TCS Instructional Design

Hey team, Won and I are at the Sloan-C Emerging Technology conference (#et4online), and I wanted to share some ideas with you all regarding the utilization of audio and video features in our discussion boards.  The presenter who inspired this post is Michelle Pacansky-Brock who wrote an ebook about VoiceThread. Her institution bought a site license so that students could make comments on VT via phone, ensuring that technology wouldn't be a barrier to student participation. My thoughts are that our online and most blended students have both computers with webcams/microphones and smartphones. I think that in Canvas we don't need to rely so much on VT to facilitate an audio/visual discussion, as these features are integrated into the learning platform. Michelle conducted research in her classes via surveys and discovered that when she as an instructor left voice and video comments, 97% of the students appreciated such comments. However, 75% of the students were unwilling ...

These application programming interfaces (APIs) are all the rage these days.  We hear about them in online commerce, social media, and now they are flooding the world of education and online learning.  So what are they exactly? An API is a way for websites, programmers, and applications to communicate with each other, exchanging information.  If I have a database with information that I would like to disseminate then I can develop an API and make that accessible to the world.  External developers can then create APIs with the purpose of communicating with my  API, and thus extract the information that I am making public.  It's similar to the notion of "my people will contact your people and we'll make this happen".  Only the people in mention is actually a software-to-software exchange. Why APIs are important APIs are a way to access information or databases which would otherwise be inaccessible.  For example, my database might be protected ...

This last week I had the opportunity to attend Instructure's annual conference which focuses on it's flagship product, Canvas.  Founded in 2008, Instructure launched Canvas in 2011, and in that same year hosted its first annual conference.  The attendance at the first conference was meager, but in 2012 the attendance numbers grew to 600 attendees.  This year marked the third annual conference, with 1,200 attendees and a giant inflatable panda mascot flocking to the resorts of Park City.  Including staff and volunteers, some 1,500 people gathered to present and attend sessions.  After-hour festivities were themed based on the 1980's and included a conference carnival, visits from the Ghostbusters, a DeLorean (yes I had to google the spelling), and concerts from an 80's cover band and MC Hammer himself. The festivities were grand (and the 80's florescence was blinding), but the real value of the conference was obviously in the sessions.  Here are a few ...

Below is an excellent blog post from 1stwebdesigner.com detailing the functional use of Dropbox in a professional milieu. To view the post from their website, head over to http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/dropbox-tips-and-tricks/

Hey all, so quite a while ago I was wondering how to embed Google Calendars into a course. At the time I had no SMEs who were interested in integrating (alliteration) such a thing into their courses. But now I have a couple who are asking me to do this for them. It is actually an incredibly easy process, and the end result is very professional. I decided to create a screencast for my SMEs (who are jointly collaborating on a couple of Fall courses), and am going to embed it below:

This is a simple post. We discussed flash CS4 professional during today's L&L. I decided to start from scratch and go through the tutorial again with you guys via a screencast. So go ahead and get your hands dirty. (FYI, I had to break down the video into two parts) Part I   Part II

I just wanted to put up a recap of what I went over yesterday. This should be useful for Nicole and Gia, who didn't make it for that portion, as well as for anyone who would like to go over that again. The short description of my portion yesterday was that there are a wealth of resources and materials built right into PowerPoint that most people don't know about (or they don't realize the possibilities available). We are able to take what is given to us and modify it and truly make it our own.

This will be a nice and easy post to get through. Even Mark might enjoy this one! I thought that I should just share a couple of little computer-related things to make your life slightly easier every now and then. Let's start with the Windows Task Manager—you know, that guy you pull up whenever something starts freezing and you want to shut it down quickly? How do you specifically pull up the task manager? That's right, you probably press [Ctrl + Alt + Delete], wait for a bunch of options to come up, and then choose the task manager from the options. Well guess what? Just press [Ctrl + Shift + Esc] , and the task manager will pop up much quicker! Try it. Also, you know how sometimes you are rapidly churning out some document and you type a mistake, but you are typing so fast that you've already typed another 2-3 words? That really stinks, because the mistake was just close enough the where the cursor is that you don't want to bother wasting time to gra...

