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In the previous unit, you learned about various course authoring tools which range from audio recording; creating, editing and organizing videos, photos; poster making; capturing screens, movie making, info sharing tools to real time document collaboration.

In this unit, you are introduced to some other eLearning tools and their educational applications. These tools can be used in education in order to facilitate eLearning. There are some tools which provide study material in a digitized form with or without embedded video lectures. Others provide it in the form of games which stimulate learning while you are having fun. Remaining ones provide platforms where you can create educational videos, games, quizzes, activities etc. and embed them in your website or blog.

At the beginning you will explore some of the courseware and video sharing sites. You will also be introduced how educational games are being used in education. Finally, you will be familiarized to certain tools which can help you in creating interactive e-content like videos, games etc. As a practical example you work with open educational resources available freely on the web.

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Learning Outcomes

On completing this topic students will be able to

Identify various courseware and video sharing, educational gaming sites,
Understand educational implications of courseware and video sharing sites,
Apply courseware, video sharing site and educational games in their own domain to enrich their understanding,
Create videos, animations, diagrams etc. using these tools.

Introduction

With the advent of technology, people are exposed to various modes of entertainment. Due to abundance, their attention span to one particular area is reducing day by day. In such a scenario, it is a challenge for educators to keep learners engaged in a knowledge seeking process. It is very important to make learning fun which will engage their minds to a greater degree. Hence it is inevitable for educators to harness the potential of media in order to enrich their learning.

Introduction of subject relevant study material in the form of courseware, audio/video, and subject based video games in education are picking up the pace in education. It not only helps educators to cater to a larger segment but also makes effective teaching with enhance learning. Research has shown that audio/video format of teaching reinforces reading and study material, enhances student comprehension, knowledge retention, thus increasing student motivation and enthusiasm. It also encourages ‘out of class’ learning.

Courseware

Courseware is the content and technique applied to instructional materials in electronic format. It consists of repository of the syllabi, reading lists, lecture notes, and other documents that were once used in an actual (http://distancelearn.about.com/od/isitforyou/a/opencourseware.htm). The instructional content of the courseware can be presented using any media be it text, computer program or CD-ROM (http://www.superglossary.com/Definition/College/ Courseware.html)

There are several universities and institutes which provide their courseware available free of cost in the public domain. Some of them are listed below (http://distancelearn.about.com/od/isitforyou/a/opencourseware.htm):

MIT – The forerunner of OpenCourseWare, this college provides dozens of detailed courses, as well as audio and video lectures.
Utah State University – Provides OpenCourseWare for multiple undergraduate disciplines.
Fulbright Economics Teaching Program – Offers economics and marketing OpenCourseWare.
Tufts University – Provides users with access to material from a number of disciplines including medicine, nutrition, arts, and sciences.
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – Offers many health-related courses.

In this section, we are going to discuss about few courseware available which are also open. They are as follows:

Hippocampus
Mitopencourseware

Hippocampus

HippoCampus is a project initiated by the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) with an objective to provide free educational resources for middle school, high school, and college students and instructors for self-improvement. It was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone.

HippoCampus content has been developed by some of the finest colleges and universities in the world and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. All the content we provide at HippoCampus is created by other educational institutions and contributed to us to distribute as part of our non-profit mission. Resources comprise of high-quality, multimedia content which include video, presentations, worked examples ainteractive simultations and test prep.

More than half the use of HippoCampus occurs during classroom hours, when teachers go online to project topic lectures and show simulations launched from the HippoCampus site. Teachers can use the site as it is, or can create custom playlists of topics in their custom HippoCampus page by creating a free user account.

Further information can be found in the HippoCampus User's Guide.

Mitopencourseware

MIT OCW was launched with the initiative to provide free and open education to anyone, anywhere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_OpenCourseWare). MITOpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT. Resources can be used to complement traditional studies, or acquire new knowledge, thus enforcing independent learning. However, MIT OCW is not an MIT education since it does not grant degrees or certificates or provide access to MIT faculty (http://videolectures.net/mit_ocw/).

