News & Events
November 26, 2003
New e-Learning Tools Make it Easy for Faculty and Students to Create Media-Rich Learning Resources
By Krista Charbonneau, Editor, e-Strategy Update Newsletter
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Tim Wang, Ulrich Rauch and Warren Scott of UBC's Arts ISIT [Martin Dee photo] |
UBC's Arts ISIT has developed two new e-Learning template tools that allow faculty and students to easily create their own multimedia learning tools, including media-rich, interactive timelines and saved discussions from WebCT courses. In turn, the tools faculty and students develop can be used again in other courses, for a variety of purposes, and shared with other faculty and students.
Warren Scott, Coordinator, Instructional Support in Arts ISIT and Tim Wang, Instructional Developer in Arts ISIT, developed the tools, which were released this fall.
“We’ve built learning object tools that in turn build learning objects themselves,” said Warren Scott. “By doing that, dozens if not hundreds of other people can create timelines and save threaded discussions, which are actually learning objects. This creates exponential growth in the number of re-usable learning objects that can be re-used and re-purposed in other courses by other faculty and students.”
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"The pedagogical benefits are that instructors are able to control content and presentation in these media rich courses, which improves the way online learning is developed overall."
— Dr. Ulrich Rauch, Director, Arts ISIT |
The Timeline Tool allows you to quickly construct an interactive timeline tailored with your own text, images, as well as audio and video clips. The WebCT Discussion Extractor Tool allows you to export and save WebCT Discussions as SCORM standard-compliant learning objects that can then archived or analyzed as a dataset and base of collective student knowledge. (SCORM is the Shareable Content Object Reference Model, a set of standards for online learning).
The tools are designed so that anyone can use them without being technical experts. They also give instructors more control over developing media-rich content for their courses.
“Instructors need to be able to enter their own course material and content, and work with these online tools themselves,” said Dr. Ulrich Rauch, Director Arts ISIT. “The pedagogical benefits are that instructors are able to control content and presentation in these media rich courses, which improves the way online learning is developed overall. These are tools that allow instructors to engage with and interact directly with the material they present online.”
Interactive Timelines Can Be Re-Used in Other Courses and Shared With Colleagues and Students
The idea for the Timeline Tool was developed after English professor Jonathan Wisenthal asked the Arts ISIT team to create a timeline to show his students the social and historical contexts in which essays and texts were written.
“We thought that if one faculty member needs a timeline in a course, others might have the same needs,” said Warren Scott. “If we’re going to spend so much time and resources on building a tool, we want to make sure we can produce 100 timelines, not just one.”
The timeline tool can be used in almost any discipline, from the humanities to sciences, in a variety of ways. It can be used to plot out the phases of a chemical reaction as well as the salient points in a certain period in philosophy, or to compare and contrast the developments of two subject areas such as theatre and film.
It can be a chronological timeline tool, which is linear, but it can also be used as a conceptual tool. For more complex material, you can create a second tier at any particular point in the timeline where student can drill down farther for more details.
Student online Discussions Create A Base of Collective Knowledge
Instructors and students can use the WebCT Discussion Object Extractor Tool to save and export a fully threaded discussion object from WebCT and archive it and re-use it in other ways.
When online discussions are created by students during a course that uses WebCT this becomes a record of knowledge of the students who contributed to the discussion board during the course.
Instructors can look through the discussion and find patterns in students' questions or thinking. Both students and instructors can anaylze the data to find interesting connections between ideas and themes that emerge.
“It’s the accumulation of knowledge through students by students – it’s an inspiring model,” said Uli Rauch. “It shifts the location of knowledge from the teacher’s head to students navigating the course. This knowledge isn’t lost when one group of students moves on – it can be saved and used as a knowledge basis for discussion for the next group of students.”
Faculty can archive a complete threaded discussion. Discussions can be re-used and embedded in another course web site. Instructors can use this as material for the next group of students to provide context and background that could lead to a new starting point for new discussions. Students can export their contributions to their weblog or e-Portfolio and save them in threaded format. RSS feeds from discussions can be imported into Weblogs, news aggregators, or other resources.
Staff Benefits
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[Martin Dee photo] | The Arts ISIT staff understands the needs of UBC instructors and work closely with them while tools are being developed. “Developing tools in-house also keeps the staff here interested in their jobs and allows them to use their creativity,” said Uli Rauch.
The tools also allow Arts ISIT to streamline some of its processes around providing support to instructors. The staff doesn’t have to spend time updating content for instructors’ course tools, and faculty can maintain more control over their own content and course material. The staff has more time to consult with and provide other support to faculty when it’s needed.
Workshops and Demonstrations
Wang and Scott have been leading workshops and demonstrations this fall to show faculty how to use the tools, and another is planned for January 2004. More information about this will be posted under Events on the e-Strategy site. The team will be developing other e-Learning template tools under the same model over next year.
More Information
Visit www.learningtools.arts.ubc.ca for more information.
Contact: Warren Scott, Tim Wang, Dr. Ulrich Rauch
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About e-Learning
UBC's e-Strategy, which includes e-Learning as a key component, helps find creative ways to use technology to enhance learning. e-Learning improves the overall learning experience of UBC's community by providing tools and infrastructure for using technology in innovative and effective ways and strengthening and coordinating support networks. Thousands of UBC students go online daily to engage with fellow students, and faculty, and access course content in new ways.
About UBC's e-Strategy
UBC's e-Strategy enables students, faculty and staff to excel in one of the world's leading universities by enhancing learning, research and community through leading-edge technology initiatives.
e-Strategy is a guiding framework to align UBC's technology initiatives with the university's strategic goals. Activities include project development, information and resource sharing, and setting long terms goals for technology at UBC.
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