Evolving as a Digital Teacher: Tools of the trade (Part 8)

Hello!! It has been like ages since I last put up something to continue this series on "Evolving as a digital teacher: Tools of the trade". So much has happened in that time and space and I don't even know where to begin.

Well, let me try to pick up and start with Part 8 so here it goes. I have joined the Center for Learning & Teaching, Divine Word University as the Director and this will be my second year in this office. Last year was an exciting year and so is this year 2022 as we embark on new learning experiences and try to share as much as we can to build our community of practice at DWU.

One of the things we have embarked on this year as a Centre is to create short informational videos as part of our Academic Policy Awareness drive or campaign. I purchased personal individual licenses for two additional software I am adding to my arsenal; Wondershare Filmora and Doodly. 

I decided to try a number of the informational videos with Doodly and so far I think Doodly's worked well for me with the intention and the kind of message I envision to bring across to the audience with it.

Here's two videos I have done so far with Doodly, 

Let me share with you for the third video the process I follow to produce these kind of videos. 

Evolving as a digital teacher: Tools of the trade (Part 4)

Use Lesson Activity together with audio, short video and quiz.

A tutorial I created initially for colleagues in the Information Systems department, DWU but I would like to share it here on my blog as the 4th sequel to the Evolving as a digital teacher series. 

This tutorial is based on the use of Lesson Activity which is an activity tool in Moodle. 

Part 1 Lesson Plan.
Create a lesson plan based on the topic you are going to cover for that week.

Example: I want to cover a topic on VPN & IPsec concepts. This topic is part of a module that is already divided into three subtopics with clear objectives for each section. If you're using a text reference as a guide you may want to follow the text layout for each chapter.

Here are the key objectives for each section of the topic.

• Lesson 8.1 VPN Technology -  describe benefits of VPN technology.
• Lesson 8.2 Types of VPNs - describe different types of VPNs.
• Lesson 8.3 IPsec - explain how the IPsec framework is used to secure network traffic.

What I usually do is to identify what technique I want to use to cover each section and what tool will help me achieve that.

• Lesson 8.1 - Use Moodle's lesson activity to cover it.
• Lesson 8.2 - Post discussion points on Moodle and get students to post replies and contribute to the discussion. Creating the task as a Q&A forum and setting the options to allow students to post feedback to a discussion question which can then be rated using a rubric.
• Lesson 8.3 - Invite students to a 25 minutes Zoom or Webex online meeting/discussion.

For this tutorial, I will focus on Lesson 8.1 and demonstrate step-by-step on how to setup the Lesson activity.

Part 2 Creating the Lesson 
Creating the lesson will include an audio intro, a 30 minute pre-recorded video lecture followed by check your understanding quiz at the end of the lesson. (This is how I approach my lesson activity, you may have your style or method. Use what method works for you.)

1. Adding the Lesson activity

Click on Add an activity or resource and select Lesson.

Add a Name and Description. I'll leave out the other important details about a lesson activity like the Grade and Flow Control until the end of this tutorial. I'll go ahead and create the lesson.

Click on Save and Display.

2. Now to the Lesson

Evolving as a digital teacher: Tools of the trade - Part 3

Here at DWU, we have talked about online learning for several years now. Several workshops and seminars were conducted all in an effort to upskill academics in the area of online learning. One of the workshops I remember attending was with A/Professor Dr. Susan Crichton from University of British Columbia (UBC) back in 2015. There were quite a number of tools introduced during the week-long session.

Since then we've had lengthy discussions and musings over the pros and cons of online teaching among other things e-learning. Discussions continue to evolve on our university broadcast surrounding this topic as several staff already using various tools share through blog posts (like this post itself) and Youtube videos such as this and others shared by Bernard Yegiora (a DWU staff who also shares some digital teaching tutorials on his blog). We even had a separate Moodle site set up by ICT to experiment with online learning. This site unfortunately has been decommissioned recently this year. Initially not many were keen on taking on the idea of online teaching. In fact only two or three people used the DMS Moodle platform setup specifically for online learning. Reasons as to why academics did not take the challenge to at least offer a unit online are unknown.

