ITEC 715, Spring 2014
Class Description
In Foundations of Instructional Multimedia, you will learn how to create a wide variety of media, including text, hypertext, images, sound, animation, and video, plus interactivity features such as links and buttons. Equally important, you will learn how to leverage these different media in an instructional multimedia project that teaches a subject of your choosing.
Contact Information
Replace "at" with @ in the email address below to send me mail.
- E-mail: rayc "at" sfsu.edu
Class Slides
- Week 1: Thursday, January 30,
2014—Intro to course, e-learning demos, e-learning production
process overview, style and writing guidelines
Week 1 Supplementary Materials:
Assignments
- Due this week: Nothing
- Due next week: Topic pitch
- Week 2: Thursday, February 6,
2014—Development process, e-learning roles and responsibilities, student topic pitches, intro to Photoshop, stock photography sources
Assignments
- Due this week: Topic pitch
- Due next week: Nothing
- Week 3: Thursday, February 13, 2014—Instructional comics, Photoshop skills: changing resolution, resizing, selecting, cropping, layers, fills and strokes, text tool
Week 3 Supplementary Material
- In-Class Comic "How To": A "worked-example" showing how to do the tasks necessary to complete the in-class comic, using the script and images from the in-class comic exercise. Also describes how to save your file and what formats to generate and to turn in next week.
- Word
Balloons, an alternate method
- Thought Balloons and Cropping: A quick explanation of how to create circular/eliptical thought balloons and how to crop images for dramatic effect.
Assignments
- Due this week: Nothing
- Due next week: Comic
NOTE: You do not have to turn in the in-class comic. Due next week is a comic you create that is related to your final project topic. The in-class comic is just for you to practice your Photoshop skills before creating your own original comic.
- Week 4: Thursday, February 20, 2014—Critiquing etiquette, class critique of student
instructional comics, elements of good screen design, frames,
navigation, buttons, themes, metaphors, more Photoshop
Week 4 Supplementary Material
- Using Prebuilt Shapes in Photoshop—Some simple instructions for converting the "masked" shape layers you get when you use the prebuilt shapes in Photoshop into standard, non-masked layers.
- Color
Combos web site. Useful for choosing a set of colors that
"go" together.
Assignments
- Due this week: Comic
- Due next week: Screen Designs
NOTE: You do not have to put any content in the middle of the screen (you'll deal with the content area later in the course). For now, just design the edges of the screen, making sure you have placed each of the required elements in your design.
- Week 5: Thursday, February 27,
2014—In-class group critiques of student navigation/layout
mockups, effective use of graphics
Week 5 Supplementary Materials:
Assignments
- Week 6: Thursday, March 6,
2014—Interaction Design
Week 6 Supplementary Materials
- Context, Challenge, Activity, and Feedback: A Powerful New Design Methodology for All Designers—This is the presentation from Michael Allen I mentioned in class this week. About 37 minutes in, there is a terrific demo of an e-learning course for police officers who have to act as first responders on the scene of a possible terrorist incident. Although it uses only simple graphics and its interactivity is essentially just a series of multiple choice questions, it nevertheless is more immersive and has far better (more realistic) context than most e-learning courses I've seen.
Assignments
- Due this week: Nothing
- Due next week: Sample Interaction Deck
- Week 7: Thursday, March 13,
2014—Course Design: design document, identifying source materials, stating learning objectives, content, assessment, keeping the learner engaged, knowledge checks and other activities, mapping content to interactions/page-types
Week 7 Handouts:
- E-Learning Design Document Template
- Page Type Variety Spreadsheet Template—Use this tool to help you see at a glance if your use of page-types is suffiently varied. If not, consider modifying your design to break up large color blocks (especially large color blocks of non-interactive red). You will need to turn in a completed Page Type Variety Spreadsheet with your final project.
Assignments
- Due this week: Sample Interaction Deck
- Due next week: Design Document
- Week 8: Thursday, March 20,
2014—Group critique of student design documents, scripting
from your design documents, audio in instructional multimedia,
microphone basics, digital audio basics, simple recording and editing
with Audition.
- Week 9: Thursday, March 27, 2014—NO CLASS: SPRING RECESS
- Week 10: Thursday, April 3, 2014—Class Presentation #1: Design Document and Sample Interaction Deck.
