April 21, 2010

Good Afternoon Developers,

I've enjoyed spending the past couple of days reviewing your course developments and things are really looking solid! Thanks for working so hard to make our students' learning experiences so engaging, rigorous, and overall very high in quality. As I mentioned last week, with these courses being prepared for Early Fall implementation, it is important that both the 12-week and 10-week shells are complete by the 100% completion deadline of May 10, so please plan the rest of your development accordingly. And when you believe your course is 100% complete, please let me know so I can copy the course over to its 10-week shell for you to work on its conversion. Next week's development blog will offer instructions for the conversion process.

Keep thinking about ways to infuse audio into your courses too. A fun, interactive, and unique audio opportunity available to you is the creation and implementation of an Xtranormal video. Xtranormal.com is a Text to Movie resource that can create an animated video for you by simply using text that you enter into the program. This can be a great way to illustrate or explain course content in a fun and interactive audio and visual manner.

As an example of how this resource might work in your course(s), here is a link to a Text to Movie presentation one of our legal instructors created to help explain what a paralegal's role and responsibilities are: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090512094652844. You may need to copy and paste the address into a new web browser to access this video.

This could also be a resource you implement into a student assignment where students are required to create an Xtranormal.com video to explain or discuss a course concept or idea. Students would have a lot of fun with this, as research has found, when students have fun with their coursework, they integrate and comprehend the material on a much higher level.

If you have any questions on this resource, please let me know. And as always, if you have any questions on any part of the development process, I am here to help in any way that I can.

Have a great rest of the week!
Heather