Final Review Paper

Final Review Paper

In my favorite season of the year, as we all are working towards the end of this semester and we are going to sum up the valuable knowledge that I have learned throughout this delightful course. Today, I will be reviewing an online course of Interactive Multimedia Learning that I took this semester at UVic as my topic of the final paper by using the SECTIONS model ( link attached) and academic researches to support with. Hopefully, after reading this review paper will make you have a better understanding of the course and why I liked it.

First off, I want to start with the reason why I have chosen this particular course as my topic to talk about. There are a few reason that I found this course useful and I want to take this opportunity to let more people get to know, such as: master the use of different educational applications. Thanks to the modern development of technologies that many applications we can use today which means you can teach and learn from different perspectives rather than just stick in the old traditional method of education. I also want to start with a video to tell my audience why online courses are getting more important and how we can get benefits out of it:

Students are always the center of the education, have a better understanding of  the students will help the instructors to teach the things that matches students’  needs. Which is the how I found my interests in the course Tony et al.(2019) mentioned in their research of SECTIONS model: “Graduating students that have been interviewed about learning technologies at the University of British Columbia made it clear that they will be happy to use technology for learning so long as it contributes to their success”. That states that student are really going to use what they learned that is helpful in their future career. Taking an example that I learned from the interactive multimedia learning: Screen-casting was something that I have never used before but in one chapter of the whole course was talking about how to use screen cast from scratch and I ended up using it in some other courses for presenting my ideas. Here is what I have done for the screen-casting challenge in the course on teach my audience how to crate a website :

I personally found it was very useful and I am glad that I obtained another skill that may be extremely useful in my future career.

Next, I want to talk about the level of ease of use in this course. In this course, you will find a lot of free materials that can be easily access to. As Tony et al. (2019) stated: “ease of use requires professionally designed commercial or open source course software, specialized help in graphics, navigation and screen design for your course materials, and strong technical support for server and software management and maintenance.” There is already materials and instructions were prepared by the instructors that makes me with no effort every time when I want to get access to the related knowledge or some recommended materials.

Furthermore, the design for the course is a successful example for the online courses. The design of online courses require a lot of professional knowledge on how to design the structure of the course, the appropriate content and the most effective method to implement the ideas into the course. Stavredes and Herder (2014) clearly stated in their book named A Guide to Online Course Design : Strategies for Student Success: “Learning with understanding focuses on the idea of learning “usable knowledge” in a network of meaning organized by important concepts. This idea is based on research about how experts organize their knowledge and how learners should be able to understand and use the knowledge they learn in different contexts rather than remember large bodies of disconnected facts. This includes understanding the facts, why they are important, relationships to other facts and knowledge, and when to use them.” That reveals the science of designing an online educational course is not as simple as it seems. In the course, we learned and there are a lot of concepts involve in designing multimedia teaching. There are many principles we could fellow that can be implemented in the educational multimedia. For an instance, according to Pelton and Francis-Pelton (2017) in their work of “An Overview of Educational Multimedia Principles.”,there is one called “Keep it simple” principle, which means to keep the educational multimedia short and precise, you do not need to tell the audience the whole story about it, but you also have to make sure that you deliver the idea to the audience. Another useful principle is called “Segmenting principle”, which means the designer also does not have to show or tell the whole thing at once. By breaking down the whole thing into small pieces to make sure that audience could a hundred percent understand what the designer want audience to learn. Also, there are many more helpful principles you could use that will serve your purpose very well. (The file of educational multimedia principles will be attached: R1-educational-multimedia-principles)

