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							     A BLU Recipe for Making Online Learning Materials
                                        Steve Bennett
Firstly, get yourself a radio mic and a laptop        Next you need to present it beautifully!
(ideally a tablet pc) and the program SMIRK

Next, go to your lectures, turn on SMIRK LIVE
and record everything you say and do. (You can
either import a PowerPoint presentation into
SMIRK, or just write on the blank screen as if it
were a whiteboard. Smirk will record your words
and synchronize them to your actions on screen)

When you get back to your office you’ll find you
have approx 3mb x duration-in-minutes of
material. For an hour lecture, that might be
something like 150mb of audio and graphics!
Now no-one’s going to thank you for uploading        In the time it takes to give the lecture you will
a great blob like that. You’re going to have to      be able to break it down in to small mini
break it down into manageable chunks                 lectures and you probably need the same
                                                     amount of time again to add titles to the
                         The vast lump of dough      slides. You probably need the same amount
                         that is the lecture, must   again to add some contextualising text and
                         be transformed into         some questions. In other words to produce
                         exquisite madeleines of     material requiring × amount of student time,
                         meaning. With SMIRK         you need 4× of your own.
                         that’s no big deal.
These should probably last no more than ten          But that is still a lot less than most people
minutes or so. SMIRK allows you to do all this,      typically budget for when making online
and also turn each mini lecture into a web           materials. And the proof of the pudding’s in
slideshow, single mp3 file, or IMS content           the eating! Cop a butchers’ at:
package, ready for uploading to your VLE or          http://smirkboard.herts.ac.uk/multimedia/
even the JORUM.                                      and see my 58 mini-lectures with their
                                                     associated text and quizzes. But don’t take
Having created these they need some kind of          my word for it, look at what my students said:
wrapper. And this wrapper is context. This           Most of them are easy to understand, but sometimes the accent that i can not be sure some words,
                                                     anyway many thanks to Mr Bennett. Happy Chinese New year

describes the mini lecture and its relationship      The lectures were excellent. they were very helpfull
                                                     I think it is quite good and interesting way. Also, very helpful to the students who missed some of the
                                                     lectures for some or other reason.
to the others! No-one after all wishes to devour     It was a great help in revising the course. The lectures i had missed i could listen to them and make
                                                     notes. It felt as if i am really attending the lecture in the class. This is a very good initiative on your
anything without knowing what’s in it.               behalf and i appreciate it a lot. I would suggest to improve the audio quality a little bit.
                                                     I think its great that we have web lectures as it has helped me with my revision by miles! I think the
                                                     quizes were a good way to revise and learn so the only recommendation I have is that all the quizes
                                                     are there! Thanks
Finally the icing on the cake is a set of multiple   Web lectures are very usefull.
                                                     Great job on the smirkboard site, definately the most organized and best presented notes that I have
choice questions. The students love them. I          come across in my time at UH (5th year!). I found the use of audio really help the revision process and
                                                     breaking each lecture down into sub-topics made the process even easier. The option to take a quick
suppose because they allow them to truly gauge       quiz at the end of each section really made me confident coming into the exam .... keep up the good
                                                     work!!
whether they have understood the material. Or        the web lecture is a good idea and it is also very helpfull and intresting, but there is a small problem i
                                                     faced with it, i could not view the slides while the lecture is going on, i could here the lecture and could

whether its just gone “in one ear and out the        see only the last slide.but this method is really helpfull and itresting thanking you
                                                     I think this is a really good method of making sure the students are best prepared for the tests.

other”.
                                                     It is better to add some video on the web lectures
Trial poster for BLU – Font size 80


                                       Picture, clip art and
   Default at 56                       autoshape imported normally
                                       – Default font 56
A larger box of text to see how this
looks when it wraps – the width of      And this is font size 20 typed in a table           And this is in the adjacent cell in the
the box was defined and the height      form to ensure that things aligned                  table… again in font 20
just continues to extend downwards      properly – this is font 20
as I type more in – resized to font
size 24

                                        This is font size 16 and is probably too small –
                                        although it might be legible, there may simply be   This is font size 36 in
                                        too many words for the poster to work effectively
                                                                                            the remaining cell




                                                                     A bit more text here in a
                                                                     different colour because of
                                                                     the background – font size
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