Mixing It Up with Interactive Online Lectures

“Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible."

- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

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If there was one tool I could convince people to try it would be Office Mix.  Whether you are flipping a classroom, teaching online, or making up a snow day, Mix allows you to "mix" multiple sources of information into a PowerPoint deck, narrate your presentation, and include questions students need to answer - and you can incorporate it into Blackboard Learn as a graded assignment.

I used Mix to create learning activities that incorporate videos from NASA and ESA that I remixed using Adobe Premiere and Audition, OER or public domain images and graphics, and illustrations and animations I created myself using Adobe Illustrator and Animator.  I included multiple choice, multiple answer, or true/false questions for students to answer as they worked through the activity. I did not use a traditional textbook; I provided access to a free, online text from OpenStax for students to use as a reference for anything about  which they needed more information.



Feedback from students was quite positive.  Roughly 2/3 of the way through the course, I asked for feedback.  Comments related to the learning activities include:

• "I actually liked this course. It took a different approach than the run of the mill, read a book, take a test. Doing that I do not retain any information."
• "I really enjoy the Learning activities. This is where I feel that I learn the most. I believe that after this semester concludes, I will remember a lot of what I learned from this course."
• "I really enjoy the learning activity lectures at the beginning of the chapter. They are personal, interactive, and informative."
• "This is one of the first online classes that I've taken and I honestly wish they were all like this class. I think the learning activities are really helpful and make it feel like I'm actually in a classroom learning that lesson for the week."
• "I also like the learning activities and they give a classroom feel...Unlike classrooms, I enjoy being able to rewind and listen again, if necessary."
• "So far, I will say this has been the most interactive course I've taken to date.  I like the videos that are made weekly to cover the important topics and bullet points, and that it's actually the teachers voice."
• "The questions spread throughout the presentation help to give me an idea if I understand what I’ve heard so far, and it’s particularly nice that instead of being penalized for getting them wrong, I can instead go back through the section and try again."

Tips for a Good Mix

I wrote earlier in the Teach Me Tuesday blog about how to avoid death by PowerPoint, and all of those tips apply to creating a good Mix.

Write a Script

I strongly recommend writing a narration in the notes area of your PowerPoint slide before you begin your narration.  You can print the notes view to a PDF to share with your students, for those who may prefer to refer back to written material rather than audio.  It also helps you to keep your narration focused and short. The first semester I used Mix, I didn't narrate with a script.  The second semester, I redid the narrations - using the same slide content - and following a script cut the length of the Mix down by about 30% on average.

Keep It Short

Normally, I say keep instructional videos under ten minutes, if not shorter.  There is some research showing that engagement in video actually falls off after about 2 minutes, although that seems to be longer for instructional video. However, the ability to incorporate questions for assessment into your Mix extends that optimal time.  You can combine segments of 2-6 minutes of narration and video with questions in between to extend that engagement time.

After using Mix for a year and looking at the analytics including average time spent by students viewing a Mix, I suggest that a completed Mix should be no more than about a half hour in length, including all of questions for students to answer, with the optimal length around 15-20 minutes I use three learning activities Mixes each week for the Fall and Spring semesters, and 3-5 per week for the Full Summer semester.  Since students also complete a lab, an social activity, and an interactive homework assignment, that's the equivalent of the amount of time students would spend in class for a 3-credit course.

Be Creative

Don't be afraid to be creative.  No Mix is set in stone, so if something doesn't work the way you think it should have, change it for the next semester. Play around with graphics and animation on your PowerPoint slide to make them visually interesting and to support your content.  Look for OER (Open Education Resources) you can incorporate. Do Google image searches and look for graphics you can use with or without attribution. Think about what YOU like to see in videos on YouTube or Facebook, and try to recreate those looks.

And give me a call if you need some help.  I spent a year learning Adobe products, and while I am by no means an expert, I am getting pretty good at editing videos and drawing illustrations, and I am really good at making the most of PowerPoint graphics and animations.  After making and revising over 40 Mixes over the past year, if I haven't done it already, if it can be done, I can probably help you figure out how to make it work.

Start Slow but Persevere

While Mix is easy to learn, it is time consuming. I wouldn't recommend that anyone do what I did, which was to convert an entire course in one semester, while running the course at the same time. 20:1 is an optimistic development ratio - a 30 minute Mix can take 10 hours to create (another reason to keep them short), so instead of doing all of your instruction in Mixes the first time out, try supplementing what you already do with one Mix per week or topic that covers those concepts students struggle with most. Then add in some more that following semester, and before you know it, you will have a completely interactive course.

To get started with Office Mix, read my post in the Teach Me Tuesday Blog.

On Creativity...or...My Year of Learning Dangerously

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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As I mentioned previously, for a little over a year, I have been taking free online courses from Adobe to learn how to use the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of products.  In those courses, we talk a lot about creativity, what it is, how to assess it, how to encourage it in students.  After 12 courses, comprising almost 300 hours of professional development time, I have come to one conclusion.

