Do you ever want a YouTube video that you are using as part of a lecture or embedded in a presentation to start at particular time? It's easy to do: find the point on the video from which you want the playback to begin (3:43 in our example), then click Share, and check the check-box that says Start at. You will see that the start time has been added to your shareable url. Easy!
Finally, the marking is finished. Now we are taking a break between two semesters. You might be in the conference/research/holiday modes. However, you are supposed to submit the unit guides for S2 in just a couple of weeks and then prepare for the unit contents. We know that and we hope this Course Workload Estimator can help you to estimate the student workload when planning for the new semester.
If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.
Course Workload Estimator
Planning your readings, assignments, and exams for your units can be challenging. And you will have to consider student workload for those learning activities. How much should we assign to the students?
We know that university has its recommendation based on the unit credit. An average study time of 24-36 hours a week is a reasonable expectation for our students. However, the research shows that the average college student in America only spends 12-15 hours per week studying.
The Course Workload Estimator developed by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University can help you to estimate the student workload based on the designs of your reading assignments, writing assignments, other assignments, and exams. We hope that the estimated results can assist you to plan your reading and writing tasks.
What is good?
What is so good about it? Let's count:
It is a tool to fill the blank. We have not seen any similar estimator for student workload.
It is easy to use and it takes only two mins to estimate student weekly study hours.
It is free.
What is not so good?
The question might be: is it really accurate? We do not know the answer, unfortunately. However, we can give it a try and see how it works in the next semester.
What's in it for us?
Students take much longer to complete a task than you do that. Even though it is not possible to estimate the workload without getting into the assignment details, you can still use this estimator to evaluate the assignment design. Then based on the results, you can change the structure, number, size, or expectations for the assignments.
It is a simple tool to use. We can spend two minutes to input the information with the designed reading materials, writing and other assignments, and exams. The web page generates the estimated student workload in the format of out of class hours per week.
And if you would like to change the design of assessments in your unit, you can just change the input and the system will calculate the workload again automatically.
If you are interested in the research of student workload and the tool, you can find more information in this further reading article.
Welcome to the exam season. We hope that the life is getting easier until it hits the point that we have to start marking the exams. If you are interested in preparing your units for the next semester, this month's video creation tool Loom can be very helpful.
If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.
Loom
Loom is a cloud-based screen recorder and video creator. Videos are widely used as teaching resources, and recently more and more teachers are trying to give video feedback to the student assignments. Screenshot of the student assignments in the video has been proven quite useful when providing feedback comment to the student submissions.
Now this entire process is made easier with Loom. The platform brings a great simplicity to the screen recording space, by allowing you to instantly record, edit and share your video.
It is integrated with Gmail. It will be so easy for you to create a multimedia email as well.
What is good?
What is so good about it? Let's count:
Well designed and it is SO EASY to use.
High-quality video
Integrated with Google Chrome and it supports both PCs and Apple computers.
Linked with your Google account. You can bring it to any new computer.
Screen recording function
Unlimited online storage for the premium version
Download as MP4 files
Free for the basic version
What is not so good?
The basic free version can only create videos up to 10 minutes. However, we don't think that it is a big problem as students won't watch long videos anyway.
It needs Google Chrome. Therefore if you are not a Chrome person, you will have to use it to enable Loom.
For the basic free version, you can only access the videos online for 7 days. You might need to download the files before that or you can refer the tool to two others to get the unlimited access.
What's in it for us?
The easiest tool so far to make webcam or screen capture videos for teaching resource or video feedback. We have run two workshops for using this tool in Monash Malaysia and the academics there absolutely loved it.
We have posted a user guide for using Loom. Take a look.
If you would like to learn to how to use the tool, please watch the following video instruction:
How are you doing in the middle of the semester? We hope that you can have a nice holiday during the Easter break. This month we are planning to introduce a very nice teamwork management tool for both teachers and students.
If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.
Trello
Trello is a project management tool which is widely used in Agile development. It is web-based and you don't have to install any software on your device. We have found that this visual collaboration tool is very useful for teamwork and project management.
It uses the kanban paradigm for managing projects. If you are familiar with the concept of lean production, you would know it was widely used by Toyota as part of its lean production, which is the secret for them to produce top quality cars with minimum cost and gains one of the top profit rates in the automotive industry.