MIT OpenCourseWare shares the entire knowledge base through 2,100 courses in 33 academic disciplines. The content include lecture notes, syllabi, assignments and exams. Rice media resources such as video lectures, simulations, and animations are also part of the courseware.

You can walkthrough the site of MIT OCW through http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICa_4xUr8BA

Video sharing site

Video is “the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video). Devices like Tape, CD, DVD and Pen Drive etc., are used to store video files offline. With increase in accessibility of internet day by day, videos are also available in online mode. You can find online videos related to sports, games, music, movies, cartoons, science, education, technology etc.

A video hosting service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. The video host will then store the video on its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view this video. The website, mainly used as the video hosting website, is usually called the video sharing website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_hosting_service). For example, YouTube is one of the video sharing website.

There are many free educational videos available on internet. They offer their video library for free and without registration (Table 1). More and more online videos are used effectively every day in education and other fields.

In this unit, you will learn more about online videos through YouTube. You may think why YouTube is chosen for this unit? This is because YouTube is the second largest search engine (after Google) and hosting large variety of videos. It allows you to work on videos, very easily in a professional manner. YouTube has several advantages for online videos. You can start up a video channel and post regular video updates that are entertaining as well as informational. As you know, YouTube is being used as a social media website, where you can meet people, share your videos and get feedbacks. The following sub-section gives more details about YouTube.

NAME	FEATURES
5min	Instructional videos providing answers to common questions.
Academic Earth	Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars.
Big Think	Video interviews with 600+ thought leaders from various fields.
Bright Storm	Short-form online video lessons by professional educators. Free math lessons.
Edu Blogs TV	Aggregator and host of educational videos.
Futures Channel	High quality multimedia content ideal for use in the classroom.
IGNOU Webcast	IGNOU provides the Webcast for Gyandarshan and Gyanvani
Internet Archive	Collection of more than two hundred thousand free historical videos, many academic.
Math TV	Professional video lessons in mathematics. Covers basic maths through calculus.
MIT Open Courseware	Short videos, teaching basic concepts in science and engineering subjects for teachers, and self-learners.
NeoK12	Aggregator of high-quality educational videos from around the Web.
SchoolTube	Video sharing platform for schools, featuring original content created by students.
Teachers TV	Engaging, professional videos and practical resources for educator development.
TeacherTube	Online aggregator of educational videos.
YouTube EDU	Free lectures from more than one hundred colleges and universities.
YouTube	Hosts millions of user-generated and professional videos.

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website. It was founded by three former PayPal employees namely Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The first YouTube video was entitled “Me at the zoo”, and shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.

In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS. The agreement allowed the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the YouTube site, along with commercial advertisements. In March 2010, YouTube started live broadcasting of certain content, including 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League. According to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event. In November 2011, the Google and social networking site was integrated directly with YouTube and the Chrome web browser, allowing YouTube videos to be viewed from within the Google plus interface.

YouTube is a free video publishing tool from Google web engine for sharing the online videos. Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML, which can be used to embed it on a page outside the YouTube website. This functionality is often used to embed YouTube videos in social networking pages and blogs. Embedding, as well as ranking and commenting, can be disabled by the video owner.

YouTube does not usually offer a download link for its videos, and intends for them to be viewed through its website interface. The following section covers creation of account, view the video, share the video and upload the video etc.

Video Lectures

OCW Finder

“An OCW Finder is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses” (http://www.listio.com/web20/app/OCW-Finder/). OCW Finder currently shows results from the following courseware: (http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/):

OER can be found by typing in the search box or selecting subject. Results cam be browsed in real time.

OER Recommender

“The OER Recommender is a web service that helps people finds relevant open educational resources” (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378889.1378994).