Creativity is hard work.

When I talk to colleagues about something I have done for my online courses, I often get a reaction something like this:

"You are so creative! I could never do that."

This assumes creativity is some innate talent that cannot be controlled.  It tends to ignore the effort that goes into innovation. Coming up with a new idea is easy. Making that idea work takes a lot of learning, planning, and trial and error. If you view creativity as something you don't possess, you have no reason to try. You have to believe you have the ability to do it before you try something new.

I already told the story of how I used social media to learn about Pluto and how that experience led me to wanting to ditch the textbook in my online courses. I took a number of MOOCs, and realized I need to make my online courses more visual and interactive. Unfortunately, although I had all sorts of ideas of what I wanted to do, I lacked the technical skills to get them done.

Thus started my Year of Learning Dangerously.

Somehow I stumbled across Adobe's Education Exchange, And there I found heaven in the form of Adobe Generation Professional courses. These are free, online courses, designed specifically to learn how to use Adobe products in education. As an LCCC employee, I could license the entire suite for less than $10 a year..an incredible price! As I said, over the past year, I have completed almost 300 hours of formal coursework.  I spent dozens more learning products not (yet) covered in those courses.  That's about an hour every day for a year. That has nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with commitment.

Taking those courses and learning how to create my own visual learning materials was just part of the equation.  I used Office Mix, an add-on for PowerPoint to create image-based interactive learning activities, that combine the materials I created using what I learned in the #AdobeGenPro courses along with questions that students had to answer while they watched the lecture.

That particular learning activity combines graphics I created using Illustrator:

With an animation I did in Animate:

And a video I "remixed" using public domain material from NASA, recording the narration in Audition and editing the video in Premiere Pro:

In addition to those resources, in a mix I can also include links to web pages, do direct screen capture videos or images, or include simple audio files.

(I like using this example, because it shows the three tools I use most often {Illustrator, Premiere, and Audition} along with one I use infrequently {Animate}, in a learning activity I created from start to finish in one day.)

I also use Spark video - an application I learned in the very first course I took at the start of my Year of Learning Dangerously - to create weekly introductory videos:

The response from students has been very positive. When I asked for feedback, one student said even though I wasn't in the videos, hearing my voice made it seem like he was in a classroom.  Another said she appreciated being able to move back and forth through the lecture to review something she missed. They have their glitches, but since I warn students in advance about some of the problems they might face and how to fix them, they are OK with that.

The advantage to me is I feel like I am in control of my course again, not the publisher, that I am actually teaching, not just grading.  When the Juno probe reached Jupiter, I could update that content in my course right away; I didn't need to wait for a publisher's edition update cycle. When NASA held a press conference about finding several Earth-size planets around another star, I could update the virtual labs on stars and on  exoplanets to include questions about that press conference. I can make the course relevant, up-to-date, and interesting.

That just takes hard work, not "creativity." My astronomy course has 42 learning activities in it, each about 15-30 minutes long.  Each one of those takes about 8 hours to produce, depending on how much I am creating from scratch versus repurposing OER (more on that in another blog). And while I was completing those 300 hours of #AGP courses, I created about two learning activities every week. That's not creative.  That's just insane.

But, I made the commitment to do it, set a schedule, and stuck to it...and my course is the better for it, and my students learn more. Now, instead of telling students that to comment on another students blog, they need to:

1. Click on the In the News Blog link on the Course Menu.
2. Select the Blog on which you want to comment.
3. Locate you name to the right.
4. Click the down arrow under your name to bring up a list of other students.
5. Click on the name of a student to read his or her blog.
6. Click the Comment button.
7. Enter you comment in the Comment box.
8. Click the Add button to submit your comment.
9. Click the arrow under the other student's name on the right to bring up another blog on which to comment

I can show them how to do it:

I realize not everyone wants to learn how to create an avatar in Character Animator or a title sequence in After Effects.  That's the "Oooh, now that's cool!" kind of stuff I like spending time figuring out how to do.

But I don't know any instructor who isn't capable of learning how to use Illustrator or Photoshop to create or modify OER resources for use in their course or to create a screencast and use Premiere to edit it and add simple titles or to make a simple introductory video with Adobe Voice or narrate an interactive lecture with Office Mix.  You just have to be willing to learn something new and put in a little hard work.

Thomas Edison famously said, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration." I'm committing to trying to provide the inspiration through this blog.  Once a week I will post a new blog, either on an instructional design topic here, an instructional technology topic on Teach Me Tuesday, or a how-to tip on Blackboard Learn Tips and Tricks...if I make the time and I have the inspriation, I'll post more than one.  Let's call it a Year of Blogging Dangerously.

Will you commit to a little perspiration and follow this blog for a year? You might find something to inspire the creativity in you!