My journey into online scenarios - Part 1

I don't know anyone who teaches psychology who doesn't care a whole lot about their students. It is such a great community to be a part of. I really like teaching psychology and meeting people who teach psych too.

The biggest lesson for me over the last 6 months has been how much I didn't know about online learning and teaching. It is amazing!  I started with a real curiosity around image maps (see this explanation).  Why did some people have engaging amazing moodle or blackboard sites and I didn't? I'm really into teaching, why hadn't I found a way to do those cool sites?? Was there are a secret that the learning support people didn't want me to know? The most impressive thing I'd done was a few Prezi presentations. Check out this serious example I made and a fun example if you haven't discovered Prezi yet :)

I learnt about image maps, and they are nice and pretty but they don't really do anything specifically for the learner unless you are really careful in your design.  More importantly, they don't get the learner to do anything.  So I made another discovery, helped in a very big way by the learning designer for my department. He gets to spend one day a week with our faculty (which is the name for a group of departments here) and so I'd never actually met him...because he's a busy guy and has to try to get around to a whole bunch of schools in just one day.  He showed me this online activity and it completely changed my ideas about online learning.


Go on, do the activity....at least give it a minute!  The activity was created by Cathy Moore and you can read her blog here.

It gave me a thirst for more scenario knowledge! Here's what I learnt:

1. PowerPoint is actually fantastic
There's a lot of PowerPoint haters out there but I learnt that with PowerPoint and a little know how anyone can make online scenarios.  PowerPoint is an amazing tool!  I started to learn how to hyperlink pages of a presentation together and how to save so my students had to work through the challenges I'd set up for them. It was a revelation!

2. People are generous and The Rapid E-Learning Blog is a wonder
I started to learn more skills and options by reading up on PowerPoint and online scenarios at the Rapid E-Learning Blog.  (image below is from blog and is not mine!)

You could start anywhere on this blog and get some excellent ideas, free templates, and very helpful tutorials.  I really like this post.

Then I learnt my next lesson.

3. The quality and design of free tools in the e-Learning sector is outstanding
I am not a podcaster...there, I said it. I hate just listening to audio and always prefer to have the option of visuals, even if I don't watch the screen all the time.  I find podcasts boring to make and, unless the presenter is truly excellent, I find podcasts horrible to listen to. The I found screenr.com and I fell in love.  5 mins max, screen casting (that means making a video of your computer screen content...I had no idea what a screencast was!).

I used screenr (image above is owned by screenr) to make some 'refresher' videos for people who are learning how to make these online scenarios. You can watch part 1 here.