Faculty Support / My New Laptop

Well I must say I had a revealing time purchasing a new laptop this weekend. I had already picked out my laptop, and while it is not a Ferrari in terms of processing speed and power, it certainly is a Honda Civic, or Honda Accord, or Chevy Impala in terms of robustness and reliability.

I wanted to purchase this particular model, but I suppose that it is such a big thing about the new puma chip, that the young gentleman did not want to sell it to me. He wanted to sell me a computer, that although faster would not have met my needs the way my new laptop does.

I want to do a lot of things with this Computer, of course surf the web, and office productivity. I also want to have fun on it, work on cool designs in photoshop, lay out pages in coldfusion, do ID movies in captivate, and do a little bit of light video work.

This young man tried to sell me a Tablet. I didn't need a tablet, and I did not want to purchase one just because it had a dual core 2.20 ghz processor, as opposed to my 1.86 processor.

WHY? because there are some things on this laptop that I wanted, and needed, which precluded me getting what may have been a Ferrari, and I instead chose a slower machine with a better balance of features, like a bigger hard drive, 32 bit os, (so I can run older software), the dedicated graphics card, etc.

What does this have to do with faculty support? Quite simply, I hope that I am not like that salesman, that AMD fan boy that tries to encourage people to do things that are "faster, better, and cooler," even though they might not need "faster, better, or cooler". They may need "reliable, robust, and time tested".

I know that we all have our things that we are huge fans of, and there is a fine line between pushing our own Instructional Design agenda, or preference to work with cool new tools for faculty, when sometimes, what they may need is that pared down, simpler solution, which still has punch, and still works very nicely for them.

This is just something for any Instructional Designer, or anyone who does technical work with faculty to think about.

Instructional Design Gal, back again. I'm currently working on a project which will bring the base level of WebCT training online, in a multimedia format that faculty can use. I'm using a variety of adult learning theories to develop the course, including behaviorist theories, where I try to get the faculty to ascertain the important objectives for each learning unit that is presented in the online course, and cognitive learning theories, where I relate these concepts to things they already know, reading a book, finding your way in a new city, relating things to stories and themes that make sense in their world.

I'm using a variety of tools to create this eleven module course in the Basics of using WebCT to supplement a course online:

• Hand coded HTML pages with Javascript includes, that present key information not otherwise highlighted in the PDF manual
• Adobe Captivate movies that illustrate key tasks
• WebCT's testing function.

I am finding it helpful to work on the project using the following processes

1. Script what I normally say in the face to face workshop in Microsoft Word
2. Create rough storyboards for various chunks of text using Microsoft PowerPoint
3. Go into the lab and record the voice overs
4. Edit and Animate in Captivate
5. Tweak in flash

I really hope this tool assists the faculty, so that they will not have to wait for the next face-to-face workshop offering if they wish to develop a course, or if the WebCT basics class that they wish to take is full. Further the movies will be there for their review, long after the online workshop is over, and because of the chunking of the content, these movies can be re-purposed for other uses.

Microsoft Word: A Swiss Army Knife for Professors

Microsoft Word is a Swift Army knife for professors. They use it to compose tests. They use it to grade e-papers, marking them up with track changes. They use it to compose textbooks, and draft email to colleagues.

Thus, it is little wonder that word becomes a tool that faculty are most comfortable with. This comfort level is so great, that when they are challenged with developing pages for a Course Management System, like Blackboard or WebCT, it is the software application that they gravitate to.

Nevermind that word produces dirty code that is not congruent with usability, or good mark up standards. Never you mind that a WebPage created in Word will take the first few sentences of the document which are normally rambling introductory statements, and make them the "title" of the page unless a user explicitly defines a title.

Word is what they know.

And since Word is what they know, it only makes sense to give them some tips to make working with Word, and a popular Course Management System like WebCT, or Blackboard a little "easier", or "better", and make that swiss army knife a little more efficient.

In the next few days, I will post a few tips to make your life developing e-learning content in Microsoft Word less of a hassle.