LOEX Presentation: Developing an Online Credit-bearing Information Fluency Course: Lessons Learned

Last Friday, I presented at the LOEX Annual Conference with colleagues Leslie Sult and Yvonne Mery. The title of our talk was, “Developing an Online Credit-bearing Information Fluency Course: Lessons Learned.” We reviewed how we developed, implemented, and evaluated the undergraduate Skillful Researcher (UNVR195a) course. To get some backgound, you can take a look at my post from last April when the class was first approved.

We had a good turnout, and the audience actively participated by asking questions and sharing their own experiences. It seemed like a very timely topic, as many other instruction librarians are going towards both online teaching and credit-bearing courses.

Here is our powerpoint to give you an idea of what we talked about, I hope others find this helpful and share any comments:

We also had a handout with a list of things to Try and to Avoid in online instruction, which I’ll share here:

Try It	Avoid It
Establishing and following course objectives	Designing as you go
Keeping tutorials short	Trying to put everything in one tutorial
Keeping text to a minimum	Overusing text
Using smart graphics	Using images that are purely decorative
Including audio	Overusing PowerPoint
Using provocative discussion questions	Making assignments the discussion questions
Including self-assessments	Depending only on quizzes for students’ assessment
Participating in discussions	Assuming students will participate in  discussions on their own
Grading discussions	Having optional discussions
Writing clear directions	Assuming students will know what to do
Paying close attention to course navigation	Over-depending on the navigation in the CMS
Responding to students promptly	Assuming that students do not need immediate feedback
Listening to feedback	Ever thinking you’re “done”
Preparing for a significant time commitment	Assuming teaching will be less work because it’s online

Captivate vs. Camtasia: Captivate Wins

I wrote a post awhile back attempting to compare these two software products that can be used for creating interactive screencapturing videos. I spent months learning the ins and outs of Camtasia, creating a number of videos that are now being used in the library. Now we have Captivate keyserved, so I finally have it on my computer and have had a chance to spend time with it and get to know it a little better. Conclusion? Captivate is much easier, cleaner, dynamic, and creates a nicer final product than Camtasia.

We had a training open to all library staff earlier this week on Captivate. Here is what we have determined:

• Captivate projects are easier to edit: you can copy and paste slides, delete and add sections, & extend time frames in a much easier manner than in Camtasia. In Camtasia you can screen draw and select mouse options before and during the recording phase, but cannot change this in editing mode. You have to start over. Captivate lets you play with these options afterward. So if you mess up during recording, you don’t have to start all over again.
• Captivate saves you time: this is a smart software, and can actually add captions for you based on what you’re doing on the screen (like “click X,” “you are now on X page”). These are easy to alter or delete if you like, but if you want them this will save you a lot of time.
• Captivate quizzes are pretty: well, prettier than Camtasia’s. And you can actually preview them without publishing the project.
• Captivate allows interactivity: this is a big one, and one I mentioned in my previous post. You can select an area on the screen and the user has to click it to continue, or take them somewhere. Allows a lot more customization than Camtasia’s “hot spots.” There’s also a new feature in Captivate 3 called “branching,” where you can make your product even more dynamic as users go to different places and discover different things.

This doesn’t mean to say I’m writing Camtasia off completely. I do like it’s easy ability to record audio with powerpoints, and I like it’s preview screen which Captivate is lacking (have to select “preview” to see what the project looks like in motion and any changes you’ve made). That said, an intern at the library this summer spent 2 months messing with Camtasia trying to make a tutorial on searching for newspapers using Access World News. She was very frustrated, particularly with the screen drawing and audio quality. She spend less than a week with Captivate and made a nice, clean, professional product: http://www.library.arizona.edu/help/tutorials/courses/jour/accessworldnews/Tutorial.htm. That’s enough to convince me in the Captivate vs. Camtasia debate: Captivate Wins.

How to Narrow a Research Topic

I’ve just finished revamping the second module of the new online info lit class, “The Skillful Researcher,” a collaboration between the library and University College. The module is on “Narrowing Your Topic.” The students are writing a hypothetical research paper; they are doing all the research and creating an annotating bibliography as their final project. The second module is very important, since it’s where they pick their topic for research, and create a few potential research questions.