Some of my favorite things about this thing called the world wide interweb are the lecture-based websites like TED, Fora.tv, and RSA. A few years ago, RSA pioneered this concept of accompanying short lectures with whiteboard drawings. It is now a common technique used by the likes of apple, dropbox, etc., in order to demonstrate their "innovative" products. Anyway, I thought that I would share my top five ID-related(ish) RSAnimates with you all. Enjoy!

Okay, this post really will be short and sweet. This is a tip that I learned very recently while collaborating with a SME. Like many or (hopefully) all of you have already done, this SME signed up for an account with dropbox. She downloaded the program onto her work computer and promptly began loading up important documents for the class we are working on together into one of her folders. Then she emailed me and gave me her username and password so that I could access the files. I promptly emailed her back and told her that it would probably be best if she never disseminated that information to anyone. Instead I gave her instructions on how she can simply "share" her folder with me so that I could have access. It is incredibly easy to share dropbox folders, and it is much more preferable than emailing back and forth all the time. This also ensures that as long as she makes changes to the file that is in the dropbox folder, then I will have access to the latest docu...

Yea, I know that it has been a while since the last post. I've been busy lately! Anyway, this one will be very short and sweet and perhaps moderately useful every once in a while. We will discuss how to modify the properties of a horizontal rule <hr>. <hr>'s have been revered as rogue html elements for many years now. They don't behave well and often when styled they appear differently based on which browser you are using. So why bother even learning this, you ask? And I answer: I don't know. So let's get into it, shall we? In days past, you could actually style <hr>'s using pure html. You could type something like <hr size="5px" width="90%" align="center"> and it would actually render. But that is all deprecated now. As is becoming the trend with everything web-design related in terms of formatting, you'll want to switch over to CSS for that stuff. Let's begin exploring the possibiliti...

What up? I have a couple of CSS gems I wanted to share with you. This first one is called a top shadow. Here is the effect: Compare this version to the not so fun version: Here is the code for that little effect: Another little gem is putting a drop shadow under images. Here is a screenshot within eCollege with two images, one has a drop shadow: If you like that shadow as it is, then use this code: Okay, now stay with me. That code should put a drop shadow on all images on the page (if you have multiple images). The code is essentially saying that whereever there is an <img>, then the browser is to apply those settings. You can also put drop shadows on <div>s if you would like. Just change the img { … } so that it reads If you want some pictures to have shadows and not others, then create a class. In the above example I had the two pictures and for the sake of illustrating the drop shadow, I wanted one to have the shadow and the oth...

Okay, onto the final half of the CSS button tutorial. This part will deal with the code (CSS and HTML) and is quite easy. You will need two pieces of code for this to work. The CSS portion can be found here . The HTML portion is simply (button text) And on to the video part of the instruction. Again I would suggest watching this in fullscreen at 720p HD :  

This is part 1 of what I wanted to get through during the Lunch and Learn this week. I decided to start from scratch so that everyone can follow along from the beginning, and I tried to be as thorough and as brief as possible. This is really kind of an intermediate tutorial, but you should be able to follow along without any problems and do the steps to come up with a good product. *note: you'll want to blow this up to full screen and watch in 720p HD

Hey all, last month I was trying to work with the eCollege tech guys in coming up with a way for us to stream video in our courses locally, instead of having to rely on Youtube or Vimeo (which I still don't think is a bad alternative). Anyway, a workaround that might be feasible for us is to actually publish the video within Captivate, and then upload the Captivate project onto the eCollege page as web content. It's quite a bit of a workaround, but it may be worth it if your SME really could benefit from video in his/her course. I am going to insert a blog post from another blog, which does a good job of laying out how to use flv + Captivate in order to get videos up in eCollege. Ignore the part about getting a service from which to stream the videos. When you get to the step where you choose a source from which to upload the video, we will upload it locally and not from a a web server, unless you are interested in FTP-ing into the eCollege servers and streaming it from th...

