Getting feedback on courses?

Apr 25, 2012

Hi I'm wondering if there is a community-sanctioned place/way to post links to courses one is developing and getting feedback on them. I'm asking because I got Articulate last weekend after having the trial for a little while and I have written an Alpha of a course on psychological experiments which I'd like to get some feedback on in terms of best practice etc.

Would it be alright to just post a link here and ask for feedback in a thread or is there a better way to go about doing that?

It seems to me to be a natural fit in a "Building Better Courses" Forum but I don't want to breach the accepte netiquette around here.

5 Replies
David Anderson

Hi Fionn and welcome to E-learning Heroes!

You bet you can share your courses here. A lot of folks use Dropbox to post links to their projects. If you have a website or blog you can link out to that site, too. 

The Heroes community is awesome at giving feedback that's both constructive and actionable. Here's an example from another thread. 

Thanks and post away!

Fionn Kelly

Thanks David,

Well I'm very, very much a beginner with articulate ( less than a week in at this stage ). I'm a psychiatrist and lecturer in Trinity College, Dublin and so my focus is on trying to make psychiatry/psychology courses a bit more interactive and interesting for students than the usual "death by a thousand powerpoint slides". I'm pretty much a one man band on this though hereabouts .

Things I am interested exploring in this partial course:

1. Use of antropomorphised avatars ( myself and then a photomorphed version of the psychologist who did the experiment in the 1950s ) which aren't at all picture perfect but "just close enough" to seem like a face and use the inbuilt human psychological need to engage with faces to have them engage with courses.

2. External links to additional reading ( so far mostly to minor work but the functionality to link to proper research articles via www.pubmed.com is demonstrated at the end ) for students who want to read around the topic.

3. Moderate but not minimal text. Since I'm trying to move away from lectures which could easily have 50 slides of wall to wall text in 1 hour moving to even moderate text and 20 slides is a huge wrench for medics hereabouts.

4. Trying to have students engage by having them "guess" the outcome of the experiment before being spoon-fed it. This should, based on educational research have them engage and learn more.

Known Issues:

1. I should speak more normally when I record the audio. I sound like a pedant

2. I need to buy a proper microphone. I was just using a 10 dollar cheap headphone mike since this is really only a proof of concept.

3. I wasn't able to get the Presenter to change to "Virtual Solomon Asch" when that avatar was narrating slides. In Slide Properties I have him selected as presenter but it doesn't seem to carry over to the previews or published presentation.

4. I can't seem to get any of the animations ( a  lot of the stick figures I used were swf files ) to actually play in-slide.

5. The avatar head movements aren't properly synched up. Whenever this goes into a beta i'll synch them up properly.

6. Audio on SLide 7 "Experimental Design" is ropey at the start of the slide.

7. Most importantly: My hair isn't actually some weird day-glo yellow. But it is good enough for proof of concept and I'm going to have to redo the avatars anyway so I let it slide.  I only discovered Colour Picker ( linked to from one of the great blog posts here ) after I'd made the videos. DOH !!!

8. Is there a way to limit the maximum size of the Presenter bar? The video quality of the avatar is poor and so when I watch this on full-screen mode on my 1650 x 1080 screen it looks poor. I would rather not limit the size of the entire presentation though so I'm wondering if there's a middle ground where I can just limit the size of the presenter bar?

9. I stopped at Slide 11 which is just a test of whether or not I could link audio and links to articles to pictures within the presentation.

I'm sure there's more but I'm very much just finding my feet. I'd really appreciate any advice on stuff I'm doing wrong which I may not even realise.

The link is Asch's Conformity Experiment ( Partial Proof of Concept Alpha Only )

David Anderson

First, thanks for sharing your course. I think it's amazing how much you've learned and created within a week. You've used quite a few features and packaged everything together nicely. 

Annotation tool - nicely used for highlighting sections and emphasizing the text.

Your topic is also a good one that stirs up a lot of creative ideas. The topic also reminds me of Mike Enders' elearning course on the Milgram experiments. Moving away from lectures and using more media--graphics, video, charts, etc--to support your lecture is a great idea and you have some good ideas going. 

External links were also helpful for additional resources. You could look at embedding web objects to pull in some external sites or use Attachments to embed pdfs or word docs into the course.

Two things you could look at updating are the text styles and the background color and style.

For text, I'd recommend defining a few basic text styles such as heading 1, heading 2, body and list styles. Here's an example from our demo course on changing tires.

For example:

It's not about fancy or decorative fonts as much as it is defining the hierarchy of styles.

The background color is an interesting choice. Dark blues are often associated with authority. Intentional? Personally, I'd go for something lighter or more historic, like browns and weathered colors. Something around "history" or "biography" styles. Not necessary, but here's an idea:

And finally, since you mentioned wanting to get away from having too much text on your slide, I'd consider sourcing some more graphics and illustrations to complement the engaging story. 

Slide 3, for example, had some downtime that could have benefited from visuals. Birth year, location and emigration could all be communicated with a single map, marker and arrow:

Overall,  you have a lot of great things going with this project. I'll add some resources below that address your listed notes and goals for the course.

David Anderson

Talking avatars - that's an area a lot of folks are passionate about. I think yours worked well most of the time. A few times I found your avatar moving, talking while slide content was progressively building.

Some options might be:

Avatar faces forward when content is building on slide and looks, nods after content has loaded

Use avatar to introduce each section and disappear after the first slide of content

Anyway, I like it and wanted to share some recent discussions we've had around the topic:

Creating a video narrator

Avatars

Use of photos vs real people

Simple way to convert your clip art to animated talking heads

Microphones

Another popular topic. Here are two good resources and conversations:

Microphone recommendations

Microphone demos from the community

Limiting presenter bar and image quality

If you scale the presentation, you're going to lose image and video quality. That's just an inherent limitation of raster graphics. Your text and PowerPoint-created shapes will scale because they're vector shapes. Where do you think most students will view the course?

Here's a tutorial on presentation size and options.

Animation

Presenter '09 uses PowerPoint's On Click animation events to sync with audio. Here's a quick tutorial on how that works.

Nigel Ribeiro

Welcome to the Articulate community Fionn.  I remember the days when I just started using Articulate and did not know much. I was amazed by the amount of resource available to help you learn.  Make sure you search the community when you have a challenge you can normally find some one who has had the similar question  and also dedicate some time each week to learn something new by reading the forums and watching the Screeners. 

Regards

Nigel 

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