Catching Up

Since I last posted it has been an absolute whirlwind of activity for me. Trying to put together two written and recorded lectures and four quizzes a week is turning out to be stressful. But I am keeping my head above water.
I wanted to present my lectures as videos. My idea was to have a cartoon character delivering my lectures using 3D lip-synched machine animation courtesy of iClone. I was going to edit that together using Power Director a popular video editing program in the UK. I made one of those at the start of the semester greatly to the amusement of many of my students and to the chagrin of all those who did not preside over a superfast cable connection to the Internet. I must also add that Rutland State wasn’t too helpful there either. The library is in charge of streaming video here so I delivered a DVD burnt for a US DVD player to them. Well that was after I waited a couple of weeks for the boss of the appropriate department to come back from the break. She was nice on the phone but I really felt like I was doing arm twisting to get my homemade DVD on their system. AS they are a library they deal with streaming commercially available DVD’s and getting copyright for the library to use the material. My situation was just too weird with my own material so there was a lot of humming and hawing, so I was told that she they would review my material and deal with it. I was sent a link to my streamed video about 10 hours before I was due to use it for my class. That was a very scary situation for me and so actually I am glad that the students let me off the hook with that by reporting difficulties viewing the material.
Now I am taking a step back a decade and using recorded audio embedded in PowerPoint. In the mean time I have found an alternative way to stream. The technology center at Rutland State says they will do that. They were very nice people who said they are just getting into doing the video. Hmm… so do I want to touch that untested path with a bargepole? I think it would work as they seem entirely competent. My only misgiving is trying to do a semester’s worth of videos with them. They have asked for the video ‘Say six month ahead of time.’ In another life perhaps. I suppose all this comes from being ahead of the curve and if I am just patient enough it will all work out.

Online Classes Start Early

I have already noticed some profound differences between online teaching and ordinary courses in higher education. The first of those is that I had to start teaching a week before everyone else. My materials and tasks for the first week’s work had to be in place and functioning the day I opened the class. That first day of the semester was yesterday (Jan 13th: lucky for some!) and I opened the introductory material and the first reading. In an ordinary setting I would hand out the syllabus and tell my students a little about myself. Now I am entirely removed from the picture. I suppose this is what it feels like to function in an entirely Learner Centered Education[al] environment.
http://www.falkenburgh.com/SageStage1.html