onlinelearningcoursedesign

I'm working on a new pathophysiology course and have been making more animated videos. Here is one of my new videos on hearing loss. 

  As I was learning to use Adobe Captivate to produce interactive activities for my online courses, I decided to push the envelope per se and attempt to produce a game.  After about 40-50 hours of work, the Circulatory System game was complete. The goal of this game is for students to learn the human circulatory system by navigating through it in order to find hidden robots and scientists. The game essentially maps out the entire circulatory system as arteries and veins are represented by "hallways" in a science fiction lab setting. The game includes a screen that tallies how many robots and scientists were found and the player is rewarded with a success screen when finishing the game.  From a Captivate perspective, the game includes a lot of advanced actions and variables to keep track of the player's path and actions. I really found these to be a challenge in getting everything to work.  My efforts in developing this game and many more interactive activities was re...

 Just finished grading one batch of assignments and thought I would do a bit of Googling to find some relevant research regarding online course design before my upcoming Zoom lecture.  During this time of Covid 19, a lot of us have been extremely busy in converting face-face courses to hybrid or online formats. Sometimes, it is difficult to avoid "dumping" PowerPoints and notes used in a face-face class into an LMS, especially when working under time constraints.  My search yielded some good results. One of which is this graphic regarding student preferences in online course modalities.  I've been a big proponent of incorporating multimodal and microlearning activities in my online courses. I know these can be time-consuming to produce, but the payoff in student learning is (in my opinion) worth it.  Please take a look and share if you'd like. There is a link to the image at the bottom as well.  Take care and be safe,  Dr. Bruce Forciea Link to Article...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Several_empty_red_pens.jpg Giving Student Feedback Many years ago, back when I started teaching online, I had a problem that puzzled me – students didn't take kindly to my feedback. They knew that my message was good for their improvement, but they just hated it – the feedback was from hell. A few of the students even mentioned having stomach pains when they received my weekly emails. Basically, my message was too negative and difficult to accept. Were these students way too sensitive or … God forbid…was I at fault here? Was I that harsh? Maybe…I just didn't like the idea that so many students hated my feedback, and I felt compelled to fix this situation. After some research and a lot of trial and error changing the feedback messages into a more palatable version, my problem was resolved! Now, students email me, thanking me for the constructive feedback they received. What a change! Here are my suggestions to improve y...