Here at DePaul, we’ve got a well-established learning management system. For many faculty, this provides a means to deliver content in both text and multimedia forms to students anywhere in the world. Some faculty are using their course sites in really excellent ways, delivering lecture content, videos, discussions, and assessments entirely online. Many others, though, do not want to or believe they need to use the system. On first glance, a number of disciplines don’t seem to benefit from having this system in place; for example, a music instructor whose sole purpose at DePaul is to teach private lessons might not see the value in having a course site available, since they don’t have a syllabus and each student’s lesson content is different. A foreign-language instructor might not see the immediate value of a course site beyond being a syllabus repository, if the majority of the course content will be conversational speaking. However, there are many ways to leverage the technology available in the Desire2Learn system to avoid the woes of the “common course site.” In order to take a course site to these new places, we first have to break down exactly what the words “course site” mean to us as instructors and designers, and from there we can use the available tools to produce something truly beneficial to students.
A Desire2Learn course site is, in its simplest definition, nothing more than a website. When you access your course site, you are accessing a collection of Web pages associated with your course and a collection of students who have access to it. As you create content in your class, you are really creating a series of web links and web pages to convey your information. D2L does a great job of hiding most of the tough stuff from you, so for the most part the system really is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). You don’t have to know any code or special tricks to get the basics to happen. In a broader sense, a “course site” becomes that collection of web pages that, taken as a whole, comprise the learning materials for your course.
What if your course content doesn’t seem very internet-friendly? What if you’re working in a typically “analog” discipline that historically doesn’t make much use of Web resources? Keep reading for a few ideas that might help you rethink how you configure your class for online learning:
Idea 1: Lecture Delivery
Consider how much time you spend lecturing to your class. How many hours a week/month/quarter do you use in class for this? In order to maximize in-class discussion and reflection time, consider creating online lectures. You can record them yourself using screencasting software like ScreenFlow or Camtasia, or using online software like Screencast-O-Matic. Screencasting software essentially records whatever’s on your computer screen at the time, along with audio and/or video, and produces a video file that can be used in your course site. Students could be watching your lecture before they come to class, and then you can spend your class time discussing what they already know instead of having to present it for the first time. You can also be sure that they will get all the necessary information because they can stop, rewind, and watch over and over. You could use your course site to be the main delivery system for your lecture content.
Idea 2: The Listening Room
Suppose you are an instructor who needs to use numerous audio files for your instruction. This could be someone in music creating listening lists, someone preparing broadcasting examples for a journalism class, or a foreign-language professor providing conversation and pronunciation excerpts. D2L handles audio excellently, and can be used to present one or many examples at once. You can create content pages with audio files that will play back directly from within the page. If you have multiple examples that need to be grouped together, your FITS consultant can create a “channel” on our streaming server, so you can present a group of items as a unified whole (for example, if you wanted to present an entire Beatles album at once). There are a number of resources out there for audio files, but one of the best for music is the Naxos Music Library, which DePaul subscribes to. You can stream music directly from this collection and link to it in your course site, so students don’t have to go looking for the music. Giving your students audio examples directly in the course site will increase the availability of those materials to them for study: no more sitting and waiting for a recording to become available in the language lab or music library, and they can play and replay these files an unlimited number of times. You can embed audio in a page with descriptive text as well, so they will know a little more ahead of time about what they will be listening to.
Idea 3: The Theatre
It’s always a nice change of pace to show a film in class. This can help break up the monotony of lecture-response-lecture-response. However, what if films and film clips are a major part of the class? Consider a Television News class, where students may be frequently viewing historical newscasts or those of their peers, or a Literature in Film class, where students will be frequently viewing old films or film clips and making comparisons to the literature it is based on. If a clip is shown only once in class, it can be more difficult to ensure that students really got what you wanted them to get out of it. D2L handles video in much the same way it does audio; you can post a video clip in your course site and it will provide a player for you, so you can view it online. D2L can handle directly embedding clips from other websites like Vimeo, Viddler, and YouTube as well. You can also have channels built for your video clips if you want to show a specific set to students. Much like the lecture-delivery idea, this enables you to have students watch clips before class, so you can jump right into discussion of the clips instead of having to sit through them all in class. It also keeps those materials available to students, so they can watch them repeatedly to study for an upcoming exam. You can also embed a video clip in a page with some descriptive text content; this way they won’t just watch, but will watch for specific things.
