With the announcement of OSU Extension gaining access to Zoom hosted meetings and webinars, Jamie Seger, Morgan Domokos, and Brian Raison offered a “Webinar Best Practices and Online Teaching Tips from the Field” during the 2016 OSUE Annual Conference. Further training on recommended Zoom equipment, use, and teaching via webinar will be offered by the Ed Tech Unit and CFAES IT Services in 2017.
Questions about Zoom and teaching via webinar in the meantime can be sent to Jamie or Danae.
Save the Date for the 2016 Innovate conference + special Post-Conference Event for OSU Extension professionals!
From the Innovate Community blog: With Excellence as our theme for 2016, we’re sharing innovations that let educators re-imagine their instruction without sacrificing pedagogical quality and rigor. It’s fun to experiment and enjoy the novelty of cutting edge technologies, but a focus on excellence is what drives meaningful implementation.
Innovate is a time for bringing people together across disciplines and across adoption barriers. The conference is built with the educator in mind: you don’t have to be tech savvy to fully participate in this day of presentations, demonstrations and valuable dialog.
Innovate is The Ohio State University’s annual conference exploring teaching and learning with technology. The highly engaging one-day event is built upon six years of successful conferences: 95% of 2014 participants learned something that could change the way they think about or do their job, 96% reported they would like to attend a similar event in the future, and the repeat attendees every year support this number. Innovate is hosted by Ohio State’s Office of Distance Education and eLearning.
While geared toward OSU faculty, with participation numbers growing each year of the conference, so too have professional development sessions relevant to outreach education and Extension initiatives. And in 2016, the OSUE Ed Tech Unit will be hosting a post-conference event for OSU Extension on May 12th. Innovate will be held at the Ohio Union, while our Extension event will be hosted at the 4-H Center. More details can be found here.
To be updated when registration and other details for Innovate become available, you can sign up to receive email updates or follow @InnovateOSU on Twitter. We’ll also share updates here on the Ed Tech blog!
We hope to see many of our Extension colleagues this year at Innovate in May!
Deana Namuth-Covert, the Director of e-Learning for CFAES, and her team have created a needs assessment to survey CFAES faculty and staff. The results of this survey will determine future workshops and trainings college-wide on topics such as online course design, as well as specific tools such as Carmen, Moodle, etc.
Because of the ongoing partnership between the the CFAES e-Learning team and the OSUE Ed Tech unit, Extension professionals are encouraged to participate in the survey. This way, we can identify areas of collaboration in our college, as well as across the University.
Questions? Contact Jamie.
A collaboration between OSU Extension’s Ed Techs and professionals from New Mexico State University’s Learning Games Lab and Media Productions over the past year has produced a handy decision chart for Extension professionals who are interested in developing mobile apps. NMSU’s Barbara Chamberlin, who directs the Learning Games Lab, developed the large majority of this flowchart which walks individuals and teams through the (very involved) decision-making process that may or may not lead to the creation of an app.
PDF version for printing: so-you-want-to-make-an-app-flow-chart-with-color-v6-ugrxmt.pdf
If you or your program / project team are interested in creating a mobile app, walk through the various steps of the flowchart. If you feel an app is still appropriate and worth the time / monetary commitments, contact Jamie or Heather to discuss how to move forward.
Questions or comments about mobile apps or the decision chart? Let us know in the comments!
With so many options available to Extension professionals to deliver educational information online, it’s difficult to know which tools and learning environments are more suitable for different curricula or program topics. Some tools available to us operate in a more formalized learning environment – like an online course for credit or certification. Examples of formal learning tools are Moodle or Carmen. Most Extension programs should not utilize Carmen, since participants need to have a name.# in order to access the course. Informal learning tools are blogging platforms (u.osu.edu), social media, educational webinars, Twitter Chats, and now even Live streaming. These are tools that can get much of the same information out to an online audience, but in an informal way. Remember to use the POST method when being strategic about what technology and learning environment you use… start with People… not with the technology. Below are some examples of when a formal learning environment would be appropriate, and when an informal approach makes more sense.
If you are currently teaching a face-to-face or online program that awards certificates or credit once the participant has completed the program, than it would be more appropriate for this program to be created in Moodle or a similar formal learning environment platform. If your class requires a lot of hands-on learning and application, it may be more appropriate for it not to go online and remain as a face-to-face program.
Examples of how it can be applied:
If you plan to focus on a topic theme over a specific period of time (an example would be sending out educational information and facilitating classes on local food during the summer months), than an informal learning tool like utilizing a blog or posting to social media would be more appropriate.
Examples of how it can be applied:
Online audiences in 2015 take it upon themselves to search for educational information they’re looking for. Continuing education is becoming much more informal than it ever has been in the past because people tend to search what they want to learn and informally network with others who want to learn the same things they do. This gives us as Extension professionals the opportunity to tap into this desire and follow-up with previous program participants at the same time. With today’s online audience in mind, informal learning environments are much more effective for this.