Move over, the interaction between material and students is quite important in the approach of online educational courses. There are three ways of interactions in terms of educations. They are student – learning material, student – instructor and student – student. For the online courses, the interaction of student – Once again, because of the development of modern technologies that makes us to learn easier and quicker. That is also the reason why online educational multimedia become more popular over the days. Students could use a kind of medium such as computer to interact with the learning material. As Tony et al. (2019) stated in the article: “Computer technology can greatly facilitate learners’ interaction with learning resources. Self-administered online tests can provide feedback to students on their comprehension or coverage of a subject area. Such tests can also provide feedback to teachers on topic areas where students are having difficulty, and can also be used for grading of students on their comprehension.” One advantage of that is as mentioned in the text, feedback is important for teachers to evaluating the material and improve the work. Here is also a clip of how to use computer to make everything easier:

Move on to that, another advantage that online multimedia education has is cost-efficient. Unlike the traditional method of education, nowadays educations can be done through very effective and relatively cheap ways. There are some essential cost that designers cannot avoid: production cost, your time as an instructor, copyright clearance and cost as an instructional designer. These are the fixed costs or the once cost that means most cost would not appear a second time. Also, there are some variable costs but they are still manageable. Besides that, the more money you invest in the material, the better the outcome is as in the article of Tony et al.( 2019): “There may be benefits then for a teacher or for an institution in spending more money up front for interactive learning materials if this leads to less demand for teacher-student interaction.” As we can observe that interactive learning materials can make education easier than in the interaction of students to teachers. Moreover, they also give an example of it: “For instance, a mathematics course might be able to use automated testing and feedback and simulations and diagrams, and pre-designed answers to frequently asked questions, with less or even no time spent on individual assignment marking or communication with the teacher. In this case it may be possible to manage teacher-student ratios as high as 1:200 or more, without significant loss of quality.” No time will be spent on marking the papers at all, which makes the education more efficient and effective.

To wrap up, we have reviewed and analyzed my experience of online course and  I also want to say that I had a great experience of this online course but most importantly is that I also enjoyed the course of EDCI 339 that gives me the opportunity to extend my knowledge about distributed and open learning. That allows me to have a better overall understanding of this world of learning from many perspectives. Last but not least, I am truly grateful for what Dr. Michael Paskevicius has done for us during this tough time. I am thankful for reading my final review paper and I wish everyone stays healthy and safe in this pandemic time, hope we will get after it very soon.

Reference

A.w., Tony, & Bates. (2019, October 10). Chapter 9: Choosing and using media in education: the SECTIONS model. Retrieved from https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/

Stavredes, T., & Herder, T. (2014). A guide to online course design: strategies for student success. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Pelton, T. & Francis-Pelton, L. (2017). Multimedia, Design, and Storytelling Principles Supporting the Creation of
Learning Resources. In P. Resta & S. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher
Education International Conference 2017 (pp. 900-905). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of
Computing in Education (AACE).

Showcase post

Showcase post by Yun Chen March 27, 2020

Today, I will be writing a showcase post of EDCI 339 based on my reflection post 2 which was focusing on the Open Educational Resources (OER) and accessible online educational resources. Moreover, as we are working approach to the near end of the term, I believe that I have learnt a lot about distributed and open learning. Also, I hope this post will be well presenting my knowledge and understanding of the topic.

Speaking of Open Education Resources (OER), it defined as freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. ( “Open Educational Resources“, n.d.) It means a general category that all the resources and materials that we could use for any educational level. For a better understanding and why it is important in the open learning world, here is a clip from TED that focusing on the topic of OER.

Many people may not be aware of, but open educational resources has given us many benefits on every perspectives. As in the article of ” The Importance Of Open Educational Resources” mentioned, being able to get useful and accessible online materials is getting more and more important these days.

First of all, cost is always the topic we have talked about. In the traditional ways of learning, textbooks and supplies are getting more expensive more ever before. As the article stated: ” rising at a rate higher than most other consumer goods” (“The Importance Of Open Educational Resources”, n.d.) As the chart is showing below (see fig.1):

textbook.cpi.png

(Fig. 1. The graph of comparison of consumer price index on different commodities between educational books and supplies, all items and apparel. Graph from The Importance Of Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/815700/pages/the-importance-of-open-education-resources.)

