Chickering and Gamson Seven Principles and the Role of IT

While working on a report on synchronous tools for my current employer, I found an article that was really well done. The article, entitled "E-Conferencing for Instruction: What Works?" was published in EDUCAUSE Quarterly and is accessible online at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0646.pdf.

Anytime a new gadget or gizmo comes out and hits the market, people get excited and think that it is going to change the world, especially in education. Think of all the hype around podcasting, webconferencing and clickers for instance... But one thing is for sure, without a plan--including learning objectives and a set of relevant activities and assessments--a brain, and a little human emotion, you will not be able to leverage these technologies and turn them into effective delivery methods for learning. Table 1 on page 47 really illustrates that tools are opportunities for added value only approximately half of the time.

As an Instructional Designer, I work hard to ensure that instructors obtain the training needed to add value to all web-based and classroom training.

Mike Check: One...Two...

Fact #1: Synchronous classroom systems are great.
Fact #2: They are even better when people are able to use them...

I had two problems this week.

Issue #1: I realized that 90% of the user support I have to do with our Elluminate Live pilot involves showing users how to select their microphone and turn up its volume. To solve this problem, I developed a scenario to teach users how to make sure they can use their microphone--without calling me on a Sunday afternoon...

Issue #2: My Breeze Presenter 5 PowerPoint add-on doesn't work on Office 2007. I knew that Articulate could be an alternative, but since I did not have a licence, I decided to try to find another PowerPoint to Flash with voice converter - by the way, I really think that Adobe made a mistake by integrating Adobe Presenter and making it exclusively offered with Adobe Connect webconferencing suite. Anyway, 2 days later, and I resigned myself to download the 2007/Vista beta version of Articulate 5. The good thing is it works just fine.

Here is a link to the result (sorry, it is in French...): http://www.fsa.ulaval.ca/apti/Elluminate/microphones/

I hope it will work well enough to help us have a smooth ride until the end of the summer semester.

I'm Elluminated!

I used Elluminate Live 7.0 for the first time today as an Application Administrator and I have been very impressed with the ease of use of this platform. I have been so irritated with our Breeze Live pilot that it is nothing short of a miracle for me.

Since Université Laval is trying the virtual classroom, I had to copy and paste more than 40 new users. CTRL-C and CTRL-V are two shortcuts you cannot avoid when you work with IT anyway.

We are beginning a pilot with approximately 30 students on Monday. If everything goes as planned, I believe that we will be a step closer to making our decision about our next virtual classroom.