Idea 4: The Gallery
Remember how much photocopying we used to do before each class? Every student needed to have a copy of every necessary page. In the case of instructors using images in class, sometimes this meant an awful lot more copying to show them, one to a page. Worse, a copy machine doesn’t necessarily reproduce images entirely accurately, so photocopies of the great works of western art probably don’t have the same effect as the originals. These days, digital copies of the images can be obtained and simply displayed online in your course site, where they will be available in perpetuity in a more authentic-looking form than a copied page. You can insert pictures one at a time into a content page, or you can use software like SoftChalk (available free at this link for DePaul users) to create an album that can be embedded and flipped through in a single content page. You can also embed photo galleries from other services such as Flickr into a content page; this can be a great way to create a gallery of student works that can then be displayed for the whole class after students upload to the external site. Imagine you’re teaching an Art History class. Wouldn’t it be great to have high-resolution images of the works you will be studying available right from within your course site? It would be a great help to students as they studied for exams, especially in those cases where they were studying things that weren’t necessarily in the book. Being able to do a side-by-side comparison in a flippable album would also reduce the amount of paging through the textbook a student would have to do to accomplish the same task.
Idea 5: The Tester
You’re probably aware that there is a pretty robust testing system inside D2L. It’s possible to do many things, including timed and randomized exams and surveys that vary their questions asked based on answers given. However, did you know that it is possible to use almost every type of content you can use anywhere else in a quiz question? That’s right, you can use images, audio, and video in a quiz question, as well as outside Web resources. An art professor could give an identification exam online by showing the work of art with each question. A Chinese language professor could give an exam in which students need to listen to an example and match the audio to the Chinese characters displayed. A professor teaching a film class could ask a question about a specific clip, and embed it right into the question; a music-history professor could give a listening exam online by providing audio examples for each question. If you’re using D2L for your classes, but not making much use of the Quizzes or Surveys tools, it might be a good idea to take a second look at the possibilities these tools offer. The reality is that almost every exam you could give on paper, you could also find a way to deliver online.
Idea 6: The Studio
Many applied courses such as internships, practicums, and private lessons don’t often make much use of a course site since so much of the course’s content is really about the student’s individual work and cannot be quantified on the same level as his/her classmates. Many of these sites end up with a syllabus and a few other general course documents and that’s about it. However, there are many reasons to use the system to make the site a resource even though not much “teaching” will happen through the site. For example, students enrolled in private music lessons not only have a weekly private session with the instructor but also one or more times a month meet with all the students of the same instrument/voice part for “studio class,” where they perform for one another, have guest speakers, and share common experiences. In this case, a course site for the entire “Trumpet Studio” could serve not as an instructional site (since that’s what happens in lessons) but as a repository for all students of that type. Sheet music and audio and video examples could be posted for general consumption by all enrolled students; since students at many different levels share the same studio class, there would be a wealth of knowledge and material available for younger students as they progress through the program. Studio class or concert performances could be recorded and then shared through the course site for the rest of the studio. As another example, a professional internship course site could be a repository for the most useful materials for students in that discipline rather than a teaching site. They know what they are supposed to do, but you can use your site to help them do it!
As you can see, there are multitudes of ways to make use of the Web space you have been given just by teaching at an institution that offers it. Just because you haven’t used a course site before for a course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t; with a little imagination you can turn a ghost town of a course site into a vibrant and truly useful resource that your students will keep using again and again. It’s our department’s job to help guide you through the selection, design, and production process to make your course site sparkle; just get in touch with your Instructional Technology Consultant or let us know at fits@depaul.edu whenever you’re ready to take that next step.