Producing Digital Content: Thoughts from the Starting Line

As we move toward the end of the certificate program, I feel excitement, enthusiasm and trepidation. Already we are busy this first week, with introductions, blogging, reading, and deciding on and creating unit structure. It’s a lot to do!

Just two weeks ago we completed course three of the program – design. I thought design would be less technical. I was looking forward to being creative with graphics, color, layout, etc. Instead I was taught to look at the details of course design. Frankly, I hadn’t even considered this! As a university lecturer, much of what I teach was designed by someone else. I modified the course to meet my own style. I never thought about the rationale behind the design. In particular, I never considered the importance of a specific rubric for evaluation. Now I am much more cognizant of these details. I have become more critical of my own f2f course design, but have also made changes for improvement.

I think “Producing Digital Content” may be what I was expecting in the last course. I am looking forward to putting content into my webct shell. I want to learn more about style, adding sound, video and other tools to enhance students’ learning.

In the article “Tips for Developing Media-rich Online Courses” authors S. Junaidu and J. Al-Ghamdi wrote: “The course should be multimedia rich in the sense that it should contain

text,animations, voice, and possibly video clips. The online course should be comprehensive enoughsuch that it can be considered a replacement of the tradition face-to-face method of teaching. It should be a self-contained learning package with concepts adequately illustrated and explained in voice narrations. The course should provide sufficient interaction with the learner in order to give a ‘human touch’ to online learning.”

The article reminded me that online course content and delivery has to take the place of the relationships that would normally be developed in an f2f class. To engage students content has to be easily accessible and visually pleasing. Students also have to be active participants in the learning process. Course content must be relevant to their interests and up-to-date with active links. This means we must always be checking our sources and updating our work.

I am glad that we are not creating a full 15 week course as our first efforts! I like the step-by-step approach we have been using so far, and I appreciate that the products we created in the last course will provide the foundation for this course. Let the good times roll!

Graphics sources:
Ready, Set, Go: www.girlscoutsracineco.org
Rubric: www.artlex.com
E-learning: online-courses-education.com
Rolling stone: http://www.theinterpretersfriend.com/pd/online.html