Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Music]
Alright, let's look at another course, Food Science and Nutrition. Arlene is an instructor that
we worked with before in our workshop series that we've had. And she's gone from blackboard to
PolyLearn in this class that she teaches. I think this is the online class that she
was teaching in blackboard. So she has put in a quote on the top and that's done from
that edit summary to have a little welcome information there. And then she has added her
syllabus with the add file,so add resource file. She's created a folder and then placed
files within that. So if you have a lot of files for example like reading, this is a great
way of putting all the readings for week one into one area. And I've also done something similar
to that in my class. So I have a title called or a label is what PolyLearn calls it, called
Lecture and then I've added a folder for optional readings. So I have these three things they
need to read or have access to for the lecture but then if they have other things they want
to read about, a little more information, optional, then you can go to this section and I could
put as many items in this optional readings as I want. So let me-- yeah, so I want to show
you this. This is how a student sees it. So lecture and then online readings and assignments
and each section has lecture and online reading assignments. I'm still working on this course.
But folders can be very helpful as you can see here in this Food Science and Nutrition.
So she's got a couple of files. But you can put as many files as you want in a folder.
So she has an image that she's aligning to the right and an image, it's just aligned left,
but I also want to show you this. So I'm going to scroll down her class a little bit here.
You can also in the edit summary embed videos. So if I click on this, I'm not quite sure how
this will show up in here but-- ( Inaudible Remark ) Okay, so this isa YouTube video.
This actually resides in the YouTube system. But in the edit summary section,you can embed
YouTube videos into your course so the students can play them, pause them, rewind them, watch
themas many times as they want and you're not making them go to YouTube 'cause sometimesYouTube
can be overwhelming and cause a user to spend a lot of time looking at all the other videos
in YouTube. But then you can place the one video you're interested in watching for this
week in your edit summary. So she's also got this other one here and this one here. So you
can add yourYouTube videos, embed those into your course. Now, how would you do that? Again,
this is all in the edit summary and every single one of these content blocks has one. So if
I wanted to put a video in my course, I would go to my edit summary block and place that
there. Now, if for some reason you can't remember what we just did, I'm going to go back to
the support site and show you this. This is a really user friendly page. If you're going
to add media to your course, I recommend you look at this on a regular basis. So on the
bottom of the faculty support section of the support site, down hereunder resource file
media, click on the media part because you can add files like DOCs and PDFs and Excel
files and soon but when you're adding media, audio or video-type files,then you're going
to want to make sure that you follow this scenario. And the reason why is that-- andit seems funny,
you know, with-- I'm adding an MP3, what's the difference with an MP4 or a WAV or-- Luanne
Fose, my coworker spent a lot of time trying to figure out this 'cause unfortunately,each
file is going to display just a little bit different in your PolyLearnCourse and she
found that each file needed just--a different setting. So you can place it in but if it's
not viewing the way you want it to, if you look at this,so for example, if you want to
insert a MP3file, well the biggest thing to be aware of is this. Under 11 where it says
display option, this is the important part is--depending on the file type, you need to
make sure you click on the correct display option so that the file will actually be viewable
and just-- and either listen to or viewed by the student. So audio or video file, so these are
really important settings that you need to use for each particular one. So embedding your
YouTube files, that's the one I wanted to show you now. If I click on that, how to embed your
YouTube files. So what you do is you go to-- what-- a YouTube site, you find the video you're
interested in and when you find the video you're interested in, you click on the share button
underneath it and then the embed button and then that is the HTML text that you're going to
copy and paste it into your edit summary. So if I open a new tab and goto YouTube and there's
going to be all kinds of fun stuff in here so I'm going to go to the one place I know
for sure how things that I would like to look at right now for this workshop is ourPolyLearn
Support channel that we have. So if I click onPolyLearn Support, these are all our videos
that we've created for our faculty and students. But this will be the same for any YouTube video
that you want. The big thing again is that you're going to click on share underneath
the video,then you're going to click on embed and then this is the code you want. So you
would copy this code,so I'm going to copy it, and then if I go back to my course and
I'm not pasting it here because this is a text-based window here that makes HTML, instead
I'm going to click on this HTML button to view HTML, and I'm going to paste it here. So I'm
pasting that embed code here and I'm going to update. Now our videos are large because we're
really expecting the people to be able to watch these in a browser on a fairly decent-sized monitor
and that they will-- we want them to be able to see what we're doing in PolyLearn. So this
size is actually too large to be displayed inside the course but I just wanted to show
you now if I save this,then it shows up in my course. So let me turn editing off just
so you can see what the students see. So there it is and if you click play, then there's the
video that the student is seeing right there in the PolyLearn Course. So that's how you
embed your video in your course. Let's look at this one, zoology. So this one doesn't
have a lot of images but I did want to show you how this was organized. This was organized,
so you got the title here, some basic information about the class as a whole and then this person decided
to make a title in edit summary called lecture materials. So all the lecture materials are
located here in this page, this little content block -block one - then videos for the class.
