Overview:
The CD-ROM Tool is a powerful aid to teaching and invaluable in courses that use a great deal of multimedia or other memory intensive materials. Using the CD-ROM Tool to reference these memory-intensive files from a CD allows you to keep the files in their proper context within your course. It also removes the long, slow download time for students and makes these memory-intensive files readily available for students instead of these files being nearly impossible to access over the web. This tool can help you to turn a simple course into a very exciting, interactive course with a little effort on your part. Instructors can distribute a CD at the beginning of the course that includes all the images, charts, PowerPoint presentations, movie and audio files that will be used during the course.
Some instructor/designers have also found that they can place movie clips side by side on the same page for comparison; something that would be impossible either using the movie files off the web or using streaming video.
The short description of how this tool works is that it allows an instructor to create a path to the files on the CD, thus bypassing the need to either upload the files into WebCT or stream them. This is a tool that is only viewable from the student perspective (you must log in as a student to use and test the CD-ROM).
Pedagogy:
Increases the overall engagement of students with content by incorporating material that normally would be nearly impossible to access.
Accessibility and Usability (versions 3.0 to 3.6):
The accessibility of this tool principally lies with the accessibility of the files that you are going to call off the compact disk(s) for your course. If the original files are not accessible, then they will still be inaccessible using this tool. The setup interface for the students, however, is accessible and useable in all versions of WebCT.
Uses and Advantages:
- Allows the use of files and materials within their proper context that would not have been feasible over the web. For instance, in the sciences you would be able to put in complex photographs, charts, tables, PowerPoint files, animation, movie clips and files and audio files.
- Those who have used this tool extensively and taught it to other faculty members, recommend that first you get the tool to work in the simplest way possible, then expand on those capabilities and uses within your course.
- In art courses, the extensive use of images could be made user-friendlier for the students.
- In almost any discipline there are materials that would not work over the current bandwidth and modem speeds that most students have. However, such materials can easily be added to your course with this tool.
- Making use of CD's that publishers provide without having to exit the course, view them and then return to the course. These files, for the most part, can be incorporated into your course seamlessly.
- With this tool, you can put files side-by-side for comparison that would not be possible with any other technology. For instance, the authors have helped put six movies on one page that could be played in sequence over and over or even simultaneously. This application would not have been possible with streaming technology and certainly not through a modem.
- Check the Dr. C forums (http://webct.com/ask_drc) for more innovative uses of this tool, as well as for additional help when and if you need it. Your students can also find help here.
Suggestions and Tips:
- This is a very advanced tip, but it can be a real timesaver. Rather than go through the tedious process of writing file and folder names from the CD-ROM down, consider doing a screen capture without all the details. Just do a screen capture of the list of files on the CD-ROM and then print out that list to use while setting up this tool.
- Another suggestion to avoid having to write down the file names of the CD-ROM is to Tile your Windows so you can be looking in Explorer and typing in WebCT at the same time.
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