All entries for Wednesday 22 December 2010

Design for a discussion forum with activity workflow

The aim of this design concept is to show how a discussion forum can be structured into an activity workflow, with tasks, deadlines, and "syndication" (that is, breaking out into smaller groups to work on a sub-task). In many cases, unstructured discussions are of little value and fail to engage the students. Un-structured forum systems can have structure added by a skilled and attentive e-moderator. However, that is a costly route that can be avoided with the use of simple structures and activities.

In this case, the workflow with deadlines is presented on the left hand side. There is a degree of personalisation in that as tasks are completed either:

• the student manually marks that stage as complete
• the system recognises that the student has done what was necessary to achieve completion.

In this example, the workflow begins with the task of watching and commenting upon a video. Note that this example has just been created to illustrate how a discussion with activities and workflow would operate.

In stage 2 each participant chooses a theme to work on. This produces the smaller groups working on sub-tasks.

In stage 3, working in the theme based groups, each student must contribute at least one idea that may be used as part of the list that the group collectively creates. The task is not completed until they have submitted an idea.

Stages 4, 5 and 6 proceed in a similar fashion, with elements of discussion and activity. In stage 5, the participants in each group select the 6 best ideas and put them in order of priority. Finally in stage 6 they can view the lists made in each group and discuss how this will help with their classroom practice.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Dec 2010 14:05 |  Tags: Ideation Onlinelearning |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Design for an interactive video player

The idea works as follows:

The whole video is split into a series of chapters. A thumbnail is created for each chapter, and displayed on the storyboard at the bottom of the screen. The student may watch the entire sequence in order, or click on a thumbnail to jump to a chapter. When a chapter is playing, it's thumbnail is highlighted (in this case with a yellow border).

As a chapter plays, a timeline is displayed under the main video viewer, with a marker for each ten seconds. The student can jump to any ten second section by clicking on its marker in the timeline.

Each ten second section also has a series of comments associated with it. As the section plays, the comments are displayed in the panel on the right, along with a thumbnail of the person who made the comment. This should also contain a comment box and submit button.

In addition, it should be possible to associate alternative video with chapters and ten second sections. This could be used to show events from a different perspective.

This example uses some great videos created by Professor Carol Rutter and Jon Trenchard (actor) as part of the Unpinning Desdemona project.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Dec 2010 10:54 |  Tags: Ideation Onlinelearning |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem