“Free” has been a popular word lately. (When hasn’t it been?) In last week’s post I introduced the free video lecture sites Academic Earth and YouTubeEDU. As an update, we can add Education Portal’s top ten universities that offer entire online courses for free: Universities with the Best Free Online Courses.

What’s that you say? Why not get your entire degree for free? Here you go: Isreali Entrepreneur Creates Free Online University

It’s really exciting to see so many educational opportunities available for free these days. Well, that is, unless you’re looking for work as an instructor. But hey, volunteering looks good on a CV, right?

It’s always fun to find free stuff on the internet: free software, free apps, free plugins, free education… Well, ok, so free education is nothing new–especially not since WISE has been offering free pedagogical training to LIS faculty and students. Now, universities and instructors are posting entire lectures online, free to anyone who wants to pick up some new knowledge.

Academic Earth, according to its website, offers “thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars”. Several well-to-do universities and professors have shared lectures. It’s also been described by Lifehacker as “Hulu for academic lectures”, after the popular Hulu site which posts videos of recent television programs.

Another source for free lectures is YouTube EDU, which is collecting video lectures from over a hundred universities across the country. It’s interesting to see competition emerging so quickly in the world of free learning materials. Time may tell how successful they are in terms of traffic.

Something that I’m left wondering, however, is how the instructors’ intellectual property is protected. As best as I can tell on Academic Earth, the videos are posted under Creative Commons licensing. The website doesn’t offer much information for faculty or universities; it’s mostly an invitation to participate in the project. The FAQ is targeted to students/viewers. While I’m all for free public lecture access, it would be nice to see more guarantee that the instructors volunteered these lectures of their own accord, and they haven’t been swiped by a university official on the sly. The videos can also be embedded onto other websites, which diminishes the likelihood of citation or credit going where it’s due. Maybe this is a risk instructors are willing to swallow for the sake of making knowledge more accessible to everyone? Then again, the nature of delivering professional services for free begs another question: who’s paying for the cow these days?

cc licensed by videoplacebo is not

cc licensed photo by marcelgermain

In its own words, eLearning Learning is “a community that tries to collect and organize the best information on the web that will help you learn and stay current on eLearning.” Their website collects and lists thousands of articles and other resources related to online teaching. Information can be searched by topic or author’s name (in case Googling yourself brings up too many results of other people with your name, perhaps). The site also offers RSS feeds for regular updates.

A Distributed Online Curriculum and Courseware Development Model

This recent article by Durdu, Yalabik, and Cargiltay at Middle East Technical University outlines a model for developing online curriculum and courseware. This may be of greater interest to instructional design teams and administrators than individual online instructors, as it analyzes specific instructional design models and theories on a program-wide level. If you have an interest in the broader theories of online learning and a curiosity about other countries’ approaches to global education, it’s worth skimming. The Avicenna Virtual Campus, for example, is a community of universities from 14 Mediterranean countries that developed 20 online course modules taught in English and the native language of the host school. It would be interesting to learn more about this community as it progresses beyond the experimental phase.

Durdu, P. O., Yalabik, N., & Cagiltay, K. (2009). A Distributed Online Curriculum and Courseware Development Model. Educational Technology & Society, 12 (1), 230–248.

Lastly, for those of you who are ready to move on from Facebook to the next social networking trend: StudyBlue is a networking site that lets students share class notes. The reasoning behind the venture is supposedly to help students study “smarter, not harder” by teaming up so they can learn more by working in groups than if they took all their own notes independently and studied them alone.

StudyBlue banner

As this article attests, some faculty are dubious of the ethical value of this resource. Is it a phenomenal tool to help online students collaborate in a shared learning experience, or does sharing the workload mean increased laziness on behalf of the individual student? Do students attend fewer classes if they don’t have to take notes for each lecture?

It would be interesting to hear from anyone reading this blog who’s had experience with this product. Since collaborative learning is such a mainstay of online education, it seems like this could potentially be useful for online students. At the least, I’m not sure it could increase students’ laziness about taking notes in class if there is no classroom for them to skip. It may have some potential. Has anyone actually used this?

Quietube is a simple bookmarklet that lets you watch YouTube videos on a plain-screen background, without all the flashing ads, comments, or other “loud” images and text that appear on a typical YouTube page.