Therefore, compared to the mostly free online accessible resources. The actual and physical textbooks lost their advantages. Open Educational Resources gives every student a chance to learn at a very low cost when the textbook is no longer necessary to the students.

Next, OER gives instructors the access to customize or even personalize the martial that they need. This make the class much more flexible than the traditional way. For example, a teacher only needs some parts of knowledge from the traditional textbook and the teacher also wants to add some particular content to let the students make a better understanding of the knowledge for this specific class. The flexibility of OER could be extremely help in his scenario where teacher could have the access to edit the material and make it more suitable for the students. Also, this is the benefit that old textbook does not have, that instructor will only get the strong related material to the class. Here is another video that showing that to relate the classes with OER:

Furthermore, OER has the opportunity to be better as long as it is editable online. The same martial can be edited by every student and teacher online around the world. This is not only useful in the educational area, but also in some other fields where the same work needs to be enhanced by different people working on the same object and sharing the same interest. That can

OER also has wide variety of materials that we can use. We used to need multiple textbooks or asking different teachers to understand the knowledge from class. By using OER we can get much more information from every angle about the same object. Sometimes, a user does not have to gather all the information, there is already someone generated all the knowledge for you there and waiting for you to explore. Now with OER we can get the knowledge from zero to success just through a click and search.

Once more, we need to bring up the evaluation guide of OER for reviewing the OER resources. we could use this guide while we are trying to evaluate the usefulness of the OER resources. Relevance, acurancy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity and licensing are the six measures of OER material. By using this guide, we will have the ability to identify the usefulness of an open resources in order to decide which material is useful for us.

OER also can be really useful in our professional areas when we are not in the educational world. OER is practical, because of the huge development of modern technology. We could be able to find solutions through OER for the real problems from our day-to-day life. There is always something we can learn from the from the online open knowledge.

References

Open educational resources. (2020, March 19). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

The Importance Of Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/815700/pages/the-importance-of-open-education-resources.

Reflection Post 4

  • Identify three concepts, ideas, or issues you think are the most important and explain why.

First of all, I want to start off with a video from TED about why universal design matters. Michael will explain to us by expressing himself with sign language. That will also give us a general idea of today’s post:

a. I believe the most important concept of universal learning design is to give an introduction of your work. In the other words, the designers should know how and where to start designing the learning resources. I was impressed by Michael’s soundless and powerful speech. Therefore, I think we need to understand the  audience or the learners that we are targeting. Any design will be based on their needs and aim to help them for a better learning experience and reach the goals.

b. Preference editing tools from Floe will be helpful as well when the designer is trying to come up with a new content of learning.

There are a lot of resources available in the world of open education. Learner will be more likely to reach their learning goals when the resources are personalized. Learning should be the process of learners to dig their potentials and explore more opportunities along the way.

c. The role of Open Education Resources (OER) is an essential concept from any perspective. We have talked about OER earlier in the course. OER gives us a much wider and more convenient access to the knowledge. Whether educators or learners could take advantages of it. We could design “one-size-fit-all” learning content or personalized learning materials by using various Open Education Resources.

  • Identify two concepts, issues, or ideas you are having difficulty

understanding.

a. Speaking of the techniques of Floe’s Inclusive Learning Design Handbook. I have been wondering what kind of techniques could educators or designer implement to improve the learning experiences for learners. I understand some techniques were used to enhance the overall users experience and make it more accessible.  However, It did not give us some examples of it that made me a bit confused about this concept.

b. The other concept that I had difficulty to understand is Web Games and Simulations. I personally did not use this kind of approach of learning before and I am also curious how much progress can it make for the purpose of learning. Is interactive game really helpful for learners with a much more stronger visual impression.

