Mid-South Instructional Technology Conference
Teaching, Learning, & Technology
Transforming the Learning Environment
April 4-6, 2004
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Nicole Turrill Welch Track 1 - Effective Technology-Based Learning Resources |
Abstract
I created a CD of multimedia lecture presentations for my online introductory biology course for non-science majors to deliver and explain content in a way that, hopefully, increases student comprehension and appreciation of biology. Components of each lecture appeal to visual, textural, and auditory learning styles. Kinesthetic learners benefit from the on-campus laboratory component of this course. Professors wanting to create course-specific CDs must anticipate a large time investment as well as cross platform issues.
Description
Topics in Biology (BIOL 1030) is an introductory biology course for non-science majors at Middle Tennessee State University. Each semester the Biology Department struggles to meet student demand for BIOL 1030 due to increased undergraduate enrollment and space limitations in our out-dated science buildings. In addition, our growing student body is becoming more and more diverse in both their lifestyles and learning styles. Many students commute an hour or more to class and have family and job responsibilities in addition to course responsibilities. Traditional classroom courses often are difficult to balance with their busy lifestyles. Therefore, the Biology Department asked me to develop and teach an online version of BIOL 1030. I currently am teaching the first semester of BIOL 1030 Online to 24 students.
Transitioning BIOL 1030 to an online format concerned me. This is a content-heavy course. I needed to deliver the content in a way that appealed to all learning styles. After much thought, I developed a course that provides the convenience of an online course with the benefits of contact hours, in a weekly on-campus laboratory with hands-on activities for kinesthetic learners. The course-specific CD that I created delivers lecture material in a multimedia format that appeals to visual, textural, and auditory learners.
Programming the CD was the greatest challenge of this project and took well over 250 hours to create. The outline below summarizes my goals for this CD and the computer programs that I used to create products that achieved those goals.
1. Create lecture presentations that clarify and summarize the textbook readings.
I developed Microsoft Powerpoint presentations that incorporate my own drawings and diagrams as well as those from the course textbook. These files were saved as html files.
2. Create transcripts of each lecture presentation.
I created Microsoft Word documents that include my own analogies, jokes, anagrams, etc., to help students understand the material. To write these, I first recorded my traditional lectures during the Spring 2003 semester. Then, my student worker transcribed those recorded lectures. Finally, I used those files as the framework for my transcripts. These files were saved as html files.
3. Create audio files for each lecture presentation.
I recorded the transcript for each slide of all Microsoft Powerpoint presentations (180+ slides) using Apple Simple Sound. I then converted the Simple Sound files to mp3 files using Apple iTunes. These mp3 files were inserted into the appropriate Microsoft Powerpoint slide as a play-on-click animation.
4. Create a course-specific CD to deliver most of the content of the course.
I created a web page that incorporated all multimedia lecture presentations and transcripts using Microsoft Frontpage. This stand-alone CD reduces the number of times and hours that my students have to login to the campus servers for this course.
In the future, I would like to use my CD as a study tool in my traditional BIOL 1030 sections. As such, over 200 students per year would use the CD.