Trello will be able to help your team to keep track of everything, end the endless email chains, organise things together, always stay in sync, and collaborate more effectively with clarity.
What is good?
What is so good about it? Let's count:
Well designed and it makes the team collaboration really easily
It has a free basic version and it is good enough
There are plenty of examples online to inspire your use
iOS and Android versions for mobile devices
The contents are mobile friendly.
Very easy to use and the learning curve is minimum
It can also be used to manage your daily tasks
What is not so good?
I think that one of the issues is that the single sign on function is not there and we cannot log in with our Monash Google accounts. Also, people might think it is too much trouble to use a new online tool to coordinate a small team project even it might be helpful.
What's in it for us?
As Mahara is still on trial, our students normally use Google Doc or just Facebook groups to coordinate their group assignments. They can use Trello for this purpose and it does a great job. You can also use it similarly for coordinating the work with your tutors and co-lecturers in your unit.
Or you can use it to plan your lesson:
Or plan a project based learning activity for the students:
There are many inspiring ways to use Trello. If you are interested, you can find more examples at: https://trello.com/inspiration.
The new semester is going to start! Have you gotten everything ready for the coming semester during last few super busy weeks? And how do you like our blog post about Create Interactive Videos with H5P from last month?
If you have any questions or you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.
Socrative
This month we would like to introduce Socrative. Teachers can initiate formative assessments through quizzes, quick question polls, and space races with Socrative. You all know that Monash will implement Poll Everywhere and MARS this semester. Socrative is also an in-class polling tool for the similar purpose. It has its special charms for this application.
What is good?
What is so good about it? Let's count:
Free account to create quizzes for up to 50 students
Real-time results display
Single sign on with Google emails
The contents are mobile friendly.
Student responses can be exported into Excel.
It is very easy to create, edit, reuse, and share the contents.
It has a Space Race assessment which is ideal for certain learning experience such as individual or group contests.
What is not so good?
This product is more popular in the K-12 programmes and there is a reason. The free account supports a 50 students session and the paid premium account supports up to 150 students per session room. It might be good enough for a tutorial but not a large lecture.
What's in it for us?
Monash has chosen MARS and Poll Everywhere, which also has a group quiz function. However, Socrative provides an easier and more interesting approach to do a team contest quiz in your classroom. If your tutorial has less than 50 students, why not give them an individual or team spaceship contest quiz as the students gonna love it:
If you are interested in finding more about Socrative, check out the introduction video below:
Happy New Year to you our dear readers. We hope that you had a relaxed holiday and are ready for the coming year of 2017. In 2017, each month we are planning to write one blog post to explore a new tool which might be useful for our innovations in teaching and learning.
If you are interested in any particular tools, just send us an email or reply to the posts. We will be very happy to help you to investigate that if possible.
H5P
This month we would like to introduce H5P, which stands for HTML5 Package. It is a free and open-source content collaboration framework based on JavaScript. The purpose of H5P is to make it easy for everyone to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 contents, such as Interactive videos, interactive presentations, quizzes, interactive timelines and so on.
What is good?
What is so good about it? Let's count:
It is totally free to use. That's a big win compared to its competitors such as HapYak, ClickView, Verse, or Vidversity.
It is by default able to add and replace multimedia files and textual content in all kinds of H5P content types and applications.
The contents are mobile friendly.
It is very easy to create, edit, reuse, and share the contents.
It can be integrated into Drupal, WordPress, and Moodle.
What is not so good?
Well, it is not integrated with Monash Moodle yet. Therefore we are not able to track student activities on that. And to create the interactive videos and other activities, you would have to upload the videos and other resources onto the H5P sites and it creates a possible copyright issue.
What's in it for us?
Create interactive course presentation:
Create interesting game quizzes:
Or my personal favourite, interactive videos:
What are we going to do this semester?
We have created a short interactive video with H5P. And we will work with at lease two academics to try to use H5P interactive videos in their units this semester. At the same time, our Senior Educational Designer Deb will work together with MOULT and eSolution to investigate the possibility to add the H5P plugin into our Monash Moodle. Once it is integrated into our LMS, it won't be long that many of us can use it in our teaching. And if you want to start to explore it now, just go to h5p.org to learn more about what it can do for your online contents.
