Online Course Design

As the resident online learning expert of my team I’ve been asked to create an intake form/document with essential questions to ask clients when they approach us to design an online course.  Looking through my books and internet resources I did not find any comprehensive form or guide to fit our needs. So I went about creating one on my own and then receiving additional input from two of my teammates.  The resulting document is here for you to use and adapt for your own needs.

You’ll notice that the information we seek is both nominative and design related.  We separated them in to categories so that clients could see the overall logic of our questions.  There are also practical questions relating to ownership, timeline(s) and roles/responsibilities.

One important thing we learned in the process of working with a recent client is to give them this document to peruse ahead of time, otherwise it is overwhelming to answer all of them in an intake interview.  We also let the client know that we didn’t need answers to everything right away since it is a process and development of a course takes time.

I’m sure this document will change with practice over time and if you’re involved with online course design I welcome your comments on it.

Gifs in a Jiffy

To support an upcoming streaming event I needed to create a gif. (Let’s not digress into a debate on how to pronounce gif.)  Denver Public Schools has a commitment box that is made available at all large culture-building events.  Since this upcoming event will be solely online I came up with an idea to make a virtual commitment box to interact with.

First, I needed to create a gif showing someone dropping a commitment card into the box.  I searched for gif creators that could do the job for free and with the least amount of hassle.  I tried giphy.com, Imgflip and gifmaker.me  with the latter winning out for ease of use.  I shot a four photo sequence of my coworker, Anna, dropping a commitment card into the box.  When I uploaded the images to gifmaker.me the interface was intuitive and simple.   Although all I had to do was upload and reorder the images, there were multiple choices available to me: resizing, animation speed, repeats, and even the option to add music. In about a minute total working time, I had my gif downloaded.

My next task was to create the Google form and add it to the top.  Google forms is becoming more and more open to customization.  I chose a blank form, changed the color to match the card Anna holds in the animation and then uploaded the gif to the description area of the form.  You can take a look at the finished product here:

I think this is going to work out pretty well for the event.  What do you think?  What is your favorite gif maker?

Cool Quiz Feature in Google Forms

Recently I had a request to create a check for understanding quiz at the end of a screencast.  Leveraging my updated Camtasia software with interactive hotspots, I was able to add a link to a Google form.  I chose Google forms to ease the access and share reporting with a group of people who would need to see the data.

This was my first time using the quiz features in Google forms and I found the process to be fairly straightforward and intuitive to setup. After opening a form and creating some questions.  Click on the gear icon (settings) to bring up this menu.  Choose Quizzes and toggle the swtich to “make this a quiz”

Full instructions are here.

Here are some tips from my experience:

• Don’t forget, after creating your form/quiz to share it with the “send” button, rather than your editing link.
• Always let users see if they were correct or not.
• Add some language to the bottom of the form such as “After submitting, click on ‘view your accuracy/score’ to see how you performed.”
• Even if tallying points isn’t crucial to your quiz, add points anyway to give people an idea of how well they performed and it adds a dimension of gamification.
• Consider giving detailed feedback when someone answers incorrectly.

Are you using Google forms for quizzes/checks for understanding?  I’d love to hear your examples too.

Flavors of Online Learning

Wow, another week, another screencast.  I think I”m on a roll with these as another way for me to share resources. Watch for more in upcoming weeks.  This one is short (7 minutes). It is my attempt to explain the categories of online learning which come in many varieties…or flavors.  Here is the video:

Two of the links referred to in the screencast are already here in my blog.  The other is: The Tangled Web of Online Learning.

Since there are few printed words in my screencast video I thought it might be helpful for some to see my outline and show you how I organized the categories.  Here is the outline for my presentation:

Online Learning Flavors
Formal
Online Courses-  LMSs with Modules, MOOCS, Digital Badging (aka micro-credentialing)
Courses can be 100% online, blended/hybrid mix, or web-enhanced
Elements-tracking, assessments, certificates/grades/credit

Informal
Google Forms, Google Slides, websites, blogs
Google Docs don’t need staples 🙂  Collaborations!
Online Learning Communities
PLNs
Social Media-FB, Twitter, Scoop It, Google +

Somewhere in between formal and informal
Personalized Learning
Lynda
Customized-letting learners choose material but have a common assessment

Synchronous
Webinars
Chats
Conference Calls
Live Streaming

Asynchronous
Discussion Boards
Screencasts
Self-paced courses/modules
Podcasts
Online Resources-wikis, collaborative docs

As always, I welcome your comments and sharing.