The OLC studio in Pleasantville is open! The Pace Online team hosted an Open Studio event last week to announce the opening of the space. Several faculty visited to learn about the studio, and how all Pace faculty can use it to create multimedia course materials.
Featured in the picture above is our Smart Board, which you can use as an interactive prop to create more dynamic instructional videos.
Please contact OLC staff to learn more and book studio time. We look forward to collaborating!
The Pace Online team is excited to announce the opening of an Online Learning Center (OLC) on the Pleasantville campus. Located in the C level of Wilcox Hall, the OLC combines a state-of-the-art video studio with workstations to support faculty media production. At both Pleasantville and NYC facilities, OLC staff support all Pace faculty with technology and training to create high-quality digital content for their courses and programs in all modalities. Join us for an Open Studio on Wednesday, March 8th (10am – 3pm).
Media Production in February
Updates and Highlights
Please contact OLC staff to book studio time. Did you know we can help you tune up your home studio over Zoom? We look forward to collaborating!
We’ve kicked off 2023 with video production and a conference presentation – see below for highlights. Smit published another Premiere tutorial on using Pace’s motion graphics templates, and his previous “Basic Edits” garnered much acclaim from his followers on LinkedIn.
Media Production in January
Updates and Highlights
As always, please contact OLC staff to book studio time, or with your questions, ideas, or production needs. We look forward to collaborating!
At this week’s 4th Annual Pace Online Conference, I presented on the opportunities and challenges of storytelling in instructional videos. My talk was titled, “Creating Engaging Stories with Video.”
Stories – that is, stories that are only indirectly connected to the subject matter – have the potential to help students better connect with multimedia content. As David JP Phillips shares, stories can make your brain more receptive to learning. These could be personal stories or stories from your field that connect to the subject matter or lesson.
But telling stories also requires students to spend more time with our media, and that can be a challenge. I shared the story of Quibi to reinforce how even 10-minutes videos fall awkwardly between short videos (that require less commitment) and long videos that rival media choices with higher production values and well-crafted stories (well, some of the time).
A Call to Action
What’s the best way forward? It’s up to each faculty member to wrestle with this issue, but I challenged everyone to try to bring a story into lectures that are longer than 10 minutes.
After sharing a personal example, I asked everyone to reflect on a time or experience in their life that led them on their academic journey. I thought it would be helpful to experience this work of identifying possible stories, even though it can be frustrating sifting through memories and making connections to subject matter! And further complicating the path ahead, a professor will need a handful of ready-to-use stories to call upon over the course of a semester.
For the final part of my presentation, I reviewed the resources and services of the OLC, and invited faculty to seek our help in bringing stories into their videos.
Ready to record a story? Book a consultation or production time in the OLC studios. We look forward to working with you!
Media Production in 2022
With the Online Learning Center opening in late January 2022, faculty from across the University have developed video and related media for their courses and projects. In total, OLC staff have held 245 hours of consultations with faculty, and collaboratively produced 444 videos. With each video averaging about 8 minutes in length, this is over 62 hours of video. It was a great first year, and we’re looking forward to new and diverse projects in 2023! See OLC Monthly Updates for project highlights (and video examples). As always, please contact OLC staff with your questions, ideas, or production needs.
It’s a great time to plan for your spring courses. We hope you will contact OLC staff with question, ideas, or production needs!
Media Production in December
Updates and Highlights
It’s a great time to plan for your spring courses. We hope you will contact OLC staff with question, ideas, or production needs!
Media Production in November
Updates and Highlights
Ready to record? Book a consultation or production time in the OLC studios. We look forward to working with you!
I attended many virtual sessions of the “Accelerate 2022” conference hosted by the Online Learning Consortium (another “OLC!”) – my first time attending any OLC conference. The OLC is a non-profit organization that supports a range of professional development and quasi-academic (more white-paper than full research) offerings. In its own words:
OLC is a collaborative community of higher education leaders and innovators, dedicated to advancing quality digital teaching and learning experiences designed to reach and engage the modern learner – anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Below are the top themes I took away from the conference, with an emphasis on how educational leaders can continue to evolve university services.
This was a major theme of Amelia Parnell’s keynote talk on “How Online and Blended Learning Can Accelerate Student Success.” She highlighted the continuing focus on the future of the “Learning and Employment Record” (digital portfolios, badges, etc.). She also noted the importance of Prior Learning Assessments (“PLAs”) for attracting and graduating students (students using PLAs completed their credentials at a 20+% higher rate).
OK, we’re preaching to the choir here, but it’s still important. Not unexpected from a conference about online learning, but several sessions highlighted the importance of adding original video to courses. A session on “Building Hyflex Programs through Cross-functional Collaboration” looked at how faculty were more successful at deploying multimedia with university staff support. A session on “The Influence of Instructor-Generated Video Content” highlighted how using videos to communicate class expectations led to better a faculty experience with students throughout the semester.
I enjoyed learning some public speaking and performance tips from Jory Basso (founder of Hybrid Health and Fitness, an integrative health clinic in downtown Toronto). Here are his “9 tips for public speaking:
In a “Technology and Future Trends” session, speakers discussed structural changes to the web (i.e., “Web3”, “Web 3.0,” etc.) and possibly implications and possibilities for educational institutions and learners. I’ll let this one speak for itself:
The internet is changing and online learning will necessarily change with it. Terms like “crypto,” “blockchain,” “NFT,” “DAO,” and “Web3” are possibly not entirely new to you, but do you know what to expect when these stop being theoretical and become infused into the very bedrock of online learning? Join our panel of experts and educators to help answer questions like “What problem does this solve?,” “What value does this add?,” “How does it work?,” and “What does it even do?”
The panel was comprised of 4 people who are all involved in a “decentralized, autonomous organization” called Ed3DAO. While they were certainly selling their Koolaid, they also had some interesting ideas about the future of credentialing using blockchain technology.
And not just figuratively: a session on the “Barnes Foundation’s Digital Learning Platform” was about designing, engineering, and testing their new learning platform. As they are in the art education space, the Foundation built a unique web-based experience for remote learners to experience art education as taught by Barnes educators. The ability for learners to toggle between “self-exploration” and “instructor-led exploration” was very slick.
That’s what I was able to glean from this experience with the Online Learning Consortium community. After many years of seeing OLC publications, this was my first time attending one of their conferences. In whole, it wasn’t particularly strong on research, theory, or business. It was more like a passing glance at some current issues in the vast field of online education. I’m glad I was able to engage with this content, but based on the overall quality of the conference presentations, I’m not sure I would attend again anytime soon.
It’s a great time to plan for your spring courses. Reach out to OLC staff with question, ideas, or production needs!
The OLC welcomes Smit Goswani as a student assistant. With an interest in the possibilities of media and marketing, Smit is a student in the Masters in Social Media and Mobile Marketing program (Lubin).
Media Production in October
Updates and Highlights
Ready to record? Book a consultation or production time in the OLC studios. We look forward to working with you!
Today I attended a Human Resources webinar on “Managing Effectively at Pace.” Although it doesn’t seem especially relevant to a blog about educational media, it’s really relevant to any collaborative activity – and developing educational content is always collaborative! To that end, I’ve highlighted some interesting points from the presentation below.
Of course these are only a few of the issues that were discussed in the webinar. There are many aspects of management that require knowledge, preparation, and skill. But each of these aspects of management has corollaries in creative collaborations, and I would summarize them as important aspects of Understanding, Action, and Communication.
Reflecting on each example above gives me ideas about how to collaborate effectively.
Thanks to the HR team (Sia Bundor, Luciana Ziegler, and others) who developed and delivered the session!