  • Pose one question in relation to universal design that was not addressed in this module

During the process of universal design. Diversity is always one of the biggest concerns that we had. Every individual has their personal goals for learning, how to accommodate everyone’s needs and make appropriate approaches or methods of learning that can be acceptable for learners. In the module, it did not mention how or what approach that we could use or refer to. What exactly we can do to minimize the impact for a relatively more diverse learning group when we are making the progress on learning design?

Reference

Floe flexible learning for open education. (n.d.). Retrieved March 22, 2020, from https://floeproject.org/

Reflection post 3

The Most Memorable Online Learning Experience

In this reflection,  we were told to write the most memorable experience of online learning. This immediately  reminds me of another online course that I am taking this term which is called “Interactive Multimedia Learning” ( the official course website was attached). Before I decided to take that course I just barely had any learning experience from the online materials but as we are working approaching to the end of the term, what I learned from these online courses have really opened my eyes.

First of all, the very first challenge that I had in the course was we were asked to make a comics to tell a simple story. However, it was as difficult as rocket sciences to me, because I had absolutely zero experience on making animations and how can I even tell a story with it. When I was worrying about how to make the first step, some Online Educational Resources (OER) saved me. There is a software called ” Comic Life 3“(Official website was attached),  which is a software that can be installed on your PC to assist you for doing some comic works and that absolutely helped me to make the whole thing easier.

Here is a video clip of how to “Comic Life 3” to crate your own comic works:

After I had an OER such as a tutorial video to assist me to do the whole works, I wrote myself a script and I tried to tell the story by using some pictures and texts in the software. Finally, after some hours of drawing, texting and combining the pictures. I had my first comics done. That tells a story about how a college student should make a financial plan in order to save up some money and obtain the goals.

My final comic works has uploaded to the post:

Comics – Yun Chen

I have never learnt anything through this kind of method before and I was also surprised by what I accomplished when I was finishing the final version of the work. This strong feeling has pushed me to have a better understanding of our last week’s reading: “Understanding Technology In Education”. Internet is such a powerful tool that can make greater effect on education as a direct medium. Have a better understanding of the use of media and technology seemed very critical to all of us.

Furthermore, I have mastered the skill of screencasting and other things I did not have the chance to learn in the traditional class. By looking back to the most memorable online learning experience and what I have learned through this course so far, it is more like a phased summary to me. It reminds me how the theories I learned from this course to implement on the other learning obstacles.

References

A.w., Tony, & Bates. (2019, October 10). Chapter 7: Understanding technology in education. Retrieved March 6, 2020, from https://via.hypothes.is/https:/pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/part/chapter-8-understanding-technology/

Reflection 2

A. Discuss the difference between online educational content and openly licensed educational content.

Open educational resources (OER) is the free learning materials and the other techniques that you can use to teach or access to the knowledge. You might be able to  find more information about open educational resources on OER Africa. Here is also a video clip attached about the introduction of OER:

Educational resources are under the protection of copy law once they were created. Openly licensed educational content means that giving the permissions to the public to use the materials under the law of licenses.  Just for an instance, if a educational company wants to use a textbook for public to use, then the company has to negotiate with the author of the textbook or author’s lawyer. When both party all made an agreement on the use of the book, then this textbook could become an openly licensed educational resources. Online educational content where can be found online, such as streaming videos, software and online tools can assist you to get the access to the knowledge.

B. Find an open educational resources (OER) and present it on your portfolio, either by linking, embedding, or by including a screenshot.

By using the Google advanced search with the most open license allowed , I searched the key word of economics. An article is called “ Boundless Economics” by Lumen appeared in the very first place of the searching results. This site basically explains the fundamental theories of economics in a way that people can easily understand.  Here is also a video of the screencast of the site:

C. Review the OER using the evaluation guide found in the tutorial, provide a brief comment on this process in your post

Reviewing the OER by using the evaluation guide given on the OER Africa. We can conclude that this OER has a relatively high usefulness when we try to access the knowledge of economics. This guide is a very helpful tool for guiding us to evaluate an OER from six perspectives: relevance, acurancy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity and licensing. We can just simply check the boxes under each categories to make an evaluation of the OER, so we will be able to tell the usefulness of the OER. The link of evaluation guide is attached below:

Faculty-Guide-22-Apr-15

D. Discuss how you might use OER in your own life or professional work.

OER is a great tool to access to the knowledge. It gives us the full flexibility in creating a learning environment. OER also can be really useful in our day-to-day life, you can always have the permissions to see and learn the educational resources at any time you want. I will have the access to the open knowledge that I want to learn. It is different from the traditional lecture-based learning, providing us another method to obtain the goals. Overall, OER is a very helpful and practical tool to use in our daily life.

References

OER Africa. (n.d.). Retrieved February 9, 2020, from https://www.oerafrica.org/

Lumen. (n.d.). Boundless Economics. Retrieved February 9, 2020, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-economics/chapter/the-study-of-economics/

OER (Open Educational Resources) Introduction. (n.d.). Retrieved February 9, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFeyCc6we-s

Reflection 1

A. instructor-centered versus student-centered learning

The model of instructor-centered learning is to put teacher or instructor at the centered place of the learning environment. Students will  focus on teacher’s material or lectures to learn the knowledge. Also, it kind of system would be limited for learning from many perspectives. Students would not be able to design the way of learning something new. Not all of the students will stay at the same pace with the instructor, so many of them will just cannot finish the process of learning at the same time. As a contract, student-centered learning is standing at the opposite side of the other concept. Students will be in the center of the place, everything will be personalized for the students in order to make students comfortable in the process of learning. Student – centered learning will be able to give the access to students to communicate with each other and students democratically  choose the way they want to learn. Students will be responsible to design the learning environment for themselves.

B. asynchronous versus synchronous learning

Asynchronous and synchronous also represent two completely different methods of learning. Asynchronous means that students and instructors are not required to be a same place and a same time to meet each other. Instructors can just leave the material at somewhere so students could work on the learning process at their own pace. It is quite flexible for both students and instructors to work with. Synchronous represents the meaning of same pace. There is a fixed schedule for both groups to interact with each other. For example, I believe most courses at Uvic are synchronous, for making sure that every student has the same pace of learning. School will make a fixed schedule for every registered student with a instructor and a place with an accurate time. This requires all of us to be there in order to finish the process of learning. However, this kind of model does not have the flexibility as the other one does. Students are required to be at the same pace with the instructor until the end of the course.

C. your thoughts on connectivism

Connectivism means an online platform for everyone for exchanging information, sharing things and expressing thoughts. This platform will be able to shorten the distance for each other and make the process of learning easier. This concept gives us the opportunity to make the world smaller and to keep everyone stays connected with each other. Everyone could make the effort to the platform so we can have a better understanding of the knowledge. It is also a perfect source for someone who cannot reach out for some help in the real life. So everyone can share the valuable information for the right people.

Referecnce

Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Siemens, G.
(2005). International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance
Learning, 2(1). Retrieved from https://edtechuvic.ca/edci339/wpcontent/uploads/sites/5/2020/01/Connectivism-A-Learning-Theoryfor-the-Digital-Age.pdf

Crosslin, M. (2018). Basic Philosophies of Distributed and Open
Learning. https://uta.pressbooks.pub/onlinelearning/chapter/chapter2-basic-philosophies/

Welcome and Introduction

Welcome to your WordPress website for EDCI339. Here are some first tasks to explore with your new site:

  • Go into its admin panel by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL.
  • Tap “Settings” and change the email address to your email address, then make sure you check your email and confirm the change.

change email address

  • Change the title and tagline for your site under Settings -> General
  • Add new categories or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “Distributed & Open” category)
  • Edit the “About Me” or create a new page welcoming visitors to your site.
  • Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works, like found at unsplash.com or pexels.com)
  • Under Appearance:
    • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
    • Customize menus & navigation
    • Use widgets to customize blog content and features