The students have already selected one of 5 broad topics we give them – education, food, human rights, music, or sports. For the assignment and discussion posting, they have to come up with 2-3 research questions that are appropriate for writing a hypothetical 8-12 page research paper.

Here are the techniques we’re teaching them:

1) Brainstorming. We have them complete a worksheet where they can talk about what they already know about a topic, what interests them about it, and what they would like to know more about.

2) Concept Mapping. I found this really cool YouTube video demonstrating how to do this:

3) Reviewing What’s Out There. We have them select an article from a list on various aspects of their broad topics. All the articles are from CQ Researcher, which is great for topic overviews and includes nice bibliographies. I created a Camtasia video on how to use CQ Researcher, and directions are presented in an Articulate template.

4) Defining Certain Aspects. A tutorial created using Articulate demonstrates how they can narrow a broad topic by looking at thing such as certain time frames, geographical locations, types of people, and/or aspects (sociological, economical, legal, etc.).

Since it’s only a one-credit class, and this module only lasts one week, we can’t teach much more than this. Another technique that I would like to teach (possibly if we create a “Skillful Researcher 2″) is how to review what’s out there by looking in library catalogs and databases. This gets a little more complicated but is a great skill for students to learn.

If anyone has other methods they teach students, I’d be interested to hear what they are! I’m hoping these 4 will be a good foundation for them, but any feedback would be appreciated as well.

Captivate vs. Camtasia – It’s Anybody’s Game

UPDATE: See newer post – Captivate Wins!

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks exploring all the many features of Camtasia. Later today I’m holding a training for all library staff on the use of this recently-purchased software. You can see the demo I created online here (the one titled “Camtasia demo”: http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/learn/docs.html.

Camtasia can create a really nice Flash file; it’s relatively easy to use and understand, although it does take some playing around with at first.

Jing Project and CamStudio are great because they are open source (absolutely free) and very simple to use. BUT they are very limited in features and have next to no editing functions.

Captivate I haven’t had as much experience with, but we did use it in the Materials Access Team for training our student workers on circulation functions. One primary advantage to Captivate is that it allows for interactivity, i.e. you can ask the user to click somewhere on the page and respond with a “correct” or “incorrect” pop-up. Camtasia, on the other hand, primarily is for demonstrations. It does allow you to input a “hot spot” which the user is required to click prior to continuing (you can also move them somewhere else in the video; take them to a website, etc.), but this is more for the purpose of giving the user control over where they are in the video than testing them on how to perform a function.

Camtasia has the advantage of being able to be key served, so that everyone in the library can have it installed on their computer. Captivate does not allow for this, and so currently less than 5 computers in the library have it.

I’ve also heard of ViewletBuilder but have never used it.

Many libraries have used Captivate for creating tutorials, including UCDHSC Library, which has a large number of these. The University of British Columbia Library, on the other hand, has created a number of tutorials through Camtasia.

I have reviewed a couple articles which also have some insight on this debate:

Clark, J. & Quinghua, K. (2008). Captivate/Camtasia. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 96(1), 75-78.

Murley, D. (2007). Tools for creating video tutorials. Law Library Journal, 99(4), 857-861.

I also recently discovered a Screencasting & Libraries blog which is a great resource, and even includes a page of academic library examples. That said, if anyone is out there who has experienced these different softwares and has advice on which one is better – and for what purposes – please share.

Camtasia for Creating Tutorials

After playing around with trials of these products a little bit, last week our library purchased Camtasia and SnagIt for us to use in creating online tutorials and trainings. I’m working right now to create a training session for all the librarians so we can all utilize these very cool toys to our advantage. The goal is for all librarians to be able to quickly make screen captures, demos, etc. for use in tutorials, subject guides, and anything else, without needing any support from our IT department.

I made the demo below in 5 minutes. Unfortunately the quality’s not great because I had to publish through Windows Media Player to upload to Google Videos; the standard is to create a Flash file but WordPress doesn’t allow for that right now. This is the simplest example – you can also add audio, add captions, bubbles, import other images & media, etc. I’ll get around to that soon enough but below is what I’m thinking for use in a tutorial on “Defining Your Research Topic.” It shows how you can use CQ Researcher to browse for topics:

P.S.  There’s also a free version called CamStudio – very simple and doesn’t include any editing features, but is great for creating short screen captures in Flash format.  Download it online for free here.