Here are some slides from a keynote presentation I did at Impact99, a social media and human resources conference in Toronto.
An App to Teach With
August 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment
This summer I designed a mobile learning organizer app called ClassCaddy to use in my courses. The app is designed specifically to solve an issue I learned about in 2010 on student exit surveys in my mass communication course: mass comm class information overload!
Collecting together the lecture videos, links, tweets, documents, podcasts, slides and various other digital learning objects in one place is the key to useability, students said.
Easily navigable, clearly organized curation of class tools makes it easier for students to discover and adopt them. Yet when that “one place” they are organized is a website, it’s so easy to get distracted by the rest of the web (well….mostly Facebook!).
Having class resources contained in a dedicated smartphone caddy app should make it easier to focus on the task at, or “in” hand.
Having said that, because a key component of any successful app is the ability to connect with friends, ClassCaddy is thoroughly socialized (Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare), and even mildly gameified (leaderboard) to encourage content sharing.
Using a CMS approach to app design lets me update the content weekly, in real-time, without having to resubmit the app for approval by Apple.
So far the Android and iOS downloads are tied. For BlackBerry users, I designed a BB-optimized mobile website here.
Adding this app to my iTunesU podcasts, SMS reminder system, and smartphone flashcards, completes my mLearning suite development projects for 2011.
I’ll wait for student feedback to see how well ClassCaddy meets their needs.
Thank you to PARTEQ Innovations for financial support, to Hayley and Annalisa for testing and UX feedback, and to MobileRoadie for great customer service.
edTech Tools for Supersized Courses
August 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment
This summer I’m designing a course for 700 offline students and 400 online ones. The topic is mass communications, media and marketing—with an emphasis on digital, social, and mobile popular culture trends.
Though we keep expanding, this class over-enrolls each year, so I opted to add some eSeats. For 2011 we reserved 100 online seats for new part time students so the course has a good mix of professionals and students—including some parents and alums I’m sure. There’s still a few seats open until 1 August.
To support such a large group, I rely on some amazing student moderators and a variety of technology solutions that scale. Here is part 1 of 2 rounding up some of the edtech tools I’m using this fall. None of these are affiliate links.
WebEx Event Centre
A pricey tool but in my opinion, event center is the mercedes benz of webinar services. 4-star customer support and enough room to offer 1,000 students a seat at a time (though I expect to see about 200 per webinar). Recordable sessions, email reminders, detailed reporting on attendance and participation, multimedia support, and live polling features. I wish it was iPad ready like WebEx Meeting Center, but then again, about 1% of my students have iPads at this point…
Remind101.com
Helping students remember deadlines, this SMS service lets profs program reminders and announcements, and requires students to opt-in (with easy opt-out) to get text messages or emails before assignments are due. My friends at Remind101 are working hard to upgrade the service this summer, adding new features for the fall. Inquiries: Brett Kopf
FlashCard Exchange, Quizlet
A multi-tool solution to get flashcards onto various student smartphones and laptops. Testing in this course is multiple choice and the world of social media marketing has more than its share of strange words. About 40% of the smartphones in my course are BlackBerry, and the only flashcard app I’ve found that works is gFlash+ (though not without causing much digital pain, par for the BBerry course). MentalCase for iPhone (paid/free). AnyMemo for Android (free). Quizlet (web-based or mobile) has free audio flashcards.
Survey Monkey, Poll Daddy
For opinion polling, feedback and course evals, these tools have been stable and solid solutions over several course offerings. I include weekly opinion polls on each lecture topic to customize the content and verify if/how it resonates with registered students. We also look at a lot of marketing case studies and do informal campaign ratings to see which messaging “sticks” with Gen Y. For live lecture polling I use iClickers. At end of term, students fill in self-assessment forms powered by Survey Monkey.
MailChimp, Gravity Forms, WordPress
Beautiful and easy-to-customize MailChimp design templates for digitally creative profs who need to send large e-mailings and track opens/click-thrus/bounces (sample campaign flyer is below). Integrated with Gravity Forms which is a WordPress plugin that allows students to opt-in to mailing lists (such as this one, offering to send an invite to an optional online webinar-walk-thru training tutorial I’ve scheduled for web conferencing newbies).
CoveritLive
For live office hour chats, CoveritLive is pretty great. Embedded on WordPress, allows me to meet weekly and chat publicly with a bunch of students at once. Chat log is cached and stays on the site for reference/records (click here for an example from my summer course). One drawback: so many irritating ads in the free version. One bonus: very cool sound effects add no functional value but still delight me.
Most of the services above have free plans and paid plans but I am using the pro version of them to allow for maximum customization, performance data, and fewer adverts.
If you’d like to take a marketing/media course with me online, Saturday mornings, this fall, get in touch. Take it for interest’s sake or to transfer credits to another degree program.
Thank you to my amazing research assistants and digital helpers Hayley, Alexandra, Brody, Brittney, and Annalisa.
Update: As of August 4th FILM240X is now sold out for Fall 2011.
