I think grad school is making me crazy | Adventures in Corporate Education

• I think grad school is making me crazy | Adventures in Corporate Education

I have the comment for this post.

tags: Graduate school

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Delilah Show

I am not loyal for a specific American radio show but this one. Every night, I always turn on the radio to listen to it and surf the Internet. Why do I like it a lot? Before playing the song, the host, Delilah, always reads a short letter sent by the audiences or got the live call from them. The touching part is that by means of Delilah's soft sound with a tone of sincerity, I am able to listen to many warm stories or memories shared by different people, including love, family, friendship or just wish for the public. Sometimes, the occurrence of those stories are just like miracle, because they happened beyond the expectation. I was especially touched by these encouraging ones. Recently, since the Christmas is coming, the host has been playing lots of Christmas songs. It is not a big deal, though. She also teaches the audience that we are supposed to cherish what we have owned and give the wish to everyone. This is a good timing to not only show our appreciation for our families or friends, but also to reflect on myself. In addition to those stories, in this show, the audience usually states his or her life problems to Delilah, and hope to get the suggestion from her. Although it is kind of religious program (sometimes they talk about God), Delilah gives us good lessons which are worthy of being considered deeply.
If you are interested in it, please tune in FM98.5. The audio is also available online during the showtime. http://www.delilah.com/affiliates/affiliates.html

My Reading 12/07/2008

• Online Training for Online Faculty

  tags: highered, training, faculty, e-learning, education

  • rain faculty on the same platform their students will use.
  • Provide multiple safety nets for faculty during and after their training
  • collections of tip sheets and job aids
  • Provide multiple ways of learning for multiple learning styles.
  • have training modules produced as full text descriptions, narrated animations, step-by-step graphics, and quick checklists so that learners can use whichever one resonates with them.
  • Stretch the faculty members' skills and challenge their preconceptions.
  • Be a role model of desired teaching behaviors for online faculty
  • Your organization skills will be tested as an online faculty trainer
  • ole-modeling the self-discipline and time management abilities that you want new online faculty to have.
    
  • Remain open to feedback from your faculty trainees
  • Online instructor trainees must get practice with their writing skills. A great deal of communication in an online course happens via the written word (e-mail, discussion boards, chat, announcements, and online text readings). Be sure to include several small writing activities such as mandatory discussion or short reflective essays so your faculty trainees can keep their composition skills sharp.

• Quick Tips to Create Quick Custom Images for Your E-learning Storyboards and Demos « One-Stop Resource for Instructional Designing

  tags: storyboard, online demo, instructional design, graphics

  • Toondoo is one popular site which people use to create and publish comic strips.
  • You can also use this site to create custom images for your storyboards and e-learning demos

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Interactivity in eLearning and Creativity

• learnability matters » Blog Archive » Interactivity in E-learning

tags: communication, interactivity

• Innovating Interactivity Models in E-learning « One-Stop Resource for Instructional Designing

Recently, I have been designing the instructional interactivity for the projects in my company. One is that I created mouse tutorial for those bus and rail operators. It is admitted that they lack knowledge of how to manipulate computers, which is also another big gap and difficulty in implementing Elearning in MARTA. I would like to talk about this in the following posts. Another one is that I need to create quiz and built-in interactivity during the lessons for AVL Radio project. Therefore, I came across different blogs and read the posts about the interactivity. I know that there is a bunch of academic research related to interactivity and games, and I also read several in my master studies. Instead of absorbing those profound information, I would like to keep it simple but feasible for my current situation.
I think that meaningful interactivity is closely associated with designers' creativity and brainstorming ability. By reviewing different examples, usually the one which impresses me features that I can solve the problem step by step, or have ability to manipulate environment, set the direction, and affect the outcome of the activity. After repetitive tryout, not only did I overcome the challenge, but also I gained what I need to learn. Moreover, the design style and interface of the interactivity also needs to be appealing and well-organized. If the information looks cluttered, I would give up trying. I got another conclusion: If the learners do not feel comfortable viewing or playing with this interactivity, then they don't want to waste time and energy on it. It is a good starting point for me as an instructional designer to think about good and meaningful interactivity.
Back to creativity, why is it essential? In terms of interactivity models, I would say that those interactivity logics across a variety of interaction are quite simple, but the point is that how do you innovate new ways to present the interactivity. It takes time to generate good invention, because it is all about ideas. I have to confess that my creativity is not plentiful enough, but I am really enthusiastic about designing learner-centered and dynamic interactivity for my learners. Without this, what is the value of Elearning? It is also my belief that the accumulation of experiences and stimulation can build creativity. Speaking of my technical skills to create interactivity, I usually use Captivate and Flash. Captivate is an easy tool, but it is limited. Flash can be very customized, and generates very delicate stuff, but it involves much with action script. This is something I feel quite struggled sometimes.
I am pleased that I gain some concrete ideas of how to create good interactivity, and I also recognize what parts I need to improve.

tags: interactivity, methods, design, captivate, Flash

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My Reading 12/02/2008

• My Learning Blog: Best Practices: Using Webex for Online Collaboration

This article gives good suggestions if corporates or organizations have web-based conference through WebEx. Web conferencing or video conferencing is quite popular in business nowadays because of the appearance of these tools. Similar software also include Microsoft Office Live Meeting, WebTrain, Adobe Acrobat Connect and so on. Those applications all provide opportunities of good internaction, collaboration and communication. The reason why I noticed this post is that my company has been trying out using WebEx recently. By means of this platform, the company can deliver the training programs or courses in an economical way.

tags: WebEx, webconferencing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.