Field of dreams e-learning

In the film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character hears a voice saying 'if you build it, he will come'; 'it' being a baseball field and 'he' being the great baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson. Okay, so I haven't been hearing voices and I'm not expecting any sports legends to use my e-learning resources, but I did built it (a screencast site inside the University's VLE) and he/they (users) did come - some of them are even spending hours looking at the content, which so far is not complete but there's probably around 4 hours content on there.

Anyway, the point being I had an idea I felt pretty sure was a good one and now people are coming. The unfortunate part is that I'm moving jobs so won't be able to continue it at Manchester, but will probably do something similar at Sheffield after I arrive. All posts have to have an image:



So, any e-learning boffins out there - building a dedicated screencast site is not that much work, it is very effective within existing VLE technology and students will use it. So far I've got about 160 users but this number should rise once the semester goes on. That's it for now.

Screencast Tour

I've been working on a new site at the University of Manchester to host all my screencast content. The content is all locked away inside the University's virtual learning environment (VLE) which is now Blackboard rather than WebCT. Since it's locked away from public view, I did a quick screencast tour of it so that others might have a peek. The video below is a little small to get the full effect, but just sit really close to the screen. All content was produced using Camtasia (from 3.0 to 5.1) and is delivered in flash because that fits in with my Rules of Screencasting.



As you can see, I've customised Blackboard for the purposes of the site and all videos have one click access via unique thumbnails and appear in a new tab/window. This should be going live to students in the next few weeks. I've just over 50 on there so far on a variety of topics but hope to increase the number according to need in the near future. It was about time for another screencasting post, so that's it for now.

Screencast Update

I've had a lot of positive feedback about my new screencasting project that I'm developing within Blackboard, the University of Manchester's virtual learning environment (VLE) of choice. A visitor from the US who is really involved in GIS education recently had the chance to see what I was doing and was particularly interested, and closer to home people also seem pretty enthusiastic. Obviously the VLE stuff is locked away from public view and it's not finished yet anyway, but here's an idea of how it will look to students:


In total so far I've completed about 30 screencasts but I aim to produce well over 100 for this project and now that I've got my production methods sorted out and streamlined I will start producing a lot more content over the summer. I'm going to continue to produce content that relates directly to different classes taught here at the University by me or by other teaching staff but I'm also going to do some stand-alone material that students can use as and when they want/need to. I don't like to script the screencasts because it can be a bit boring that way but I do have a plan that I stick to. There's a lot of advice out there but I think it's best to do what I know works after testing on students over a period time, although I do try to take on board what other more experienced developers have learned.

Finally, I think it's about time time that screencasting (or whatever you want to call it) should really be a lot bigger than it is. The technology is not new and everyone knows it can be done so why is it not ubiquitous? Before I sign off, I came across an interesting blog by a prolific screencaster last week - it's called Demo Girl and it's good reading.