[MUSIC]
This week in the MOOC we've been looking at ways to enhance your online courses
with multimedia tools and techniques.
Incorporating images, podcasts, videos, screen casts, and Twitter feeds,
all contribute to make an online course look attractive and engaging.
Which can only enhance the learning experience of our students.
Joining me here are some academics and teaching professionals who are going to
share how they make use of these technologies in their own practice.
>> In our computer-based learning material,
we include images to brighten up the material.
Engage the students with it, and use color as well.
So we use things like graphs and maps, that sort of thing,
we'd use within our material.
So, yeah, and the students enjoy that engaging material.
>> Yeah, well, I teach anatomy, which is a really visual subject.
So we use images a lot in all of our materials, labeled and unlabeled.
Sometimes with an additional level of interactivity, so that students can add or
remove the labels to use for revision purposes as well.
>> Tim, any experiences of images?
>> Well, I'm teaching at the Institute of Education, and
my topic doesn't lend itself to using images for content.
But I think what's really important is the visual appeal or
visual framing of your online course and your VLE.
And imagery can perform a function there, so
you can use images for sign posting, for example.
And if you use imagery consistently to identify, here's the discussion,
here's a particular type of activity, and so on.
And that can help students while they're navigating through the course.
So, in that respect, I think imagery is quite important.
But it doesn't have to be restricted to imagery.
You can already do a lot with indentation and formatting the text.
And keeping text at a minimum on the front page and hiding the more,
yeah, more detailed instructions on a sub page and this kind of stuff.
So I think the visual look of your online course can make a huge difference.
>> I was just going to say, rather like, in my subject,
in diplomacy, isn't necessarily a very visual field.
But what I have been able to do in designing a dissertation module is
thinking about something like a literature survey.
And, actually, to survey the field, I have an image of a field being surveyed.
So it's a very literal way of putting an image to a piece
of text that might otherwise seem rather uninspired.
>> Yeah, so it's a way of just aesthetically enhancing the course
visually, as Ann was saying as well.
>> Yeah, not just aesthetically but also functionally.
There's quite a bit of research on these subjects.
And one important thing there [COUGH] is that the images
should always kind of reflect the message of the text and so on.
Because if they contradict then you have this cognitive dissonance, and
there's this dual coding theory, and so on.
That goes into it.
So, yeah, both have to match.