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Online Faculty Innovators: Deborah Griggs

Dynamic Presentations for SPCH 482

"Images and human voices are nonverbal elements that can make online classroom activities not only more conducive to the promotion of both verbal and nonverbal skills, but also richer in sensory impression."

— Deborah Griggs

Deborah Griggs, an undergraduate faculty member based in Germany, first became involved with teaching for UMUC-Europe in 1980, and she recently moderated a session of WebTycho Training. Ms. Griggs has been teaching SPCH 482 Intercultural Communication since 1998, and it was the first online course she taught for UMUC. The object created here will be used in the online version of the course in 2005.

What is the pedagogical value of adding audio and/or images into an online course activity?	audio \| transcript
How did you manage dealing with so many new technologies at once?	audio \| transcript
Why or why not would you use any of these technologies again?	audio \| transcript
Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently next time?	audio \| transcript
Are you satisfied with the outcome of your work?	audio \| transcript
Object Snapshot Click on the thumbnail below to connect to the course page containing links to the various presentation formats. Note: You will need to turn on your speakers and read the footnote on the page to ensure that you use the correct browser for viewing some of the presentations

Background

SPCH 482 Intercultural Communication is an upper-level undergraduate course that examines the major variables of communication in an intercultural context. It can fulfill the civic responsibility or international perspective requirement (see the course description and the common syllabus for more details). The main challenge Ms. Griggs, a faculty member at UMUC-Europe, faced with this class was how to create engaging online learning materials using technologies that appeal to the various preferences and needs of students.

Nature of the Project/Intended Outcome

Over the years, Deborah had developed several special topic mini-lectures on nonverbal communication for her SPCH 482 online course that were useful and that students seemed to particularly enjoy. Although the activities on architecture and color were naturals for image-enhanced, multipage HTML format, she was hesitant to take on a task that would add to her already-full workload and perhaps not turn out as she hoped. After viewing a colleague's work with documents and simultaneous audio snippets, Deborah decided to create an HTML image-enhanced version, and an audio/image slideshow version of a lecture as a way to:

Include images that support textual descriptions to enhance the effectiveness of the activity and be more useful to students who are better at analyzing visual information.
Make the activity more interactive for those who prefer a nonlinear approach to learning.
Better prepare students for an observation and analysis assignment related to the activity.
Offer a response to audio learning styles.
Provide images and explanations simultaneously to increase student understanding.

Programs/Applications Used

Development Time

Deborah was new to PowerPoint, Impatica, and sound files. Learning PowerPoint "took a while," she says, but went faster once she stopped using the program's templates and created her own slides from scratch. Impatica, however, had a low learning curve: just about 10 minutes to to understand the basics of "impaticizing" a PowerPoint presentation.

Taking into consideration that she had already developed the text lecture, Deborah estimates that the conversion to a multipage HTML activity took about 16 hours. She took digital photos on one day—knowing in advance what photos she wanted to take and having all the settings in her immediate vicinity—and created the activity on the second day.

Notes Deborah: "In order to do this in this amount of time, you'd have to have experience with creating and interlinking HTML pages; know how to format pages with tables; understand the most basic procedures for resizing images, preparing them for the web, and inserting them into pages; have a clear visualization of how the images fit the existing text, and have the appropriate images (or subjects) at hand.

"To create the first segment of the PowerPoint and Impatica slide shows, needed about a week—maybe four hours a day—mainly because I had to acquire and learn the software, acquire and/or test hardware and in general learn how to get the sound I desired out of my rudimentary, low-threshold equipment."

Deborah estimates that all the decision making involved with this project made the process take a week. Now that she knows what she's doing, she expects the next project to move much more quickly.

Support and Assistance

Deborah received information from a colleague on audio freeware and some support from colleagues in Germany who were more technically inclined than she. She admits to following through with all the work associated with this activity only because of inspiration from attending a multimedia workshop presented by Dr. Theo Stone, director of the Faculty Media Lab, at the CTL Summer Institute in 2004. Deborah notes that learning how to use Impatica was not nearly as difficult as she thought it would be and that the online user manual provided by the company, to which Theo directed her, is not all that necessary to use.

Lessons Learned

Reserve development of this kind of multi-version presentation for activities that are relatively "timeless" or that relate to a special area of interest, significant activities reflecting personal expertise or perspective that will not become stale or dated too quickly, or activities that are close to one's heart and therefore fun to create.
Work on one new media element at a time so that you do not get overwhelmed.
Find some colleagues and/or resource experts to complain to and/or get advice from when something doesn't work.
Impaticized PowerPoint with embedded WAV files is a fast and easy solution and creates an online presentation for which students need no software other than a current browser. PowerPoint with incorporated MP3 sound creates much better sound, but it demands that students have PowerPoint on their computers or download the free PowerPoint viewer and view the presentation in Explorer.
If at all possible, deliver an activity to students in more than one technology so that they can choose the format that'is most convenient to them and make their own decisions about the importance of sound quality. It's also a good idea to offer a PDF text/image version so that students can avoid online time and read the activity offline; this is particularly important for students, like those in Europe, who must pay each time they connect to the Internet.
Make it a goal to have fun during the process. It's much harder to complete a project like this, especially if you are technologically challenged, if you aren't enjoying what you're doing.
Create a text version of the presentation so that all students can access it. Since it's best to work from a script when recording audio, there's no lengthy extra work involved in creating a text-only version.