Tools for Enhancing the Development and Delivery of Online Courses

The Tropical Agricultural Science Program at the University of Guam currently has one course delivered fully online  (including the lab which utilizes a lab kit) and numerous courses delivered as hybrid courses. Several tools are used to help enrich the online learning experience. The courses are currently managed using Moodle. SoftChalk (www.softchalk.com) is used to produce lessons that included interactive activities not available within Moodle. SoftChalk lessons are stored externally to Moodle, but can be accessed by links in Moodle. Lessons can include activities that are graded and the scores automatically posted into the Moodle Gradebook. Lessons can also be exported to disk for situations where web access is unavailable. The current generation of cameras produces images that contain great detail, but because of the high resolution, are generally too large to download and display at typical bandwidth speeds available to students. In order to utilize the detail of full resolution images, Zoomify (www.zoomify.com) is used. Zoomify makes it possible to deliver high-resolution images that can be zoomed and panned with reduced loading lag on the web. Zoomify images can be incorporated into online lessons making detailed images more usable. Images can also include interactive labeling. Producing images continues to become easier as camera technologies advance. While full frame DSLRs offer the highest quality images, smaller format cameras are much easier to carry and produce high quality images. A brief summary of the strengths and weaknesses of some recent camera formats will be compared.