I had a really interesting time working on Assignment 3 along with the digital story. Since my course subject matter is so heavily multimedia focused, I found it very topically relevant to read some of the readings for this course at the time that I was creating the course content. The two readings that stood out for me the most were Ciampa (2013) and Siemens (2003).
I knew going into Assignment 2 that I was going to try and make the course easily accessible and hopefully fun. There are so many After Effects videos and tutorials on the Internet that I wanted to create some structure that would work better for people that weren’t as organized or proactive. Despite what Spiro (2014) claims about the self-directedness of learners now, I know that having too much information can be just as troublesome when trying to learn something. So I decided to provide content for directed learning.
Ciampa’s (2013) writings on the motivation of students really struck home with me and I tried to include those reflections into creating the content module for this course. That was primarily the reasoning for the topic of my digital story. I wanted to create an educational video that would hopefully motivate them to stick with the course and give them a positive starting point. Since all professionals started with no skills or knowledge, I felt that the digital story could parallel their own learning path throughout the course.
While I was building out the content I really took notice at what information I was trying to deliver to the students and the best possible media to use for that. Through reading Siemen’s piece on media characteristics I spent quite a while thinking about how else I could deliver this information about my course content. The subject revolves around video, so that is what I went with but I had a fun time trying to think about unique ways I might be able to teach people about after effects. I think if I had more time and energy I could have come up with something fairly unique.
Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf
Siemens, G. (2003). Evaluating media characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes. Elearnspace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/mediacharacteristics.htm
Spiro, K. (2014). 5 elearning trends leading to the end of the Learning Management Systems. Retrieved from http://elearningindustry.com/5-elearning-trends-leading-to-the-end-of-the-learning-management-system