DWU however does have a well established e-learning environment using Moodle established several years ago which has gone through various updates with one done recently beginning of this year adding additional features and plugins to allow for more functionality. This university-wide learning platform has been used for both its undergraduate programs and flexible mode programs. Use of Moodle in this case has been mainly for blended learning where lecturers upload resources and post assignments for student to access and for students to post task submissions for feedback. It was not used for full online learning programs. The traditional approach of face-to-face classroom style seminars and lectures is still the norm for most of our programs.

The idea of online teaching using video,web and audio conferencing tools for remote learning was there but somewhat shelved every time it came up in discussions for various reasons. 

Anyhow, it now seems the COVID-19 may well 'force' academics to start using the vast array of tools online that allow for remote learning. At least that is the approach taken now in many universities across the globe given the outbreak of this pandemic as this article suggests among many other similar articles.

• Shift to online learning due to COVID-19 requires rethink of teaching: experts
• The COVID-19 online pivot: Adapting university teaching to social distancing

This post will not talk about how you can move your classroom online, an expert at Harvard Business School has done that already and is sharing his expertise and experience by hosting several webinars like this one which you can sign up to attend or download recordings. Harvard Business Publishing also share some great resources on Moving Your Classroom Online.

In this post, I share with you briefly three online delivery options I have been using and which I am familiar with. I use all three of these tools at various times in the Graduate Certificate in Data Networking program that I teach for 14 weeks fully online (remotely) and 1 week face-to-face on campus.

Using MailMerge to send progressive results to students

In my almost five years of teaching, I have been using this method of keeping my classes updated of their progressive results every semester. We have only started using Moodle Gradebook two years ago (well at least for me) but I still find myself having to resort back to this method of updating my classes of their progressive results.

If you are like me, wanting to make the most of what basic tools like your MS Word, Excel and Outlook can offer then this post is for you. (I am assuming you are using a Windows OS with MS Office installed already) In this post, I go through step by step on how I create a grade book for my class and send the results to their emails using a method called MailMerge.

There are two things that we need to do;

• Task 1: Creating a grade book in MS Excel
• Task 2: Using MS Word to create a standard template for the mail merge ready to send the results from the Excel grade book.

Task 1 Creating a grade book in MS Excel

For this tutorial we will just use dummy test results, names and emails.

Step 1 Open a blank Excel file. Create seven columns and put in the column headings as First_name, Second_name, Email_add, Test1, Test2, Test3, Total

Step 2 Add at least three to four records of dummy details. One email can be your own email or a second email you use. This will be an email which you will use to verify that your mail merge is successful and you are sure that students will receive the assessment report. Here is a sample of my gradebook. Make sure to save the Excel file somewhere.

Gradebook in Excel

You will notice here that all the emails here are real emails except for the last one. This is so that I can demonstrate at the end that the mail merge was successful and I posing as a student have received the report.

Cisco Packet Tracer as a teaching and learning tool for computer networks in DWU

I recently published an article co-authored with Dr. Peter Anderson in the DWU Journal on Cisco Packet Tracer as a teaching and learning tool in DWU. This paper was basically a reflection on my teaching experiences with Packet tracer for the networking courses.

Here is the introduction.

Computer networks have become a fundamental tool of today's corporate environment. “Computer networks consist of devices that provide communication paths between electronic machines to create local networks inside buildings as well as the interconnection of networks in such structures as campuses and the Internet” (Frezzo, Behrens et al. 2010).

As Lammle (2010) suggests, “computers have become invaluable to us personally and professionally. Our society has become highly dependent on these resources and on sharing them with each other. The ability to communicate with those we need to whether they’re in the same building or in some far-away land completely hinges on our capacity to create and maintain solid, dependable networks” (Lammle, 2010). To have such skills that will enable an IT professional to create and maintain networks requires rigorous training. It is a demanding field of expertise since the efficient operation of many business organizations today rely upon the smooth operation of its computer network.

You can download or read the paper here 

Integrate Camtasia Studio with Moodle

It has been a while since I last posted any tutorial here. Been very busy with work and family that I wasn't able to write something. However, I did get to participate in a very enlightening course over the course of three weeks on teaching online.

It was through this course that I started to assist the facilitator teach some of my colleagues on how to use Camtasia. Camtasia is a great screen capture tool. I shall not go into the details of the software as there is tonnes of info on their website (a simple Google search would do) but I would like to share a tutorial I wrote on how to integrate Camtasia with Moodle. Moodle is an open source LMS with a huge support its community of users. You can find more about Moodle here.