Blackboard Video Tutorials

I've started working on my own BlackBoard screen videos today, but I noticed that Atomic Learning has 7 free videos available plus a full set of 93 more if you subscribe to their service, which costs $79.99 a year for an individual. I had a subscription for a year, but I didn't use it enough to renew. They currently have more than 20,000 training videos for a wide range of software applications and they are always adding new stuff. In general, their videos are good and cover the important stuff you need to know. I have found the quality of their audio to be a little lacking, however. It sounds like they overcompress everything to keep their files small.

The screen tutorials on Lynda.com are very high quality, but they primarily cater to users of professional applications like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Director, although they do cover MS Office and the Mac iLife applications. A one year subscription to lynda.com is $250, so you pay a little more for the higher quality. Lynda.com's tutorials are also available on CD/DVD starting at $49.95.

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Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

Podcast features in Blackboard 7.3

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .

Download Moodle courses from the Open University

I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this morning and they had an interesting segment about how a university in Brazil was making use of the resources from the OpenLearn project at the Open University in England. The project is similar to the Open CourseWare effort at MIT and elsewhere. In both cases, university courses are made available online and many include audio and video segments as well as the syllabus, assignments and so on. The big challenge is how to make use of these excellent materials. A persistent student might make their way through a cours e as a self-study, but I think they are more suited for modification by instructors who are teaching something similar. Maybe only a particular unit would fit into someone's course, but since these materials are offered under a Creative Commons license, they can be modified and re-used as you like. The big step (in my mind) with the OpenLearn materials is that many of them are available as Moodle courses. ...

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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