Creating Media-Rich Learning Solutions John Lynch Senior Instructional Technology Consultant Center for Digital Humanities UCLA

Media-Rich Learning  As the technical skills in instructors increase, so do their ideas; technical departments are increasingly pressed to provide solutions  Are there tools available that allow a subject-matter expert to develop their own media-rich content without extensive training, i.e. without custom programming?

Why Not Existing Course Management Software? Pros  Already available for many universities  Provides a structure for rich-media materials Cons  Inherently private  Not permanent  Not necessarily portable to other institutions or away from the university context

Other Options for Media-Rich Learning  Multimedia Lesson Builder  Pachyderm  Other?

Multimedia Lesson Builder  ects/MmLessonBuilder/ ects/MmLessonBuilder/  Very strong media capabilities – text, audio and video  Flexible self-evaluating tools, including media-rich testing materials  Very linear, very standard structure

Multimedia Lesson Builder  Despite the excellent instructions and diagrams, instructors often find all of the options intimidating  The “Lessons List” is difficult to use

Pachyderm   Very media friendly  Uses a system of design templates, like MMLB: letter codes clearly link content to its location within the template  Sample Site Sample Site  Very non-linear  Media stored online  No evaluation tools

Pachyderm  Very non-linear  Unlike MMLB and its “Lessons List,” the links between Pachyderm’s page are hand-coded by the creator, making page organization more intuitive (see previous)  Plans to create open- source version, ability to create custom templates will expand its applications dramatically

Other options?  Project Pad and Multimedia Annotator  Audio annotating tools –  Project Pad will develop into a whole suite of web-searchable tools  Blogs?  Both Blogger and Wordpress are very easy to use, and have extensions allowing the addition of media and password protection  Wordpress includes the ability to define “categories,” which allows instructors to organize their resources/posts on the blog in the same way that they might organize them on a standard CMS website, i.e. by Assignments, Annoucements, etc. -  Can content from tools like Hot Potatoes be run within the blog framework, or does the blog have to link to external content to gain quiz-tool functionality?

Discussion  Any thoughts?  What tools are in use on your campus? Are there any that I’ve missed?  What essential capabilities, if any, do you think are missing from the tools here?  Do media-rich learning objects need to connect to a student database and allow grading to be truly useful to instructors?  Other questions, comments or snide remarks?