Here's some videos and here's folders so they can access the videos. Next one, lab materials.
Folders for the lab materials, and it's separated by week one, week two, week three. Now this
could be user friendly if you're just trying to provide students' files only. You just
need-- you need to make sure they need files. But I would recommend for,my example, my class
here. My class has more than just files. I have files and then I might have an assignment.
So I cannot add quizzes,questionnaires, assignments, discussion forums into a folder. It doesn't
work like that. So what I've done is on my--for the assignments they need to be doing for
the week,they have an assignment, then I've done add resource assignment, add resource
quiz and then add a resource forum. So you can separate your content by using labels and
I said labels before. So how do you make a label? Let me turn editing on and scroll down.
Okay, so here's another content block, content block number two. And I can add a label to
my course by clicking on add resource label. The label is another HTML block so I could
say lecture and highlight it, change the font, make it big and so on. I can change the color
and whatever. So I'm going to scroll down and save changes. And here's my lecture,my lecture--
the label. And the cool thing about labels is if you're going to be consistent, whichI
recommend you are in each content block, that you can do times two, so continue, I'd like
to duplicate this and I'm going to return to the course and thenI can move these things.
So I'm going to click on this move button and I'm going to move it down here to the content
section three. Now some browsers are going to actually-- you click on, it's like a double
arrow, one up, one down and you can click and drag this lecture label down. So you can
duplicate with the times two and then click on the move and drag the label down. So you
can move your labels and create your setup for each content block. That's a quick way of
doing that. So that's how you make a label. And then you would add your resource. So I'd
add a file that would go underneath that label or I would add an assignment or something that
would go underneath that label. And you can also indent things too. So let me see if I can
find another course that has indentions. No, this one doesn't but I also want to show you
this course too. Here's another course that was not setup by week or topic in regards to 10weeks
but broken down into main topic areas with only four main topics. So in the edit summary,you
can change the number of topics viewed from 10to 4 and the-- that edit-- sometimes I say
summary,sorry, edit settings. So edit settings, over here under settings is where you change
the number of topic blocks or change it from topics to weeks. So she changed this to four topic
blocks and she has course information, discussion boards in the top block then she's got study
guides, grading rubrics, handouts and cool microlinks and assignments. Now she's done it just a little
bit different. Instead of using that edit summary, so here it is right here,she actually did
add label and she typed in all the stuff in the label. So the label itself let's you do
more than just type in "lecture notes" like I did. You can type as much as you want in
it and you can also put in URLs that become links and you can also add additional labels
by taking text and making them bold like she did in the top. So let me go at the top. So
this is the edit summary which she didn't use but she's got a label here,Welcome to Microbiology,
and then she has another label which has this text here and then she made another label with
an HR. So you could do that by-- ifI go into this one, label, add resource label, so this is
my text, it can be a lot of text, I can just push my align tool like this to make a horizontal
rule. I can do a title that I need to have bolded 'cause I've got other stuff I want to
put under it and then maybe I'll just-- there and I want to add a bulleted list. You know,
whatever you want to do. So you can add more stuff. You can add images in here too. So
label is just an HTML block that has a little more flexibility than just providing a label. So
I'll show you what that looks like-- so, see, here my text, my title and so on. So labels
can be also very useful too for adding information that displays on the page. Let me see, I was going
to see if somebody indented things. And it doesn't appear that there's a whole lot of
people using the indent tool. Let me see if Bri--oh, Brian did. So Brian has content here