How it works: After you add a Quietube button to your browser (by dragging & dropping it from their website), click the button when you are on the page for a YouTube video you want to see sans distractions. It opens up the video with a Quietube URL on a plain white or black background. There is also a feature that creates a TinyURL link of the Quietube version of the video, to make it easier to post in smaller spaces like comment boxes and Twitter/Facebook status feeds.

The website’s video tutorial is short, sweet, and to the point:

Why this is useful for online instructors: Videos are being used more and more in online instruction as a way to teach material to students who learn better with visuals and/or audio than they do with text alone. Many useful educational videos can be found on YouTube. Whether you store your own videos on YouTube or you want to link to popular clips like A Vision of Students Today, Quietube takes the distractions, commercialism, and other nuisances out of the background and leaves you with a cleaner, more educationally appropriate setting for watching and focusing on the videos themselves.

cc licensed photo by jpellgen

Let’s say you want to use more images in your online courses and presentations. Unless you are using your own photos, you’ll probably be looking somewhere for professional-quality images appropriate to your subject matter. Buying stock photos can be very expensive. Where are all the free pics, available for public use?

Compfight is a search engine that allows you to find free photos through creative commons. I found the photo above using a search for “spring tree” and set the Creative Commons feature at the top of the page to “Only”. (This latter step ensures that you only search for photos that are licensed for public use, and not private images that have restricted permission from the authors.) My search brought up 16,317 images.

Once you select a photo, save it onto your computer, add it to your document, and give credit where it’s due–in this case, I’ve used a caption with the author’s name and the photo links to the Flickr page for the original source (which I can link again here just in case…)

This makes simple work of hunting down and inserting visually appealing content into your presentation of your ideas, whether you’re preparing course content for online students, delivering a face-to-face presentation, or just writing a blog post.

Some of you may be familiar with Michael Wesch as the creator of the short video “A Vision of Students Today”, which enjoyed viral popularity with educators as an eye-opening look into the way students in 2007 were relating to higher ed instruction and technology.

If you like that, you might also enjoy another of his videos, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”. This clip walks through the way information has been carried across the internet, beginning with html and developing further as websites began to incorporate web 2.0 technology. For those teaching courses in information science, it could be an interesting  resource to share with students. At the least, viewing the 4:33-long clip is an interesting use of your time.

There were no new posts last week; I was home on sick leave after undergoing sinus surgery. Now that I’m back at the office, I’m going to be gradually catching up and adding new content here relating to recent articles and technology for online pedagogy over the course of this week. At least, that’s the intention…

A recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education explains the value of creating short micro-lectures for your students. By distilling a regular-length course lecture down to its key concepts, you can help your students digest and retain the information after they have listened to the full lecture. This is especially helpful when they are preparing for a test or otherwise studying the material.

The point is not to give them a handout of PowerPoint slides, but to record a very short podcast or video, three minutes or less. Students will need to take notes on what you are saying–as opposed to glancing at a printed handout and stuffing it away in a folder. This repetition, in combination with what they’ve heard in the full-length lecture, will help solidify the information into memory.

Read the Chronicle article for instructions on creating your own micro-lecture.

If you’re looking for more evidence that podcasts and video recordings help students learn, you might want to read this study by Dani McKinney that compares the effects of podcast lectures with PowerPoint handouts in facilitating learning retention. Abstract:

“iTunes University, a website with downloadable educational podcasts, can provide students the opportunity to obtain professors’ lectures when students are unable to attend class. To determine the effectiveness of audio lectures in higher education, undergraduate general psychology students participated in one of two conditions. In the lecture condition, participants listened to a 25-min lecture given in person by a professor using PowerPoint slides. Copies of the slides were given to aid note-taking. In the podcast condition, participants received a podcast of the same lecture along with the PowerPoint handouts. Participants in both conditions were instructed to keep a running log of study time and activities used in preparing for an exam. One week from the initial session students returned to take an exam on lecture content. Results indicated that students in the podcast condition who took notes while listening to the podcast scored significantly higher than the lecture condition. The impact of mobile learning on classroom performance is discussed.”

Read the full article via Science Direct –>

After yesterday’s post about my experimentation with Stripgenerator, I went back to their site and had much better luck registering and saving my own comic strip. Moving and resizing the text boxes is still a bit challenging, but I’m pleased with the result:

In case the text is too small to read on this blog, you can click on the image to see it in full size (this links to Stripgenerator’s site) or you can find the official blog page for “The Online Pedagogist” here.