Presenting Materials to Students

A core ability of online learning is the ability to communicate with your students wherever they are through video, either in real-time (synchronous) or in recordings (asynchronous). Given the traditional centrality of this activity in college teaching, the toolset features a range of options to enable you to do this with your students.

The internet is made of words, so it would seem that creating and sharing reading materials would be the simplest teaching task to accomplish online. There are nevertheless some nuances worth considering, because some methods of sharing text can result in inaccessible materials and/or compromise student security or privacy.

There are multiple ways to add explanatory text and other enhancements to videos you create or find elsewhere, which can be a powerful way to deepen students' understanding and increase the efficiency of the time they spend watching materials. ThingLink is most effective for adding constructed annotations, while CarmenZoom is the simplest way to record mark-up and annotations created in the moment. NOTE: there are nuances and challenges involved in generating annotated multimedia, and it can be especially helpful to meet with an instructional designer for input and support.

Rather than presenting information in a single, linear stream, it can be valuable for students to make decisions while they are processing new information. Also called "choose-your-own-adventure" pedagogy, branching activities present students with decision-points and provide different new materials based on their choices. Ultimately, any tool that enables hyperlinking can host a branching scenario; some tools are easier and some enable more options.

• Resources: ASC ODE Branching Activities Overview (3rd item on the page), ASC ODE Adding and Adjusting Buttons Page

Beyond sharing materials with students, it is important to present those materials in a clearly organized, easily navigable form.

Most online tools present material in linear form: vertical text in Word, for example, or horizontally scrolling slides in PowerPoint. It can be valuable to present material in more flexible forms or to interact with materials while presenting to move things around or to add additional notes. In some courses, it is important to demonstrate solving problems by writing out solutions while explaining the process to students. These advanced kinds of presentation are especially challenging to provide accessibly and many vendors that do so are especially likely to violate student privacy.

A powerful way to improve student learning is to enhance materials by adding elements beyond text, images, audio, and video. For example, you might want to add your custom annotations to a reading or video, providing just-in-time guidance for students through a challenging text. Or you may want to mark up an image or diagram, adding clickable markers that students can use to trigger more detailed explanations. Or you may want to incorporate interactive elements, which ask students to answer a question or engage in a task in the midst of a reading or video.