Part 4: INVENT

Building your course with the basics is important, but delivering a course that is of the highest caliber, with the most engaging activities and interesting content is something that takes a bit of invention. This section contains ideas to point you in that direction.

Audio and Podcasting
Using audio and podcasting technology, you can increase your instructor presence and provide an alternative mode of delivery for your insights and perspectives. Audio and podcasting also offer engaging opportunities for your students to creatively present and demonstrate their own understandings.
Collaborative Docs: Small Group Participation
Are you looking for a better workflow for giving feedback on your students’ written work?Are you looking for effective ways to track and  streamline group work? Collaborative documents are powerful tools offering great potential for your course.
Crafting Video for Instruction
Video is among the most powerful of the many modern tools at your disposal. You can use video to improve your instructor presence, deliver content, or provide feedback to your students. Importantly, your students can also use video to demonstrate the rich understandings you hope they obtain.
Curation
There is a powerful array of modern tools for collection and curation of videos, images, and references of all kinds. You can put these tools to work for your class fostering communications and sharing of resources. These same tools also offer powerful opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding.
Immersive Roleplay
How can you best get your students to practice at being the professionals they’re learning to become? Try putting them in the role of those very professionals for an engaging and valuable learning experience.
Game Mechanics
Are you looking for ways to increase student performance and engagement? Are you looking for ways to enhance student motivation? Game mechanics take on these challenges with a variety of powerful strategies.
Online Discussions: Canvas, WordPress, Slack
Successfully fostering a rich discussion dynamic can be one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks in course design and delivery. Here are some tips and tricks that will help you avoid some potential pitfalls and make the most of the capacity of your chosen platform.
Screencasting
Screencasting tools allow you to record your desktop images and actions and combine them with your voice and even video to easily create powerful instructional videos. Additionally, consider having your students present their own understandings by using screencasting.
Student Publication
We all want our students to effectively demonstrate the understandings we hope they obtain. How and where can we ask them to share their presentations through engaging and innovative places or modes?
Synchronous Communication: Small Group Presentation
Like many powerful tools, synchronous communication has tremendous potential to strengthen or weaken your course. How can you take advantage of this great potential, or should you, without undermining the design of your learning experience?