Looking for Multimedia for your Courses? Inspiration to Create your Own?

Recently CCCOnline's Training and Professional Development held a webinar focusing on the integration of materials from the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) and HippoCampus. A lot of you have emailed expressing interest in finding materials from these sources as well as other places on the Web. Perhaps this post will help you and inspire others who are thinking about multimedia enhancements for your online courses.


Wolfram Demonstrations Project
This is a great place for finding open-source demonstrations on a variety of topics. Use the list of topics link below to find demonstrations. The 'web preview' can be seen online without downloading the Mathematica Player. The player (free) is required to view full demonstrations so, if you use these with students, be sure to provide the player download link.

• Home Page: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/
• List of Topics: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/topics.html
• FAQs: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/FAQ.html
• Mathematica Player (Free): http://www.wolfram.com/products/player/

Online Videos
You've all heard of YouTube by now probably, but did you know that with Yahoo and Google Video searches you can get an aggregated list of results from multiple video sites at once?

• Yahoo Video: http://video.yahoo.com/
• Google Video: http://video.google.com/

Two words caution and consideration to make in using videos from the Web: (1) watch the video in its entirety so you know exactly what is presented. Having focus questions or some goal for watching a video is usually an more effective instructional technique. (2) Don't forget about accessibility! If your video is a 'central' piece of content that is "must" be viewed in the course, you will want to take the extra effort to create captioning, if it does not already exist, or a transcript. This can be a painstaking process, but if the video is worthwhile, so is the process. There are some tools available to assist with captioning, such as MAGpie. Contact your instructional designer for more information.

Content from Open Courses
The MIT and Yale Open Course projects are among the most famous of this category. Their courses are browsable online and often include video lectures and other media you could use to enhance your own course because, well, it's "open". There is also a nice repository list from Scott Anderson online.

• Open Yale Courses: http://oyc.yale.edu/
• MIT Open CourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu/
• Anderson's List: http://www.opencourse.info/

You can also find great supporting audio materials from sites such as the Nationa Public Radio and tons of resoruces from places like the Annenberg Media Learning site.

That's a lot of information to consider and get you started, for sure!

But wait!

Don't forget about the materials from HippoCampus.

Go to our page: http://hippocampus.org/myHippo/?user=myccco
In the upper-right corner, you can search by keyword. You can also browse the subject index on the left-side of the page. To learn more about using these resources, take a look at the Archive for the June 10 Webinar by clicking here.

And, finally, note that we are now offering the Respondus and StudyMate workshop as a self-paced experience. We encourage you to train on both these programs together since they work together so well. You can create several types of engaging practice activities in StudyMate directly, or use Respondus to tweak existing test-banks for repurposed 'study' activities. StudyMate creates Flash-based activities that YOU design! Check out our session from the Faculty Wiki: http://faculty.ccconline.org/index.php?title=Respondus_and_StudyMate

Enjoy!
Lisa Marie

[Tip: you might want to view this post directly off the Faculty Blog: http://ccconlinefacultynews.blogspot.com/]