“Recommender systems form a specific type of information filtering (IF) technique that attempts to present information items (movies, music, books, news, images, web pages, etc.) that are likely of interest to the user” (http://openedconference.org/2009/archives/519). OER Recommender was introduced looking at the increasing number and decentralization of OER. It is necessary to index OER so that it becomes easier for users to filter them as per their relevance.

It links the digital learning resources in the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) with OCW repositories thereby providing related information. While browsing the OCW repository, the recommender also shows the pages with "Recommended resources" link (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378889.1378994).

You can go to the video link An introduction to OER Recommender and Open Resources that find you for an insight into OER Recommender.

OCW Consortium

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is an independent non-profit organisation. It is a community comprising of various higher education institutions (+250 universities) and other related organisations which support and promote the use of OpenCourseWare for global education (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/aboutus/abouttheocwc). OCW consortium work towards providing formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality education materials organized as courses.

The Consortium provides a gateway to OCW projects and courses for the entire OCW community, thus encouraging its use by people and organisations. There are more than 5,910 courses from 62 sources in 15 languages, available through the Consortium's web site (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/courses/index.php?option=com_coursefinder&view=search&Itemid=9&q=uric+acid&l=English&s=&uss=1&b.x=35&b.y=13&b=search). Various projects which OCW Consortium has undertaken are provided under the link http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/community/projectshowcase. The Consortium works towards educating people about the movement. The consortium comprises of people with expertise in OER generation and work for the development of open education projects.

YouTube EDU

YouTube EDU is a home to high quality educational content and can be used to continually discover, create and share educational videos with the world. It provides educational resources pertaining to Primary & Secondary, College & University, and Lifelong Learning. Videos can be used as supplement to in-school learning or for professional development. It is an excellent media to enrich classroom teaching (http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1330535)

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is an aggregator of free online academic video lectures from universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. The lectures range from subjects like Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Philosophy, Political Science, Arts, Culture, Archaeology, Space Science, Psychology and Religion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Earth). It has been in the list of 50 best websites 2009 (http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1918031_1918016_1917977,00.html).

Academic Earth has created a platform which has made education accessible to its users around the world. It has overcome barriers to achieve world class education from the world’s leading scholars http://www.academicearth.org/about.

TeacherTube

TeacherTube is a platform for academics to particularly teachers, to share educational resources such as video, audio, documents, photos, groups and blogs to aid teacher training (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeacherTube). “TeacherTube is a YouTube for Educators” (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teacher-tube-educational-video-resource). The site is also open for students to upload videos. 0

TeacherTube can be used in a variety of ways for digital class room experience. To know about its features go to the link http://www.instructionblog.com/index/2009/09/teachertube-a-youtube-for-educators/. If you are interested in learning how to use teacherTube for teaching and learning process, please refer to http://learnitin5.com/How-to-use-TeacherTube-in-the-classroom.

Educational games

Freerice

Freerice is a non-profit website that was founded by John Breen in 2007. Freerice has two goals (http://freerice.com/about):

Provide education to everyone for free.
Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

Freerice is an online game as well as learning tool which is available freely. In this game, players solve multiple choices questions and earn 10 rice grains for each correct answer. The grains are then donated to World Food Programme. Players have the flexibility to choose the subject of their choice. The available subjects are English vocabulary (the original subject with which the game launched), multiplication tables, pre-algebra, chemical symbols (basic or intermediate), English grammar, SAT, basic foreign language vocabulary for English speakers (French, German, Italian, and Spanish), human anatomy, geography (flags of the world, world capitals, country identification and world landmarks), the identification of famous artwork, and literature (classic and popular books) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freerice). In this way, it allows players to raise rice to fight world hunger and to learn through games.

Freerice has become a major contributor in fighting world hunger since so many people answer so many questions. The site is therefore responsible for the donation of hundreds of millions of grains of rice every month. Therefore, Freerice has been listed in the 50 best websites of 2011 (http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2087815_2087915_2087900,00.html).

