eLearning III — More Higher Education Applications

This presentation will describe the development and offering of a 12 week human behavior and the social environment course in psychopathology. This course teaches the clinical diagnosis of mental disorders as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The course uses a variety of video and internet technologies to reach 98 students registered from a wide geographic area. To provide the broadest audience for the course, the course is offered predominantly on-line, with a traditional text, and video lectures distributed on CD. The main component of the course is a course web site constructed within the University at Buffalo's Blackboard Course Management System. The Blackboard site is used to structure the course materials, offer access to supplemental course documents, offer exams, and to allow interaction between the students and the instructors. To supplement the on-line course materials, students are mailed a packet that contains the required texts for the course and CDs that comprise the video taped lectures for the course. The text forms the standard knowledge base, as with any traditional course. The video lectures are provided on CD to ensure that the video is of such quality that it is viewable by the students. The CDs also ensure that the students will be able to access the required lectures irrespective of how they connect to the internet. The course content is structured in a series of modules covering different topic areas. These modules are structured within the Blackboard system and they link to the video lectures on the CD so students are required to use the course web site in tandem with the materials they receive through the mail. The main instructional component of the modules is the video lectures. The video lectures average four hours in length, and are broken down into sub-segments of about half an hour to make them more accessible to the students. The lectures were designed to offer a variety of multimedia components that will keep the students' attention while the core content is being covered. These components include PowerPoint slides, the instructor's lecture, and video clips that demonstrate diagnoses that are described in the lecture. The PowerPoint slides offer the students an outline of each lecture. Students are able to download and print out the slides prior to viewing the video so that they have hard copies of the slides while they are watching the lectures. Video of the instructor was captured in one of the University's distance education classrooms. The video segments that illustrate specific diagnoses of the mental disorders consist of video from diagnostic tapes, and video role-plays that were performed by the instructor and students from previous classes. These segments help illustrate the behaviors that were described in the lectures. By combining these components, the lectures provide the students with a diverse presentation of the content that they need to learn in order to successfully complete the course. It enables the instructor to present the materials in an organized and systematic manner.

The Learning & Performance Support Laboratory at the University of Georgia has developed Evidence Based Inquiry (EBI) as a methodology for assessment and systematic improvement of performance. We will describe and demonstrate the methods as instantiated in an EBI Tool. The EBI Tool utilizes remotely controlled video devices to capture evidence, transfer MPEG2 video over IP, and enables analysis of video housed on campus multi-terabyte mass storage. Our presentation will provide detailed information about the practical applications of the methods and tool and explain how each were developed through the LPSL.