Thoughts on the Cheap & Cheerful: Approaches to Multimedia Workshop

Courtasy of Wikimedia:
Father Goose

Susie Greig and I recently attended a workshop called Cheap & Cheerful: Approaches to Multimedia organised by the Institute for Academic Development (IAD).

This workshop was full of great ideas to use free and easy multi-media applications to create learning and informational multi-media assets for your course and/or website.

The first presentation ‘Podcasting for free – Weekly podcasts from the Religious Studies Project‘ focused on the creation of a weekly podcast on interesting topics relevant to Religious Studies. Staff members and students interviewed interesting people in this field – both scheduled interviews and ‘on the fly’ at conferences and workshops. Louise Connelly (IAD), who helped create the podcast platform on the website, told us how easy it was to record the interviews and edit and save the audio files using Audacity (a free audio editing application anyone can download and use). The weekly podcasts have become very popular and the most popular podcast had 943 downloads in one day. David Findlay (Learning Services) then demonstrated Audacity, and all its functions and how easy it is to use.

The next presenter was Sharon Boyd Lecturer in Distance Education at The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies who demonstrated an application called Padlet which her online students on the MVetSci in Conservation Medicine used to create collaborative posters. This application was a great way for students to share graphics and text on a group project entirely online. They could add pictures, text, web links and videos on a virtual bulletin board type interface as if it were a real poster that would be presented at a conference. This was a great way for distance students to collaborate and gain experience on poster creation for conferences when they couldn’t come together physically in a group setting.

Next, Fumiko Narumi-Munro, who teaches Japanese here at the university, gave a great presentation on how images and video enhance online learning especially for giving instructions to learners of a new language. She shared an example of a screen cast (video of on screen activity) she had made of navigating a Japanese website which was far more practical for students than a verbal description.

Last but definitely not least Wilma Alexander (Learning Services) gave us a great demonstration on the Screen Capture software Jing which is really useful for creating short and simple demonstrations for using software applications when text is just not enough.

I hope these highlights of what was a very useful and fun morning are helpful and hope to see you at the next workshop 🙂 Click the following link to find out about future IAD events. IAD Events