IT 740 - Interactive Instructional Multimedia

The purpose of IT 740 is to help learners understand and use interactive instructional media in the educational setting. Students will complete practical projects that illustrate their understanding and mastery of interactive media design principles and visual literacy theory. Students will create interactive media/computer-based instructional materials using digital imaging and multimedia authoring software. This course will also explore issues related to visual literacy, design principles, copyright issues, and their impact upon education.

This is the first time I offer IT 740 in a hybrid format and am not quite sure how it will go because students need to master the basic skills in both Photoshop CS3 and Flash CS3. In order to provide supplement materials to students, I designed and created a course Web site where students can get course syllabus, course schedule, course assignments and projects, rubrics for assignments, and tutorials for each software application, as well as the related resources. Although I created and uploaded all tutorials to the site, I don't feel confident that all students will do the exercise. I thought this format would be more effective than face-to-face format because I demonstrated the skills in class and students may forgot them after class. While with these tutorials online, they can view them again and again if they want. However, to my great supprise that some students told me that they didn't do the exercises in the past two weeks when they were supposed to finish a few small exercises. I don't know how they can follow the instructions in the following weeks if they miss some exercises.

I hope that all my students would understand that online weeks (weeks we don't meet in classroom) means more work on themselves, not doing nothing as they showed me. This blog was created to keep communication with my students. I would like to read your blog for the reflections on your experiences in doing the exercises.