UMConnect Presenter: Providing Access to Information is Only a Starting Point
By Lauren Marsh
Guest speakers enrich learning and broaden the range of perspectives and experiences we bring to our students. In the Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel, presentations by guest speakers about topics ranging from designing for workplace productivity to designing environments that promote health are captured and delivered to students online. The audience for the presentations includes current design students and practicing urban planners, interior designers, architects, landscape architects, graphic designers, and other design professionals who are taking continuing education classes to meet licensing or professional organization membership requirements. Like the guest speakers, the students are spread out across the nation. Busy professionals "don't want to go out at night, go away for a weekend, or take a day off work in order to fulfill licensing obligations or to learn," explains Denise Guerin, a professor in the department. For this reason, Guerin and her colleagues provide their students with virtual access to the expertise of well-respected professionals and the depth of research-based course content. Delivering this material online is made possible with a tool called UMConnect Presenter.
As Guerin explains, the design professionals who view the online presentations "see fantastic presentations every day" and have high expectations with regard to visual quality and aesthetics. As educators, Guerin and her team have their own high standards with regard to pedagogical quality. UMConnect Presenter meets both sets of needs exceptionally well. While the tool makes it possible to create recordings of presentations, it presents many more possibilities than a simple video recording. Instructors can transform their Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into online modules rich with text, images, audio, video, and links to resources. Built-in tools enable the creation of quizzes and surveys with instant feedback. Furthermore, producing a UMConnect Presentation is much easier than producing an online video, and requires much less bandwidth.
Guerin recalls that when she started this project she imagined the key bottleneck would be finding time to set up protocols, forms, and efficiencies for getting content into an online format. That was actually easier then she'd imagined. She and her team have worked out a smooth-running process. First, they select well-known practitioners with good presentational styles. Guerin and her team then coach each presenter in audience expectations, the concept of Web casting, and the workings of the UMConnect Presenter tool. Before recording, the presenter submits the PowerPoint presentation script that the team edits. During the recording a "live studio audience" of two or three people helps put the presenter at ease. After recording, another team member edits out gaps and long pauses, a simple job in UMConnect.
While the production process has proven to be easy, Guerin notes: "I've discovered that it's really the teaching strategies that we need to figure out." As often happens, using technology has led to a reassessment of teaching practices. Currently lectures are presented in their entirety, running for an hour or more. Guerin concedes, "That's a problem. We know that people learn better in nine minute chunks." With the support of a TEL grant the team will further explore best teaching practices and develop a rubric for evaluating the pedagogical effectiveness of presentations delivered in UMConnect Presenter. They'll explore grouping or chunking information into short and meaningful units, engagement, and reflection activities. This systematic approach to integrating teaching and technology will not only benefit students in the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel, but also other educators who can now learn from Guerin and her team's experience and expertise.
Related Resources
- Guerin and other TEL grant recipients discuss lessons learned while creating learning materials with UMConnect Presenter at the TEL seminar on November 1, 2006. See the Improving UMConnect Learning Activities page.
- Presentations produced by Denise Guerin's team are archived under "Web Casts" on the InformeDesign site.
- Guerin was awarded a 2006 TEL grant to work on this project. Read her grant proposal: Development, Dissemination, and Marketing of Research-Based Design Curriculum Offered On-Line (PDF).
- Find out more about UMConnect, link to campus resources for creating UMConnect presentations, view sample UMConnect presentations, and access additional research on using UMConnect Presenter in education on our UMConnect Presenter page.
