Model eLearning

The Basics of Video Editing

You’ve recorded your lecture or instructional video, and now you need to edit it into something you can share with your students. With the complex elements and tools involved, the process to convert a simple recording into a full-fledged video can seem intimidating or daunting. While the technical side of editing can be very complicated, it’s a very simple and straightforward process.

Today, I’m going to walk you through the basics of video editing. Whether you’re learning editing for yourself or just interested in understanding the process, this post will give you an overview some of the elements of video editing basics. I’ll use Adobe Premiere Pro as our example, but video editing software like Camtasia, Final Cut Pro, and DaVinci Resolve have similar features. So, without any further ado, let’s begin!

Instructional Design for Mental Health

When instructional designers or subject matter experts (SMEs) design a course, students’ mental health often unintentionally gets overlooked. Courses that overlook students’ mental health, even unintentionally, show a lack of empathy and understanding on our part.

Collaborative and Social Learning Tools for eLearning

Authentic engagement between students and instructors is immensely important in eLearning. That being said, both collaborative and social learning are the heart behind any virtual course. Not only that, but researchers at the University of Calgary Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning describe these modes of learning as an “opportunity for students and instructors to engage in shared efforts to search for meaning, understanding, and solutions to complex problems or concepts” (Anselmo et al., n.d.). Thankfully, the rapidly-developing sector of collaborative and social learning tools allows us to provide these opportunities for authentic engagement.

Does Going Digital Alter Learner Retention?

People engage in learning through different formats. This can vary based on the learning environment and the stakeholders involved in the development of content. With the recent uptake in online and computer learning, as course designers and instructors we need to ponder a new question—is the option of having a digital textbook and taking notes on a computer just as effective as a paper textbook and handwritten notes? This debate includes many individuals adamantly on one side or the other, so the answer should be investigated through research to determine what the evidence tells us. To begin this conversation, let’s look at existing studies and determine how these two available options should inform course design moving forward.

Unwrapping 2022: Supporting Learners

It’s that time of the year again. If you’ve been following Model eLearning for some time, you know we use our last post of the year to reflect on the past year. We enjoy the opportunity to look back at the themes of the year (and we hope you do too!).

Authentic Self-Assessment in eLearning

Self-assessment is an incredibly powerful tool to foster self-reflection and growth for all—and it’s especially important for college students. More students take a greater number of courses and programs online. And overall, online learning is generally more self-paced. Students need to build and hone self-assessment skills to help them track their progress and set goals for future weeks, months, years of assignments, projects, and exams.

Digital Content Curation Tools for Education

Digital content curation tools allow us to easily create, collaborate, share, and evaluate educational resources and collections. With “[…] advances in technology, enhanced tools allow researchers to preserve their work in new venues and formats to reach new audiences. (Deschaine & Sharma, 2015, p. 20). In Curating an Instructional Content Collection for Teaching and Learning, I shared how to use content curation in course design to provide accurate, relevant learning resources and model 21^st century information literacy skills. In this post, I’ll discuss digital tools for curating educational content.

Building Learning Environments to Engage Our Learners’ Attention Span

An interesting development within the expanding research on the brain and its functions is the study of attention spans in humans. Based on the new information and data found in these studies, we can build learning environments that are more interesting to our students as they are able to engage in the content more effectively since it aligns with the way their brains prefer to engage in the world.

Reimagining Higher Education: The Sequel

In summer 2020, I reflected on reimagining higher education in light of Smith and Felch’s (2016) book, Teaching and Christian Imagination. Today, I want to build on that blog post by reflecting on another book, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (Baker & Bilbro, 2017).

Creating Accessible Learning Materials — Microsoft Excel

Hey there! Ready to continue learning about how to make your course materials accessible? In keeping with our theme thus far, we’ll look at another program in the Microsoft Office Suite–Excel.

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