Learning Materials
Scran Learning Materials
Case Study
1. Author details
| Name: | John Edmonstone |
| Job title: | E-Learning Support Officer |
| Institution: | Cardonald College |
About the author:
My role at Cardonald is supporting staff in e-learning projects, training staff in a variety of ITC-related disciplines, and supporting the college’s Blackboard (VLE) programme. I’m also seconded for two days a week to the SFEU where my role is a project officer, helping to plan and deliver ICT training across the Scottish sector, as well as designing and creating online course materials. My background is in Communications and Journalism and I previously ran the HND Journalism course at Cardonald.
2. The materials
The materials comprise a web-based guide to photography techniques, delivered on CD-ROM. The materials provide a simple guide to a range of photographic techniques, which are in turn illustrated by exemplar photographs, principally drawn from the Scran resource. The materials are also present in booklet form.
These materials were created to support the teaching of photography across the curriculum. They provide a high quality photographic resource and are adaptable to a variety of levels for a range of students. They will be used with both HNC and NC Media students.
Why did you want to create these materials?
Partly because the Scran resource prompted the idea, but also because there is a shortage of good quality exemplar material in photography. Paper-based resources do not provide a good or easily available substitute, and letting students search the Scran resource would be counterproductive in this case as it is not easy to find photographic exemplars casually.
How will your materials benefit learners?
By providing a high quality and wide range of exemplar materials.
How will they improve on previous methods of teaching this topic?
They will fill an existing gap and allow students to browse the materials independently of the tutor.
3. Creating the materials
I worked hand in hand with the subject specialist – Eric Judlin. Eric first produced written notes on photographic techniques. We then divided these into a set of topic headings which would comprise our menu.
While Eric began searching for images relevant to each topic I produced a number of templates and experimental versions of the first section of the materials. We then decided on a format in which to present the photographs. This format relied extensively on templates and subfolders for images, which meant that a lot of pages could be reproduced in template form, with different images added for different topics. The aim was to produce as few different types of pages as possible, and there were basically only two main ones.
Photographs were given to me as printed out thumbnails. I then downloaded these, edited them and built them into the pages, along with the notes. I also sourced copyrights and compiled these. Photos were given to me in batches, and there was a good deal of adjustment along the way, substituting new images. We also produced a list of images which could not be found in the Scran database and Eric took these himself.
The final versions of the pages were put together. Leftover images were used to compile some quizzes, and I also reassembled the materials in booklet form. The end results were burned onto CD.
What tools did you use?
FrontPage for html authoring. PaintShop Pro for graphics editing. Otherwise simply Word and a CD writer. I also need a portable memory device to enable me to carry images/pages between different locations.
What additional support did you need in creating the materials?
Very little not provided by ourselves. The cover was designed for us by one of the Graphic Design lecturers.
What are the main skills required in creating materials like these?
The main technical skills would be html authoring and graphics manipulation. An additional set of skills would be simple web-page design and planning.
Describe any difficulties you experienced and how you went about addressing them.
The main difficulties arose from finding time and occasion to confer as a team, and final technical difficulties in producing a Mac compatible version. This latter is being addressed by seeking advice within the college. The former was coped with by flexible and creative scheduling.
What would you do differently next time?
There was a tendency to assume that the work was nearly finished when the bulk of the materials were created, without realising how many small jobs would be left to do and how long these would take.
What hints and tips would you offer to a colleague planning to create a similar resource?
Plan well, allow a lot of remediation time in the last section of the project.
Recommendations – please note any reading, software, websites, online courses etc that were useful to you.
An online source of JavaScript was useful, accessed at www.simplythebest.net. This provided some image manipulation and presentation codes to create the slideshows.
Additional comments
There was a long learning curve in getting the best out of the database, and similarly with producing workable materials. However, the idea was essentially quite simple in the first place and therefore there wasn’t a huge number of complex technical problems. The Scran database itself proved to be a good source of inspiration and threw up new ideas for using images as we went along. The necessity of good planning and good project management became clear. Also the tendency for a project to consume far more time than was budgeted for.