Examples of how it can be applied:
What are your thoughts? Any other suggestions for formal and informal learning environment tools that we can utilize in Extension?
A while back, those in Extension received an invitation to register for a CFAES Online Course Design Workshop. The workshop is being held simultaneously in Wooster, Columbus, and virtually NEXT Wednesday, May 13th. But there is still time to register! The day will consist of walking through hands-on learning to design online curriculum and/or trainings via Moodle or Carmen. (Note that only those with name.# accounts can access Carmen courses, so it may not be an appropriate tool for Extension online programming. Moodle, however, is still appropriate tool for any course or training that requires or offers a certificate upon completion.) This workshop has been a collaborative project between our new CFAES Director of Online Learning and Engagement (Deana Namuth-Covert), Instructional Development Specialists at ATI, myself, and many others.
I will be attending a portion of the workshop in Columbus and will be available for any questions Extension colleagues in attendance might have. I will also send out a follow-up announcement to Extension participants after the workshop. Look for a blog post in the coming days on the differences between formal and informal learning environments, and when which is most appropriate to utilize.
~Jamie
More information on the Online Course Design Workshop:
Eric Stafne, Extension Professor from Mississippi State University, has posted a very interesting and thought-provoking 5-part series on the eXtension Educational Technology Learning Network’s blog this week. In this series, he discusses his favorite definition of digital scholarship, how digital technology and scholarship best connect, outlines barriers to digital scholarship and offers solutions to how Extension can address these barriers.
I encourage everyone in Extension who is interested in traditional media, digital media, and scholarship, as well as the future of academic content, to read this series and offer your input on the digital scholarship blog posts. You can also Tweet your reaction and thoughts using the #EdTechLN hashtag and be part of the conversation.
Click here to access the entire digital scholarship blog post series by Eric Stafne.
During the entire month of May, the #EdTechLN is shining the spotlight on digital scholarship and its impact on Extension. Next week’s #EdTechLN TweetUp (May 7th at 2:00pm EST) will focus on this topic. You can join and follow the TweetUp by going to: twubs.com/edtechln If you’d like to take a look at the last TweetUp discussing digital scholarship, which focused on “Traditional Pubs. vs. Digital Content” you can access the summary here.
It should also be noted that we’re addressing digital scholarship questions and issues here in Ohio. The Extension Promotion and Tenure Committee is working hard to discuss solutions to how we define quality digital media and content. A handout presented to the P&T Committee to begin this discussion is below:
The Ed Techs have shared several examples of online writing best practices in the past couple of years, including one created by CommTech and one from the CDC. This morning, I came across another one. Below is a Slidedeck from Jennifer Chilek (Ed Tech for eXtension’s Network Literacy CoP) on writing for online audiences.
In the slides below, she includes examples of best practices as well as succinct info that’s usable and to-the-point. If you have questions about converting content that’s currently in a traditional pub or curriculum into quality content more suited to an online audience, please let us know in the comments below or don’t hesitate to send me an email (seger.23).
Have an iPad or iPhone and want to learn how to quickly capture and edit video on the go? Ohio State’s Office of Distance Education and e-Learning (ODEE) is offering a brief hands-on workshop April 10th at 9:00am in Stillman Hall. The workshop will focus on using the iMovie app for Apple devices.
Click here for more information.
If you are interested in one of the day-long video creation workshops the Ed Techs offered last year, you’re in luck! We’re currently in the process of scheduling three more workshops around the state in 2015 that will feature two software tools: one for Windows and one for iOS. We’ll announce the workshop dates sometime in April – stay tuned to the blog!
Last week, the Ed Techs hosted an online training about utilizing webinars as a teaching tool. The PPT is below, as well as a summary of the main points. A recording link to the webinar itself will be included as soon as we receive it.
We know how busy you are, and so the Ed Techs are offering to provide preparation training, hosting, and “back-end” support for program and support staff who wish to present educational webinars in 2015! These will not be professional development webinars we are all used to, but rather webinars intended to educate our online clientele (How to Respond to Temper Tantrums, 3 Simple Ways to Stick to Your Budget, How to Diagnose Pest Disease – as examples). We are requesting that individuals interested comment on this post, or contact us directly with the following information:
Send the above information to any of the Ed Techs-
Jamie Seger: seger.23
Kim Roush: roush.143
Heather Gottke: gottke.4
7 Tools for Using Webinars to Teach
Planning:
Design:
2. Visual Appeal: large images, one key point on each slide
3. Layout/ Structure: divide content into 10 minute segments or less, set up webinar session to promote interaction with different pods, discussions, polls, and activities
Interactive Elements (demonstrated in CarmenConnect):
4. Polling / Quiz / Questions
5. Chat Box
6. Whiteboard
7. Online Search
Link to Recording: TBA