July 30, 2010

Welcome to the first blog posting for Online Instructional Strategies!

Weekly I will be posting various online instructional and technology strategies, tips, and tricks. Please feel free to use anything from these postings in your own classes and let me know if you try something out and it works really well as we may want to implement the approach in the master shell for all sections and students to benefit from.

In this first blog posting, I'd like to share with you a great audio/video resource that allows us to bring expert "guest lecturers" into our courses through the use of online TED.

Who is TED you may be asking. Well, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives.

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free - a huge opportunity for us to bring experts into our online courses. More than 200 talks are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a creative commons license, so they can be freely shared and re-posted. You'll simply need to remember to add the link with the "Open in new window" option selected (just as you should with any external link so as to comply with Internet copyright regulations).

If you haven't had a chance to search around the TED website at http://www.ted.com/ I encourage you to do so. The videos that are shown are very "real life" and "relevant."

Because of TED's success and growth, even if you are teaching a course not in one of the above mentioned areas, I strongly encourage you to check out the various TED listings as the videos also include the disciplines of Business, Science, and Global Issues.

By incorporating TED lectures into your courses you are adding in both video and audio components to your course, thus reaching audio and visual learners. The more learning styles we can appeal to in our courses, the more effective we will be as instructors.

If you have any questions on this resource, or anything that I post in the future, please just let me know. I'm here to help you enhance your online instructional approaches!

Have a great weekend!

Heather Thomton-Stockman