What is your name?
Dr. Tim O’ Sullivan
What and where do you teach?
Pharmaceutical and organic chemistry, School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry, UCC
For what purpose did you incorporate TEL into your teaching?
I hoped to use TEL as a means of facilitating a flipped classroom approach to spectroscopic analysis. The two main goals were to make the pre-classroom videos more interactive and to incorporate analytics to track student engagement.
How did you do this?
Following discussions with the Instructional Design Team in UCC, we decided that Articulate Storyline was the software package best suited to this project. After initial training sessions, I set about embedding Panopto videos into Storyline and then splitting the videos into short 3/4 minute segments. I next interspersed these segments with short quizzes. The quiz questions related directly to the preceding video segment. The package was designed in such a way that only on correctly answering each question was the student able to progress to the next section.
What were the benefits of this TEL tool?
Storyline is a very flexible tool for creating interactive video packages and it doesn’t require any programming skills. The layout is broadly similar to PowerPoint which makes it relatively easy to find your way around the menus. There are several question styles available in Storyline which allows you to bring incorporate a variety of questions. Lastly, Storyline can export content in SCORM format, which is compatible with the major VLEs (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle). This SCORM package links directly with the VLE grade centre, making it very easy to track student engagement and determine exactly how many students have completed their pre-classroom work.
What were the drawbacks?
Building up interactivity in Storyline requires the use of layers, triggers, variables etc. which are not especially intuitive at first. It does require some practice and trial-and-error in order to make full use of it.
What advice would you have for someone else wishing to use this tool?
The training provided by the Instruction Design Team was hugely beneficial. There is also an active online community using Storyline, many of whom are willing to share their Storyline creations. It is well worth checking these out as basic blueprints for your project – no point reinventing the wheel!