having learners practice it with a series of completely decontextualised problems as Khan is.
However, I think that the assumption that many learners can't independently learn how to pick and choose from available skills to apply to given contexts and problems as they present themselves is an erroneous one. Research such as Piaget's would appear to suggest that, through processes like assimilation and adaptation, we appear to be pretty well hard-wired to instinctively pick and choose from available skills and experiment with them to see what eventually gets us the result we are looking for.
Not all learners, of course. And those are the learners who would benefit most from having a teacher, someone who can scaffold, help facilitate (or at least illustrate) the contexts and highlight the skills we need to deal with them. Environments are everything. Some learners learn how to negotiate them very well on their own faster than others, while certain students will need very targeted individualised help for quite a lot of the overall distance.
Personally I believe applications like the Khan model and innovative classroom-based teaching and learning both have their merits. Used together, they could be pretty darned powerful in reaching different kinds of learners based on their individual points of need.
To say something like Khan is a perfect solution that renders classroom-based teachers redundant is obviously a pretty sweeping call, and I don't agree with it.
But to write it off as being ineffective because it doesn't apply specific and individualised context before, during and after discreet skill-building is also full of rather risky assumptions.
Perhaps, as teachers, we should hold off on instinctively taking Khan Academy out of context, and think about when, where, how (and for whom) we could be putting it into context.
;-D
Okay, so there are definitely more than 10 things to be considered in instructional design, and not all of them are limited to just the digital mode, but for what it's worth here is what I consider to be a short list of some of the more important things you might like to think about...
1. Consider the potential of downloadable lesson 'kits' rather than lessons spread across web pages. The Internet and LMSs don't always work as well as they should, but material that can be stored in a hard drive is only at risk in the case of power blackouts.
2. Master PDF creation and formatting for accessibility, presentation, control, interactive features and consider the merits of the 'one page' lesson - everything on or linking out from a central screen of tasks, all of which are visible from the one interface.
3. Get colourful: you're not paying for print outs or photocopies, and going with plain white space and black text is like sticking a tradtional printed workbook onto the front of a monitor. You can bring life and vibrancy to your digital material in ways you never could when limited to ink marks on slivers of tree.
4. Include relevant course details to help with audit situations but also out of basic respect for your learners in letting them know how lesson activities link directly to their course requirements. It's nice to know what you are doing is relevant to your course aims, who made the material, when, and why.
5. Think about layout and organisation, use of sections and colouring, alignment. Sloppy or amateurish-looking formatting can create a similar impression of our teaching quality. It needs to look and feel professional, but also needs to be organised for accessibility and quick guidance.
6. Nothing beats video for engaging input. But like any other content, there is good/effective video and there is poor video. Use it as much as you can, but take the time to source excellent and appropriate content.
7. Think about the tasks you are including, how you are presenting them, and whether the sequence allows learners to engage with them according to their own preferences.
8. Apply both consistency and variety in both presentation and task types. Rhythm and routine help to make learners feel safe and comfortable, but there needs to be 'freshness' (and fresh challenges) with each lesson.
9. Whenever and however possible, try to faciliate personalisation and specialisation so that lesson material can target or incorporate individual learners' specific interests, occupations, backgrounds, etc.
10. Facilitate cumulative skill and knowledge building. A skill in lesson 3 should help the learners do a task in lesson 5, for example. What the learners know based on lesson 4 could help the learners extend their knowledge in lesson 6.
The video tutorial below demonstrates all 10 of these tips or principles in action with actual materials that were recently developed for a course unit on sustainable work practices:
Feel free to agree/disagree or add/subtract to the list!
If you're looking for more design tips and demonstrations, you might like to also check out the materials design masterclass series I made for people looking to develop their MS Word and PDF application skills, and/or the extensive list of Moodle tutorials I've put together here on the blog.
Happy designing!
;-D
Just in case you weren't already aware of it, there are some pretty nifty tools available in Moodle (via Wimba) that allow you to draw on real voices rather than just text-based activities. Two of these are Voice Boards and Voice Emails.
The first tutorial below demonstrates how to set up and use Voice Boards in your Moodle courses:
And for something with more in the way of privacy and 1-1 options, you might like to also check out the Voice Email tool:
For more Moodle tutorials from English Raven, check out the entire list here!
;-D
PDF is a great way to secure your documents, but -- if you have Adobe Acrobat -- there are also a number of ways you can make your materials more interactive and adaptable in PDF format. In turn, this makes PDF a far more versatile format for learning resources to be uploaded into LMS set ups like Moodle - where they can become stand-alone assignments to be downloaded and completed without needing access to the web.
The tutorial below demonstrates how to embed text form fields into your PDF document so that learners can submit answers to questions:
You might also like to look at embedding audio help files into your PDF resource so that learners cna get additional instructions, tips or advice on how to do something:
I've also demonstrated in the past how to do this audio file embedding with materials for younger learners as well (and as part of generating a resource that might be presented for the class on a beam projector, for example):
Hope these give you some ideas on how to go those extra yards with your PDF documents to help make them more multi-modal resources with more chances of teaching/learning interaction.
;-)
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