Alright team, let's break some new ground with this blog post. I am sure you guys know by now that I am all about using the tools and software that we have to be the best designers ever. One of the richest resources that we have at our disposal is also perhaps the most under-utilized: Photoshop CS4. This is the most elite image editing software on the market right now and costs somewhere around a thousand dollars per license (of course we get it through the eLearners Suite—lucky us!!) Anyway, I thought that I would throw together a demonstration so that you guys can at least get some exposure the world that is Photoshop. In a past life, I was something of a Photoshop guru of sorts. I have forgotten a great deal, but still know a little. In this video I will demonstrate how to create reflections of images. Reflections are a big deal right now in print advertising and web design, and much of it is done very poorly. But in reality good reflections can actually be pretty simp...

This one will be short and sweet. I write this post intentionally on the eve of our unveiling of the new TCS websites (next week, yea!). First of all, I want to credit Mark for passing along some javascript code about three months ago. If this page does not change within a few seconds, please click here Of course, you would change YOURURL.html with the link to the page where you want the student directed. That code as written will show your url within the window in eCollege. Quick note, if you want the target page to open up in a new window (instead of within the eCollege frame), change target="_self" to target="_blank". If you want it to open in the same browser window, but in a new tab, use target="_new". Unfortunately, this code is now deprecated. This means that the page will not pass W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict validation,  *yawn*   but that is not really important to us. Again, kudos to Mark for the javascript, but I am going to show yo...

For those of you who are interested in exporting Captivate 5 SWFs for use in Articulate Presenter, there is an interesting dilemma preventing us from importing Flash Movies. We will address a workaround for the dilemma in this blog post. My hope is that this issue will become irrelevant as Articulate upgrades their standards, but for the moment it seems as though Articulate only recognizes Flash Movies written in ActionScript 2. The current design standard is ActionScript 3. ActionScript is essentially the code used to define the various flash components in the SWF. It was originally developed by Macromedia, but now Adobe owns it. For those of you who are still using Captivate 4, the solution is actually fairly simple. When you publish your SWF file in Captivate, make sure that the settings are set to publish using AS2 (ActionScript 2). To import it, simply click on Flash Movie (in the Insert group of the Articulate ribbon) and locate your SWF file. The Captivate 5 users wil...

Okay team, by now you should have an idea of the functionality of html. Html is code that allows you to write in a language that web browsers can read. You use the html tags to define certain elements on the page such as: <h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>This is a paragraph.</p> But there is a main problem with using html. It is not useful for defining large quantities of elements on a page. A very relevant example is that some designer prefer the font in eCollege to be size 3. In order to do this, you highlight everything and select "3" from the font dropdox in the visual editor. The result is a whole lot of <font> tags throughout the page. But what if you could say once and for all "I want all the font to be size 3 unless I specify otherwise (and quit making my code all cluttery!!!)". Come to think of it, who is it that decided the "default font size anyway?? The font, it turns out, is defined either by 1. the browse...

Hey -- check out this article from from Inside Higher Ed called The Thinking LMS (this is the same site Gia pointed us to for the Blackboard/eCollege comparison ). Basically, the University of Phoenix wants to build an LMS that will automatically present course content in the modality that best suits each learner... kind of like how Amazon, Netflix and iTunes can predict what we like to read, watch and listen to. That's a pretty provocative idea, given our current model of "the course is the course" which basically hopes that one size does fit all. How many of us have had a conversation with a TCS SME about building in some flexibility for different students' learning preferences? While the idea of "learning style" has become pretty cliché in our field by now, there's of course a lot of truth to it, and I'd encourage us to bring up the idea with our more engaged SMEs... even if it's just to gauge their understanding of the concept and h...