Instructional Technologies and Online Teaching Strategies

Educational games and simulations can engage students in higher-level cognitive thinking, such as interpreting, analyzing, discovering, evaluating, acting, and problem solving. Recent technical advances in multiplayer, user-created virtual worlds have significantly expanded the capabilities of user interaction and development within these simulated worlds. This ability to develop and interact with your own simulated world offers many new and exciting educational possibilities. This article explores the technical capabilities and educational potential of these new worlds. Additionally, it presents and illustrates a model, which uses interaction combinations, to identify course content and topics having educational applications in virtual worlds.

This presentation will show participants how to use Web 2.0 social networking tools like LiveJournal and free online media content (podcasts and short films) to create dynamic learning communities. We will look at specific examples of how to integrate Web 2.0 in face-to-face, hybrid, and fully online courses.

Most lecture capture systems are too tech-heavy, too expensive, require too much training, and are too difficult to adopt across a campus. Until now. TechSmith’s newest beta software, Camtasia Relay, changes everything. Join Michigan State University and see how they’re better connecting with students, anytime, anywhere.

Critique_It is an online virtual classroom critique system originally developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Croquet and ported to Second Life. The critique is a rudimentary instructional methodology in the arts that can be applied to most other disciplines. Critique_It provides an environment for simulating authentic learning strategies and allowing the possibility for feedback from peers and experts from outside the campus.

The presentation will give a development perspective to incorporating a virtual field trip into a newly created online entomology course. The field trip in the traditional course took students to a local farm to uncover the varying species of bugs at the farm, as well as where they lived and what they ate. As the course went online, the 3D virtual environment enabled virtual students to share experiences similar to those of the traditional students while learning the same content.

An online virtual case-based management system was developed to provide an interactive learning portal using simulated case scenarios, collaborative learning, decision support, and real-time assessment of student motivation and decision skills. Learn how to dynamically create and implement online case scenarios using virtual characters, speech, and other media-rich content.

Course lecture capture provides many positive benefits to enhance student learning by providing on-demand access to recorded class lectures. We will share the results of our pilot including implementation challenges, student and faculty feedback, and assessment data.

In 2002, UNH inaugurated a Faculty Instructional Technology Summer Institute (FITSI) to help our faculty explore emerging instructional technologies and instructional design best practices. This session will report how the overwhelming success of FITSI has led us to expand it to a national audience.

WordPress, an open source content management platform, can be used to implement Web 2.0 learning initiatives without the need for a team of programmers. We will demonstrate how Yale is using WordPress for collaborative script analysis, audience driven theater events, and courses where students contribute images and podcasts.

The blended learning environment (part online and part face-to-face) introduces both faculty and students to emerging technologies and meets students where they reside in a digital- and media-driven world. This presentation will discuss how UMass Dartmouth's Instructional Development team created training to assist faculty in developing effective blended learning experiences.