and then indented the content. So like I was saying, when you can move and also indent so
this is the move, so if you just roll over it, it says move but you can also click on
the move right. So each one of these things can be moved right or left. Now, this one has
already been moved once to the right so now you have the left option too. So you can indent
things,resources that you've added, to also help with organizing your content and making
it more user friendly for your students to view. So hopefully, that was helpful for you
in figuring out different ways that you can organize your content. My suggestion is that
you try to minimize what you put on your page so let me turn editing off. So if you have
content that you can make as a PDF or something like that, that's going to be more user friendly
for your students to read that large document as a PDF than it being on this page. So I
do recommend that anything that's important like this, the general information about you
and your office hours and how to get a hold of you and kind of a, "Hey, this is what's
you're supposed to do this week." You know, what are you responsible for this week and
then the other long information as an attachment. Because your page can get really, really long
and the student has toscroll to get to everything. And I don't know if you know this, there's
a couple of things that a student can do and yourself to help with viewing content. As
a faculty or a student, you can click on this little block. So it's a box on the top of your
content block and this one says,show only two weeks and so our week two,I can click
on that. What that does is minimize how much content is shown on the page. So this-- that
box that I just clicked shows the first block and one block underneath it. Then I have the
ability to goto other blocks so now week 7. So now there's week 7. Oh, I need to look
at week 2again, so I jumped to week 2. So that's a great way to-- now, if I change this as
the instructor, I'm not changing it for the student view. But as a student or an instructor
looking at content, this can help you by minimizing what's on the page so each person can do that.
The other thing that a person can do to help make content more user friendly for themselves
is this navigation block and setting block can be docked. So if I just role over this,it
says move this to the dock and I click and click and see now I have a whole bunch more
resource for my content. Now again if I do that, it's not for the students, alright? It's
only from my view. So-- and then I can click and then the NAV shows up again, you can click
and the settings shows up again. And then if I want it back where it was, where that little
blue box that's kind of next to it, it says undock this item. I can undock it, okay? So
there's some helpful tips to-- if I want to get back to all view, I can click on that box
again and now I can see all of them. So there's some things that can be very helpful for you
and your students to know when navigating through this content because it is all on one page.
I have to tell you though, I know if you're a Blackboard user you're thinking, "Gosh, I
don't really like it all in one page. I'd really liked the folder setup I had and the menu system."
The feedback we got from students was that they preferred this PolyLearn. Because now--
not only if you organize this work 'cause any material, any application can be used poorly.
So you can just throw a whole bunch of stuff on here and no organization at all--I mean,
they just, you know, that'd be just as bad asa bad Blackboard course. So what we heard
though from students is if it was organized in a way that is intuitive like by topic or
week, you know, this is by week and this is by topic. If it's organized in a way that it's
intuitive to the student, user friendly to the student. That this was a lot more user friendly
for the students to find content than blackboard because it's one page where all the content
is and not many menu items and folders and whatever in Blackboard,so students prefer
this. So just keep that in mind while you're designing your PolyLearn Course. Try to make
it as clean and as organized and duplicate your setup in each content so we can-- ( Pause
) While working in your course and organize your content, just make sure you're consistent throughout
each content block. So thank you very much for attending this workshop on organizing yourPolyLearn
Course and I hope that you have learned a lot about options for organizing your course and what
resources you can find to help you with that. Thank you and have a great day. ( Music )