Week 10 Handouts:
Assignments
- Due this week: Final Sample Interaction Deck and Final Design Document + Presentation
- Due next week: Voice-over Narration
- Week 11: Thursday, April 10, 2014—
In-class critique of some student recordings, sound for
your splash page, creating theme music with GarageBand, multitrack
editing and mixing with Audacity, saving in mp3 format
Week 11 Supplementary Materials:
- Introducing GarageBand—A pretty good GarageBand tutorial from IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis)
Assignments
- Due this week: Voice-over Narration
- Due next week: Voice+Music Mixdown
- Week 12: Thursday, April 17,
2013—In-class critique of some student recordings, examples
of video in instructional multimedia, producing and editing video,
quick intro to iMovie
Week 12 Supplementary Materials:
Assignments
- Due this week: Voice+Music Mixdown
- Due next week: Video
- Week 13: Thursday, April 24, 2014—In-class critique of some student videos, the page type variety spreadsheet
Week 13 Supplementary Materials:
- ID Style and Writing Checklist—Use this checklist (from Week 1) to help you make sure that your script is adhering to the appropriate class style guidelines. See the handouts from Week 1, above, for more details on specific style guidelines.
- Final Project Grading Guidelines—This documents the point-assignments for the various elements I'll be looking for in your final projects.
Assignments
- Due this week: Video
- Due next week: Script
- Week 14: Thursday, May 1, 2014—Recent research on assessments; leveraging e-learning techniques back in the (non-virtual) world. Workshop Day 1
Week 14 Supplementary Materials:
- Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968.—This is the research paper on testing vs. studying that we will review in class today.
- Performance Learning Filter: Are Your Learning Designs Increasing Organizational Performance?--An archive of a free webinar presented by Scott Colehour, Solutions Architect and Co-Founder of Allen Interactions. The webinar took place online at 11:00 AM Thursday, April 23rd, 2009. Check out the excellent demonstration of two different e-learning designs, both based on the exact same learning objectives. The first is like most e-learning that I see (boring and not terribly effective). The second shows how much more can be done when the instructional designer stops thinking his or her task is to present content, and starts thinking about how to get the learner to demonstrate the desired skills in an appropriate context.
- The Primary Components of Interactive Learning Experiences: Context, Challenge, Activity, and Feedback—Free archive of a webinar by Michael Allen given Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 10:00 AM. Contains a wonderful demo of an e-learning course that leads with a challenge and has more in common with a video game than with traditional (he might say "boring") e-learning.
- Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning—My short review: Michael Allen's first three books on e-learning are some of the most practical and interesting such books I have ever read. This one and Designing Successful E-Learning are particularly outstanding. These books will likely change your view about what good e-learning should strive to do and how it should go about accomplishing its goals. Allen's principles, like "Put the learner at risk" or "Don't start at the beginning" or "Test before telling" run counter to much ingrained practice in the industry. But radical though they are, the principles he lays out are, I think, exactly what is needed to shake e-learning out of its doledrums and take it to the next level where it can actually be of genuine value to the learner. Read these books and you'll never want to design e-learning the "old" way ever again.
- A New View of E-Learning Design: Stages of Change—A free, archived Webinar by Michael Allen.
- Simulations and the Future of Learning—An interesting talk by Clark Aldrich, author of Learning by Doing and Simulations and the Future of Learning
- Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED)—The site that contains the full-length videos of the talks by Evelyn Glennie and Eva Vertes that I excerpted in this week's presentation. Lots of other really interesting stuff on this site; check it out if you have a chance.
Assignments
- Due this week: Nothing
- Due next week: Video Assignment (Video and slides)
- Week 15: Thursday, May 8,
2014—Review videos; Review of Karpicke et al. research paper; special presentation from Ray; remainder: Workshop Day
Assignments
- Due this week: Draft Script
- Due next week: Finished Script
- Week 16: Thursday, May 15,
2014—Workshop Day
Assignments
- Due this week: Final Script (full PowerPoint deck w/o media or links)
- Due next week: Final Project and Class Presentation
- Week 17: Thursday, May 22, 2014——Class Presentation #2: Final Project. (Final projects and final presentations are due.)