Tools of the Trade

The purpose of this week’s blog is to take the part of an instructional designer by recommending appropriate training tools for one of the three scenarios presented.  I’ve chosen the first scenario which is a typical example of required training for a large national corporation with six regional offices.  Rather than call all designated employees to one site at considerable expense to the company, it seems a more efficient form of training would be the utilization of tools appropriate for computer-based distance training.

Two requirements stressed by the corporation are that the training involve sharing information via screen captures and documents, and also involve participation via ongoing collaboration.  A requirement outside the scenario that frames our decision-making is that we recommend Web 2.0 tools beyond the use of a course management system (CMS).

A computer management system such as Blackboard, Angel, Moodle, or D2L is necessary to manage the logistics of registration and notification for the training, a delivery system for course content, dropbox capability for submitting activities, a discussion board for asynchronous communication and reflection, an internal e-mail system for private communication when necessary, assessment capabilities to further verify participation and knowledge gain, as well as a grading system to record compliance for the training program.

One technology recommended beyond the CMS is a screen capture and editing program to be used by instructors and students as a way to utilize visual communication.  A second technology must meet the need for both a synchronous workspace and communication.  For that a web-conferencing software either hosted or licensed is recommended.

There is a plethora of software available both free or at cost fulfilling the requirements of screen capture and web-conferencing.  The suggestions here are to consider SnagIt  [click link and scroll down to video clip] as the screen capture tool and Elluminate as the web-conferencing tool.

The use of screen capturing tools has the obvious advantage of showing visually the step-by-step process required in executing a skill.  It also is helpful in visualizing a difficult concept.  With the added use of editing tools, one can turn a plain screen capture into something that is both captivating and instructional.  Captions and objects such as arrows, callouts or boxes can be added to highlight important and key points in a visual.  These screen  captures can be utilized independently for presentation in the computer-basd training or employed in a PowerPoint or video presentation created with a video production tool such as Camtasia Studio.

A web-conferencing tool may prove to be more useful for instructional and collaborative purposes than a video-conference.  Many web-conference products provide four components: participant privileges, chat box, audio capability, and especially important, a whiteboard for displaying drafts of documents, notes, graphics, even videos.  These web-conferencing programs or sites provide breakout rooms, web-cam capabilities to see participants, and again especially important, the ability to record and archive live meetings.

A tool like Ellluminate serves the moderator/teacher for instructional purposes if needed beyond the course delivery via the CMS but also serves the students by providing a joint workspace and asynchronous communication for collaborative projects.   This is probably superior to workspaces provided through a wiki because the communication can be live/synchronous.  San Jose State University utilizes Elluminate and the Library & Information Services provides substantial assistance to students and teachers in the use of this particular web-conferencing tool.  Especially helpful might be the Elluminate Participant Orientation Slides. Here’s another PowerPoint presentation about Elluminate from the Wimba/Elluminate which is in the process of being purchased by Blackboard.

Here’s a final link with excerpts from two articles / sources concerning the use of screen capture for instructional use by both teachers and students and an analysis report by what-when-how.com comparing two web-conferencing systems.  Although not a discussion of Elluminate, the excerpt presents information about qualities to be sought in a web-conferencing program.

Although this was an exercise for a course in the Instructional Design program at Walden University, these two Web 2.0 tools should be considered as standard tools for any web-based / computer-based course or training program.  Whether it’s SnagIt for screen capture or Elluminate for web-conferencing, these tools help augment the capabilities of a CMS program and even can be appropriate authoring or collaborating tools for non-instructional use.  With so many competing versions of these programs or sites, especially the ones that are free, open or for trial use, these tools are surely worth investigating.

MindMap for Distance Education

I. Wk 1 Assignment: Define Distance Education

Our understanding of distance education has naturally developed over time but also seems to have progressed exponentially with the advent of electronics and those little things called micro-chips and sub-processors.  I dare say that if you ask most people about distance education they will usually think of e-learning and online learning.  Forgotten are the days of the old correspondence courses that were offered for professional development, not for academic, degree-seeking programs.  But in time that changed and as our main text reveals, by the beginning of the 20^th century, colleges were getting in on the deal and offering first correspondence courses for certain academic courses and eventually for an entire degree program.

The first influence of technology was, of course, the use of radio and records as the medium for distance education. These forms of the phenomena lacked the important component of 2-way synchronous communication and interaction that made these courses perhaps more challenging to take and complete than the highly interactive e-learning courses of today.  The radio, as has been true in the commercial market, was eventually superseded by television and eventually closed-circuit television which provided first of all the visual element to education and human relations and also eventually allowed for the telephone to be used as a tool making the communication 2-way and synchronous.

In the 80s I participated in the Eastern Virginia Writing Project and my project was one of ten selected to be presented on local cable TV for English and writing teachers in the Williamsburg area.  A video camera was set up in my school’s library for the session and we used the regular landline telephone for asking and answering questions.  The local station videotaped the sessions and that was the equivalent of today’s archiving web-conferences, available for viewing by those not able to attend the live session.

Of course, the cathode ray tubes of television were eventually replaced with circuit boards and transistors and micro-processors.  We were entering the age of the computer with user-friendly interfaces and wired networks which eventually gave way to wireless networks like the World Wide Web.  All of this is what makes up the internet which now seems to be the only form that one thinks of concerning distance education.  The interest in social learning has led to other phenomena that seem to be part-and-parcel of distance education.  That’s the integration of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook, but also the use of social viewing through YouTube, Vimeo or Slideshare and Prezi.

What will be the next avenue taken in the advancement of distant education?  I suspect it will come through the phenomenon of open education.  Whereas distance education currently has the appearance of academic institutional-ization, open education suggests the idea that education truly can’t be bound by corporations or academic institutions but conforms with the thought that knowledge is free and should be made available to everyone.  Of course, many will want to get credit for what they learn for free, and open education will probably succeed at developing a system that acknowledges a person’s achievement in learning.