Firstly, get yourself a radio mic and a laptop (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 a great blob like that. You’re going to have to break it down into manageable chunks A BLU Recipe for Making Online Learning Materials Steve Bennett These should probably last no more than ten minutes or so. SMIRK allows you to do all this, and also turn each mini lecture into a web slideshow, single mp3 file, or IMS content package, ready for uploading to your VLE or even the JORUM. Having created these they need some kind of wrapper. And this wrapper is context. This describes the mini lecture and its relationship to the others! No-one after all wishes to devour anything without knowing what’s in it. Finally the icing on the cake is a set of multiple choice questions. The students love them. I suppose because they allow them to truly gauge whether they have understood the material. Or whether its just gone “in one ear and out the other”. The vast lump of dough that is the lecture, must be transformed into exquisite madeleines of meaning. With SMIRK that’s no big deal. In the time it takes to give the lecture you will be able to break it down in to small mini lectures and you probably need the same amount of time again to add titles to the slides. You probably need the same amount again to add some contextualising text and some questions. In other words to produce material requiring × amount of student time, you need 4× of your own. But that is still a lot less than most people typically budget for when making online materials. And the proof of the pudding’s in the eating! Cop a butchers’ at: and see my 58 mini-lectures with their associated text and quizzes. But don’t take my word for it, look at what my students said: 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 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. 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 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 Web lectures are very usefull. Great job on the smirkboard site, definately the most organized and best presented notes that I have 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 quiz at the end of each section really made me confident coming into the exam.... keep up the good work!! 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 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. It is better to add some video on the web lectures Next you need to present it beautifully!

Trial poster for BLU – Font size 80 Default at 56 A larger box of text to see how this looks when it wraps – the width of the box was defined and the height just continues to extend downwards as I type more in – resized to font size 24 A bit more text here in a different colour because of the background – font size 32 Picture, clip art and autoshape imported normally – Default font 56 And this is font size 20 typed in a table form to ensure that things aligned properly – this is font 20 And this is in the adjacent cell in the table… again in font 20 This is font size 16 and is probably too small – although it might be legible, there may simply be too many words for the poster to work effectively This is font size 36 in the remaining cell