UMUC

Center for Teaching and Learning

Online Faculty Innovators: Stella Porto

Transcript:

Why were multimedia objects a good solution for you?

This course is very technical and it has some math. And even students that have an IT background, they have some difficulties in connecting to abstract concepts and some of the math. And the visuals do help—actually, some of the visuals are not really concepts; they're just showing, "how do I go through the full exercise," and they see all the steps. I have taught this course face-to-face as well, and I found that some of the things—some of the things that I did in the face-to-face course that were helpful and sometimes there were things that I couldn't even do in the face-to-face, and a visual would help.

Which of the technological solutions that you created is a keeper?

This question is tricky because in terms of how it looks, I would keep, for example, all the Flash things—those are nice, but at the same time, they are time-consuming and they have, you know, a learning curve. If you don't have some assistance, and I did have it...I'm not a Flash expert...not even a novice! So, I needed someone. And some of the technology—you actually don't need anyone. For example, I would say certainly a keeper of one of the technologies I used is just the images with voice. They are extremely effective and they're very easy to use. I would say this is almost the easiest thing to do. Although there's all the part of having the transcript for the voice, which we did not worry with that at least for the time being, and I know we're going to run into some little issues, but still that is certainly a keeper.

Which technology would you not use again?

What I would not keep—and it's not because the technology is not good, it is just that the process of doing it is complicated—is the whiteboard. It is very interesting for...like doing a full exercise the way I did some of mine. But you need a lot of rehearsal because you cannot start with something on the board already—you have, you know, you have to write from scratch. If any little thing goes wrong, you have to start all over again.

What would you do differently next time?

I would go for more planning in the beginning, you know, before starting. One thing that I would really do differently is I would try to get more input in terms of instructional design. Because I'm not an instructional designer. This is not my background! So I would maybe try to have some input from somebody else that would help the integration of the objects with the learning activity. Maybe try to explore the objects a little bit better.

What kind of feedback did you get from students?

The feedback was amazingly popular and sometimes even when the feedback was not asked for. For example, I think that my evals probably went higher because of the objects! And because it's not only the learning, I think it's something personal—that personal thing that I mentioned—that they feel that there's somebody, you know, that has a voice and everything, on the other side. But even from students in other classes, who were not my students, you know, I think that it's just another mode, and when you think that you have all these senses and that you can learn through all of them—you know, hearing, looking—and getting this at the same time for example, so it helps to even bring redundant information that helps learning.