Building the Internet
Course and Communicating with Students
This section provides tips on how to organize
your on-line course and how to communicate with colleagues and students.
Storyboarding
Instructional designers often use storyboarding,
a technique borrowed from the creators of movies and television shows,
to better represent media elements (video, text, audio, graphics, and animation).
Storyboards are essentially sequential screen drawings with a space for
audio and video information underneath. Storyboards are easy to use and
are quite flexible in what they can incorporate. From sketches of how the
computer screen should look at a particular point in your course to sketches
of the sequence of how a user navigates the Web, the storyboard provides
you with a way to work out on paper preliminary ideas of the look and feel
of your course.
Conferencing
and Collaboration
Electronic conferencing
and collaboration covers a wide variety
of tools and techniques used to communicate in an instructional setting,
between instructor and student (called point-to-point) and instructor (or
student) and several others (called multi-point). Conferencing and collaboration
are especially important in the on-line course environment, where instructors
have to fight the social distancing that can occur when your students can’t
access the “live” you. To insure a positive outcome in terms of learning
and course satisfaction, you will want to consider what kinds of software
technology you might employ to create social interaction opportunities
with students you may never see or talk to “face to face.” Teaching strategies
for using the Internet are provided in the section Using
Distance Education Technologies. Some of the most commonly used tools
for on-line course communication include the following:
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Listservs allow you and your students
to participate in “threaded” discussion, which means you can establish
a topic for discussion and ask students to reply with comments which you
can organize and access according to subject, date, and sender. Listservs
are accessed through e-mail.
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Bulletin boards are similar to listservs,
but bulletin boards can be accessed through a Web browser. In bulletin
board discussion groups, participants can share information by posting
questions, answers and queries about the subject in a common message database
that’s available to all those who have access.
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Chats allow students to interact with
the instructor and each other synchronously, or in real time. Along with
desktop conferencing, chats are the closest thing to a traditional classroom
meeting. The instructor can moderate the flow of a class discussion, and
students can also use chats for team projects.
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Desktop conferencing applications let
you communicate with other participants in real time via text, audio and/or
video from your own computer. Netmeeting, for PCs only, is one example
of this application. Videoconferencing over the Internet, also known as
IP
videoconferencing or H.323 (for the official standard for IP
videoconferencing,) can also be done through high-quality videoconferencing
systems such as PictureTel or Polycom.
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Collaboration tools allow participants
to collaborate in a shared space on a computer screen, as well as transfer
files, and even share applications. The most commonly used collaboration
tools include the following:
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Electronic whiteboards. Draw, import
and export graphics in real time with another participant on the whiteboard
window.
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Collaborative browsing. Direct another
party to a specific Web page during a desktop conferencing session. As
you follow links around the Web, your participant’s browser moves to the
same location.
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Application sharing. Share a file with
your participants, where you can either control the file yourself, or you
can authorize another participant to control the application you are both
working on.
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File exchange. Exchange application
files, images, and data with another party or parties during desktop conferencing
as an alternative to sharing files via e-mail attachments or FTP.
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Index