Category

Unit and Activity Design

Obtaining and using images and videos to enliven your unit content can be frustrating and a copyright minefield!

However, searching for images and videos with Creative Commons licences can make the hunt for useable content easier. Creative Commons (CC) licenses are designed to make the rules around re-use of content very clear to everyday people – not just to lawyers.

Here’s an introduction to the concept of Creative Commons.

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Understanding CC Licences and attribution of content

What kind of licence should you look for if you want to use images, video or even sounds in your unit? Generally, any Creative Commons licence allows us to share content for non-commercial purposes, like education, through vehicles like our MyLO sites. However, some CC licences require you to attribute the content to the original creator, share alike any content that you have created using the original content, or show the CC licence under which the item is used. Other licences prohibit any derivatives of the original work (in other words, you can’t change the original content in any way).

Finding CC licenced content

There are so many images and videos out there on the web: how do you find the ones that carry Creative Commons licences?

  • You can use Creative Commons’ simple search function to search for CC licensed content.
  • This brief article, from Fractus Learning, details five tools that students can use to find images with Creative Commons licenses. We think teaching staff might find them useful too!

Do I have to provide attributions for…?

Videos (or other multimedia) that I find online?
When someone uploads a video to YouTube or similar video sites, they can switch off the ability to ’embed’ the video in other websites. If embedding is enabled, the creator is usually happy for their video to be shared on other sites, or at least linked to. However – use caution! Don’t embed or link to videos that have obviously been uploaded  without the original author’s permission. For example, when I look up a music video called The Salmon Dance (a song by the Chemical Brothers) on YouTube, I find several versions of the video. One has been uploaded by emimusic, another has been uploaded by ChemicalBrothersTV, and other versions have been uploaded by users with names like  ReyMysterio1254 and cheree4life. I should use the version from emimusic (the band’s label) or ChemicalBrothersTV (the band’s official YouTube channel), as these are most likely channels run by the owners of the music video content.

Common sources of videos and multimedia include:

  • Youtube. Millions of videos of varying quality are available here. Some channels are more reputable than others. A particularly good channel is TED, which features short talks on a wide variety of big ideas and issues from across the world. Be mindful that students cannot download these videos, so can only watch them whilst online. Also, many Youtube videos will commence with a short advertisement, which you will not be able to switch off. Students in China can not access YouTube videos due to enforced internet restrictions.
  • Vimeo. Similar to YouTube, you can search for and embed/link to videos. Here is an example of a tutorial video on Vimeo. The same warnings apply as per YouTube, however, there are no ads. Yay!
  • Merlot. This database contains annotated links to open educational resources, and organises them into categories. Alternatively, you can search for key words.  Resources may include videos or interactives.
  • Publishers may be willing to share videos, either online or as part of an embeddable object. Check that these do not require students to use a username and password, as some may be behind paywalls.

Music and sounds
In most cases, you will need to obtain permission from the creator/copyright owner to use music or sounds. It is OK to link to songs that the creator has made available online themselves (you’ll find plenty of these on SoundCloud), but incorporating sounds into a video or multimedia object is different. There are some open source sound and musics sites where you can seek out audio for inclusion in PowerPoints and Videos, but check the Copyright conditions first. At a minimum you will be required to acknowledge the creator. Useful sites include Freesound (for sound bites), Free Music Archive (for music), and DigccMixter (for music).

Hyperlinks to webpages?
There is no need to attribute a link to a website, as a visitor is taken straight to the source of the content when they click on the hyperlink.

Images embedded in your site (originating from another site)?
When I embed an image in a page, it is ‘linked’ from a page on the web and appears as an image on my own site. For example, here is an image of Dr Stuart Crispin (from the TSBE website) that I have ’embedded’ in this page.Dr Stuart Crispin
Technically, the creator has made the image publicly available on their own website (in this case, the image belongs to the university, so I can use it!). However, without an attribution, the image could be easily misconstrued as my own creation. Even with an attribution, I may not have permission to ‘bring in’ the image, even though it is coming from another website. So, when in doubt, check with the owner of the image first, and provide an attribution with the image once you have obtained permission. Searching for a Creative Commons licensed image will take some of the guess-work out of how to use an image.If you’re looking for a clip-art type image, check out OpenClipArt.

When in doubt…

Visit the UTAS Copyright website

http://www.utas.edu.au/copyright

or contact the Copyright Officer by email to utas.copyright@utas.edu.au

Each year, the University of Tasmania recognises excellence in teaching with Teaching Merit Certificates.  In early 2014,  11 TSBE staff were awarded Teaching Merit Certificates. Teaching @ TSBE will present a series of interviews with Certificate recipients.

For the first interview in the Excellence in Teaching series, we asked Dr Vitali Alexeev about the Teaching Merit Certificate application process, and the unit he was awarded the certificate for.

 

 Q

 Vitali, congratulations on receiving a Teaching Merit Certificate. I understand that you were nominated for the award by some of your students?

 A

 Yes, that’s right. The unit that I was teaching was BEA286 Investment Analysis. It is one of the units that I am most passionate about so I was very happy to have been nominated by my students. I was contacted by email and told that I had been nominated. After that, it was a matter of completing a form where I had to describe what occurred in the unit and why I felt I deserved the certificate. I think the process was pretty straightforward.

 Q

 Tell us some more about BEA286.  

 A

 There’s a lot going on in this unit! The focus is on building skills that will help students be employment-ready, so the application of investment analysis skills is quite important. Every year we have to fill out the unit reports and every year I teach the unit I have fewer issues or negative things to say about it, so I know that I’m on the right track.

 Q

 Describe the student cohorts that you teach in BEA286.

 A

 We have students studying face to face in Hobart as well as students studying by distance. Many of our distance students live locally, but study by distance due to work commitments. Others are based on the Launceston and Burnie campuses, and a small portion are based on mainland Australia or overseas. Our cohort is quite diverse. Some of our students are international , and some have no background in finance at all. Many of our students come from different disciplines like engineering and social sciences, so they come to the unit with a very limited understanding of financial theory and terminology. In addition to this we have a combination of undergraduate and graduate student enrolments.

 Q

 It must be challenging dealing with diverse cohorts. What steps did you take to deal with these challenges?

 A

 One of the major challenges we face is that some of our students haven’t been exposed to finance topics in their undergraduate studies. Students who have studied finance are generally aware of terminology like ‘equity’. How do you explain what ‘equity’ is to a student who has never heard of it before?For the students who don’t have a finance background, I offer three workshops. These workshops are tailored to address finance knowledge gaps so that the students have the ability to perform the first assessment task effectively. We also cover financial mathematics and stats in Microsoft Excel, for example, regression analysis, and option pricing. Many of our students are familiar with the basics of Excel, but have never had to use it to perform complex calculations. In the future I would like to develop a series of short videos on specific topics, which students can review in their own time if they need to.

 

Q

 You mentioned that this unit is very focused on the application of investment analysis skills. How is this manifested in the unit’s activities and assessments?

A

 The unit is designed around a portfolio simulation for a hypothetical client of their making. Students submit two portfolio reports, in addition to delivering a poster presentation. They are encouraged to work in groups as I believe that discussing initiatives together will help them work it out better than if they were to work alone. Report writing is a skill that they will need in the workforce, so we generally get them to write in a report style.The first portfolio report is basically a description of the client, the objectives the portfolio needs to achieve and any constraints on the client’s portfolio, for example, tax incentives and whether or not the client wishes to invest in environmentally sustainable companies. I’m trying to make this as real as possible for the students, because text books often talk about returns on investment without covering important things like tax implications for the client. Students are invited to select a minimum of six securities for their portfolio, but they are welcome to experiment with larger number of stocks in their portfolios. Doing this teaches them about the importance of diversification – that investing in just one or two securities is a risky approach. They quickly learn that they can diversify some of the risks by investing across industries or by investing in companies of different sizes.

 

Students work on the second portfolio report towards the end of the unit. This report is focused on analysing the performance of their portfolio. Students use Excel together with the DataStream database to analyse and mine financial data. This way, students gain experience working with data as they would in the real world and they can include this experience on their resumes.

 

The students are given the chance to present their portfolios to the class during a poster presentation session. The group members stand by their poster, ready to defend their results if there are any questions. They’re free to walk around and look at their peers’ presentations. I thought it would be fair if the students decided how grades would be awarded for the poster session, so they each pick their three best presentations. The marks are issued according to the votes received. I do reserve the right to adjust the grades as needed, but only by 1 point or so.

 

The presentations have several benefits. Firstly, the presentation is an important milestone that encourages students to start working on their portfolio early, rather than waiting to the last minute. Secondly, the presentations were delivered 2 weeks prior to the final portfolio submission date, meaning that students could use feedback from their peers and me to improve their final submission. Finally, the presentations require students to explain their portfolios and convince others that theirs was the best portfolio available. These are skills that they will need to compete in the financial industry.

 

 Q

 Group work and the presentation session are a key component of the unit. How did you cater for your distance students who perhaps couldn’t attend workshops or the poster session?

A

 Because we had a blended cohort, it was important to have an online presence so online discussions were strongly encouraged. Many of my distance students were concentrated in Launceston, so they were able to meet in person. But technologies like Skype allowed others to have face to face interactions over the internet. They could see the expressions on each other’s faces. This kind of technology alleviates the problem, but doesn’t eliminate it.Presentations for distance students were done using voice-overs in PowerPoint. They were made available online so that distance and face to face students could review them. This way, all students had the opportunity to review the presentations made by others, and receive feedback on their own presentations. Many of our distance students even attended the face to face poster presentation session, so attendance was huge!

MyLO allows you to easily include images and YouTube videos in a variety of items, including News, Discussion posts, Module pages and descriptions, Quizzes and more.

These instructions explain how to embed images from the web or from you computer (refer to Parts A and B). Information about embedding YouTube videos is also included (refer to Part C).

Tam has also produced this video to outline how you can embed YouTube videos, as well as media from other commonly used sites like SoundCloud, into a News item, Discussion post and so forth.

 

A lack of disciplinary vocabulary can be a significant set-back for students as they  listen to lectures, complete readings and construct assessment tasks. Here are some activities that could help students become familiar with the language of your discipline.

OPTION 1: Pop quiz

  • Get students to complete a MyLO Quiz at the end of a recorded lecture or reading activity. Include automated feedback. While a quiz must be associated with a score, the score itself does not have to be recorded as a Grade Item, meaning that these sorts of tasks can be used for formative feedback.
  • Quickly and easily create vocabulary lessons with Quizlet. It allows students to learn vocabulary in a variety of ways, including electronic flip cards, drag and drop matching games and more. You will need to provide students with a link to the Quizlet quiz.

OPTION 2: Flip cards, fill-in-the-blanks, crosswords and more

H5P is an opensource interactivity development tool. You can sign up for free and create a range of interactive activities, including dialog cards, drag-the-words, fill-in-the-blanks, mark-the-words and memory activities. Once you have created an activity, you can link to it or embed it within a MyLO HTML Page. Note that the results WILL NOT be recorded in MyLO Grades, nor will a record of completion. See the example below.

Hot Potatoes, developed by the University of Victoria (Canada) Humanities, Computing and Media Centre, is a free application that generates crosswords (see image on right), quizzes, cloze passages and more. Packages created with Hot Potatoes can be uploaded to MyLO for completion by students. The graphics are a little dated, but it still functions OK in Google Chrome browser. May not work on mobile devices. Note that the results WILL NOT be recorded in MyLO Grades, nor will a record of completion.

OPTION 3: Word of the week

Include a Word of the week in your weekly introduction (video or presentation), perhaps in an Announcement on MyLO.

OPTION 4: Glossary

You can create a glossary of discipline specific terms. Though MyLO has a Glassary tool, we do not feel that it contains sufficient functionality. Instead, we recommend creating an HTML page with a list of Glossary terms. You don’t have to make up all the definitions yourself. Instead, provide  links to  definitions on the web.

For more information about these options, contact your local blended learning/online learning team.