Animation and Online Teaching
Galen Foresman, Scott Cooper, Chris Metivier
- Animation can help:
- unity and consistency
- reusability
- engagement of material
- attractive to students
- avoids the “talking head” model
- Course structure: reminds me of a game interface (like Mario)
- Course content: reminds me of Strongbad
- Interactivity
- Production
- Characters: voice, appearance, attitude
- Script: course content, dialog
- Storyboard: narrative form, visual gags (and chart, if branching)
- Animation: bring it all together
- Animation allows for narrative form, easier to remember! Video of talking head much less engaging.
- Production:
- Photoshop to create layout, etc
- Flash to create animation
- Very time consuming (40-100 hours for each short video)
- Video shows good & bad thinking
- In discussion board can ask students to discuss what was good & what wasn’t & why
- can make fun of characters w/o undermine authority
- good cop/bad cop with characters
- Trends
- Most students watched more than once
- Most found them enjoyable
- Most found them helpful
- All supplemental to course reading & professor material
- Extensions of characters/animation
- MySpace “surfer dude Benny”
- blogs: include course content
- messages: announcements, bulletin
- networking: student interaction
- YouTube “Mor-Tron”
- instructor videos
- widen audience
- interact via comments
- Longer than 1-2 minutes, but there are cut scenes, and popular online Flash (like Strongbad) are longer, too.
- Question: “how to make students feel like they are more part of it?” maybe avatars?
- Possibilities for Interactivity
- Choose your own argument: students control characters to demonstrate possible arguments
- Position diagnosis: students identify positions by answering characters’ questions (like a quiz)
- Interactive review: students review course material by controlling character responses
- Some people are distracted by background moving images, some like it.
- Feedback/choose your own: students might choose to run through again to answer wrong on purpose, just to see silliness. Can learn more from that with the feedback.
- BIG QUESTION: how do you sell a Flash Development position to department?
- online learning makes a lot of money
- development is very expensive, but over long period, will pay back 10 fold
- Part of ischool, providing these courses free across the state for HS
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