Over the last couple of weeks, I've given a lot of thought regarding the H1N1 virus. Yes, certain universities have had serious outbreaks. I believe that it will get worse here before it gets better, but life goes on, and so must the business of the university. That means that we need to have a plan in place to support teaching and learning when faculty and/or students can't get to class.
So during the weeks before the semester started, we put our heads together and came up with the "Teaching During a Pandemic" list of resources on the TLT Web site. Here's what we picked and why:
1. ANGEL: The vast majority of Penn State faculty and students use ANGEL to share resources in some way. So why would faculty need additional training on ANGEL? Because while they may be used to sharing documents, setting up a drop box, or sending the occasional e-mail to their students, they aren't used to teaching completely online. So the TLT page has links to resources for both getting-started and more advanced features needed to teach online. These links include handouts, one-page summaries, knowledge base articles, and videos, such as the one below. Most of this was existing material, created by Jeff Swain and the other members of the ANGEL documentation team.
2. Blogs at Penn State: ANGEL is great for faculty who want to securely share content with their students, but it has two issues. First, there is a maximum file size limit of 1 GB per courses (which sounds like a lot, but fills quickly). Second, it is difficult for students to share content with the rest of their class or those outside of the class roster - industry experts, future employers, advisors, etc... The Blogs at Penn State is really an easy to use Web publishing platform that opens the possibility of sharing and collaborating online. Most of the materials to support this platform were created by the Blogs at Penn State and the ePortfolio teams.
3. Adobe Connect: ANGEL and the Blogs platform work well for asynchronous resources, but faculty who are used to teaching in the classroom may feel that there is something missing without a synchronous component for those dynamic question/answer/discussion/debate/discovery interactions. Adobe Connect does a good job in filling that gap. It has voice and video sharing capability, screen sharing, text chat, presentation, and other forms of interaction that you would typically see in Web Conferencing software.
So during the weeks before the semester started, we put our heads together and came up with the "Teaching During a Pandemic" list of resources on the TLT Web site. Here's what we picked and why:
1. ANGEL: The vast majority of Penn State faculty and students use ANGEL to share resources in some way. So why would faculty need additional training on ANGEL? Because while they may be used to sharing documents, setting up a drop box, or sending the occasional e-mail to their students, they aren't used to teaching completely online. So the TLT page has links to resources for both getting-started and more advanced features needed to teach online. These links include handouts, one-page summaries, knowledge base articles, and videos, such as the one below. Most of this was existing material, created by Jeff Swain and the other members of the ANGEL documentation team.
2. Blogs at Penn State: ANGEL is great for faculty who want to securely share content with their students, but it has two issues. First, there is a maximum file size limit of 1 GB per courses (which sounds like a lot, but fills quickly). Second, it is difficult for students to share content with the rest of their class or those outside of the class roster - industry experts, future employers, advisors, etc... The Blogs at Penn State is really an easy to use Web publishing platform that opens the possibility of sharing and collaborating online. Most of the materials to support this platform were created by the Blogs at Penn State and the ePortfolio teams.
3. Adobe Connect: ANGEL and the Blogs platform work well for asynchronous resources, but faculty who are used to teaching in the classroom may feel that there is something missing without a synchronous component for those dynamic question/answer/discussion/debate/discovery interactions. Adobe Connect does a good job in filling that gap. It has voice and video sharing capability, screen sharing, text chat, presentation, and other forms of interaction that you would typically see in Web Conferencing software. 4. Tools for Pre-recorded Lectures: Instructional resources are not complete without a faculty voice to put things into perspective. Faculty who would like to put their existing materials online through ANGEL or a blog post can create pre-recorded lectures and then use ANGEL discussion boards or blog comments to discuss the presentations with students. The tools that we are recommending are Jing (to make screen recordings), Adobe Presenter or Keynote (for Windows or Mac presentation recordings), and iTunesU (to deliver audio or video recordings). Support for these tools comes from a variety of sources, but primarily from ITS Training Services, Digital Commons, and the ITS Help Desk.
So if you have some time, take a look at the "Teaching During a Pandemic" page. And if you have any feedback, please leave a comment here or fill out a quick comment form that I set up using Google Forms.
So if you have some time, take a look at the "Teaching During a Pandemic" page. And if you have any feedback, please leave a comment here or fill out a quick comment form that I set up using Google Forms.
Focused and useful Allan. This unified response to adversity feels like a move towards having every course in every college available all the time online. Would UStream be stable enough to be a help?
Thanks Dave. Our original list of technologies included a lot of third-party and off-site services: UStream, YouTube, Kaltura, Vimeo, etc... However, the official support for those services is very limited and we don't have good materials in the Knowledge Base. So if a few key people from Digital Commons got sick, the ITS Help Desk wouldn't be able to help much (assuming they would be busier than usual).
I'm not sure if you know this, but Pat's experience with UStream and the Learning Design Summer Camp was mixed. The live stream worked fine, but the archive had some severe audio/video sync issues.
So for now, the list is "safe", but I'm not adverse to doing some work to help a few faculty use something else if it's a better fit.