To know how it works, go to http://www.bdwebguide.com/free-rice.htm

Noble prize

Noble prize is an educational website which introduces games, animated experiments, and simulated environments in order to create deeper understanding about the Nobel Prize-awarded works.

There are around 46 productions out of which 29 are interactive learning games which vary in their themes and level of their difficulty. The games have in depth conceptual illustrations and high level of interactivity which make it engaging. Moreover, it is an easy and interesting platform as it does not require any prerequisite knowledge. These animated content are mainly aimed at young learners particularly the 14-18 age group (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelmedia/nobelprize_org/edu_program.html)

To know more about Nobelprize.org's Educational Outreach Program, go to http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1458

Flash games

ClassTools

ClassTools is an application which creates flash based free educational games, quizzes, activities and diagrams which can be easily embedded in the blog, website or classroom webpage. It is an interesting tool to make teaching learning more effective and entertaining. It is a free website which makes it popular among people. There is also a library of games created by other teachers (https://sites.google.com/site/abbeywoodelearningcpd/home/basic-tools/class-tools).

In order to learn how to create tools using classtools , you may refer to the YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBQ47s1qp1Y

Animated games

GoAnimate

GoAnimate is a web app that lets you generate fully animated cartoons where you can make animated characters act out whatever you’d like (http://www.Techcrunch.com). It is a platform where everyone and anyone can create and share animations online (through email or by embedding it in the website. It allows its users to express them selves through animated videos without any need to learn to draw or install any software. It provides a wide range of variety and options in terms of characters, scenes, sounds. Users can also create their own characters, add their own voice etc. (http://www.goanimate.com).

Animation is an interesting way to communicate with learners of any age group. It helps to enrich knowledge along with providing fun and entertainment. They can be used in a science class showing how to conduct an experiment, safety instruction, in a maths class , solving equations. It can also be used as a storytelling and discussion tools (http://teachweb2.wikispaces.com/GoAnimate) Following is an interesting example of animated ad showing difference between Office PC and iPAD (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2favWoQDbo).

Goanimate Tutorrial for beginners are available at http://www.slideshare.net/marceloleal/go-animate-tutorial-presentation and http://www.slideshare.net/snglylmz/goanimate-6481212.

You can alo learn to create videos from the site http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a8KeqkLsHs&list=PLACB94497E3D66DF7&index=1&feature=plcp

Virtual world application

Second Life

Second Life was launched in 2003 by Linden Lab. It is an online 3D virtual world where people interact with each other through their avtars. They can meet, socialize and participate in individual and group activities. It also provides experience where people can create, buy and sell anything. It also offers a platform where people can enjoy live events and gaming activities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Second Life has become a very famous platform for education by many institutions, such as colleges, universities, libraries and government entities. It provides a more personal way than traditional learning for researchers as well as instructors. Over 80% of the universities in UK and atleast 300 universities use second life for teaching and learning activities and research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Second_Life).

To know more about Second Life, go to the video http://www.youtube.com/user/Secondlife

Survey/questionnaire tool

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is the world's leading provider of web-based survey solutions. It offers market research, event planning, customer feedback, product planning and education & training. It provides the insights to its users about their domain and thus helps in making informed decisions. Literally millions of people use SurveyMonkey for everything from customer satisfaction and employee performance reviews, to course evaluations and research of all types (http://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/aboutus/). To know about how survey monkey works refer to the tutorial at http://help.surveymonkey.com/app/tutorials/categorylist or the user manual at http://help.surveymonkey.com/euf/assets/docs/pdf/UserManual.pdf?noIntercept/1&session=L3RpbWUvMTM0MDk2NDkxNS9zaWQvd01UZDFUX2s%3D.

Conclusion

In this unit, you were introduced to some other eLearning tools which can facilitate teaching learning process. Courseware and video sharing sites are the excellent mode to supplement ones learning. With the introduction of OpenCourseWare, learning using internet is picking up the momentum. On the other hand, introduction of concepts in the form of games brings interactivity to the e-content thus stimulating learning while having fun.