Title: micro-Overview
Course: FLO MicroCourse - Creating Online Gallery and Portfolio Spaces OER > Section: Day 1

The micro-Overview provides a description of the course, the learning outcomes, and a preamble about how it all came together.

To obtain a badge for this course, please complete the following activities:

📌 1.0 Getting to know each other

⭐ 1.1 Educational use cases

📌 1.2 Please, share your pedagogy

⭐ 1.3 Getting organized

⭐ 2.0 Image sharing on SPLOT

⭐ 3.0 Create your website, portfolio or gallery

⭐ 3.1 Upload your media collection

📌 Final presentation and reflection

The micro-Overview provides a description of the course, the learning outcomes, and a preamble about how it all came together.

To obtain a badge for this course, please complete the following activities:

📌 1.0 Getting to know each other

⭐ 1.1 Educational use cases

📌 1.2 Please, share your pedagogy

⭐ 1.3 Getting organized

⭐ 2.0 Image sharing on SPLOT

⭐ 3.0 Create your website, portfolio or gallery

⭐ 3.1 Upload your media collection

📌 4.0 Final presentation and reflection

This is meant as an introductory course for those who do not have much experience in web publishing or who want to try something new. I have tried to keep the material accessible and use as little technical jargon as possible, but there will be some. So, let’s stay in touch!

There is an open discussion forum and two synchronous sessions on Tuesday and Friday, so we will have a chance to share and showcase our experience.

If you have any questions or feedback about the material or activities, please use the available discussion forums or contact me by email at jason.toal@gmail.com.

Participants can explore a selection of platforms intended (in most cases) to do much more than create a simple portfolio or gallery. A lot of bells and whistles that you probably don’t need. This course will focus on those features for displaying, sharing, and primarily collaborating with media. Each media type (images, audio, video, documents, interactive) has its own constraints, so to keep things simple, the examples used will be those using images. Other media types will be mentioned, but it takes more time and resources to present in most cases. I will follow the cohort's needs this week and see where it takes us!

Outcomes

In this course, participants will
- Examine web publishing tools for sharing media, including WordPress, Notion, and Github (pages).
- Contribute a media collection to several of these platforms.
- Develop a website to showcase a media collection.
- Develop a website to facilitate media sharing and collaboration

Preamble

If you have been teaching in post-secondary education these past few years, you would have become familiar with your particular institution's chosen online learning platform, commonly referred to as a Learning Management System (LMS), and you may already be familiar with its features and constraints. Moodle, Canvas and BrightSpace are common examples.

Working as an educational technologist and consultant during this time, I have had the opportunity to support many instructors who have been trying to emulate their in-person teaching methods by using one of these systems, and have noticed there can be a gap between what the LMS is capable of and the desired outcome, or what we can call the “user experience.” Most notably, in terms of sharing and collaborating with multimedia such as images, audio and video, the LMS does not always provide the types of interactions that people have come to expect from modern websites, such as interactive image galleries, videos with comments or the ability for groups to collaborate and contribute their media content to a shared collection for a discussion or critique.

Instructors do their best given the tools provided and try to make the learning activity fit the features their LMS includes. In some cases, they seek external web services or tools that specialize in the types of user experience they are looking for but quickly come up against a steep learning curve, run into barriers protecting student privacy or discover that these services only provide limited functionality for free (freemium). At this point, they often contact a technical support person at their teaching and learning centre for a consultation.

I developed the idea for this micro-course through some of these requests and an interest in state-of-the-art web publishing tools for sharing media online. My teaching goal is that throughout this week, you will become more comfortable exploring the web “outside the LMS” and discover some new methods for engaging your students with media.