Students were able to apply knowledge from several chapters including globalization, ethics, business law and government responsibility and many students understood how much their opinion changed when the tragedy was so close to home. The last question was to contrast MMA’s responsibility to Quebec in the Lac Megantic disaster. I developed 4 questions for class discussion about the Loblaws and JOE Fresh lines of clothing, which made headlines following a tragedy in Bangladesh at one of their factories. However, the biggest impact of this new pedagogy on my Introduction course is that I am able to finish the material significantly faster and try something that I have been thinking about for years but for which I never had sufficient class time. This helps keep students engaged and the responses are used as participation marks. In the videos, I talk for a few minutes and then pause the video to ask simple questions on the topic that was just explained in the previous slides. It is a discussion rather than a problem-based course. In my Introduction to Business course, I use video classes differently. My role is to circulate and explain things when a group flounders or to teach the concepts at an even higher level. The students work collaboratively in groups to solve the higher-level online problems. For the face-to-face class, I book the SMART classroom at Dawson which has 7 SMART screens. They can start and stop as they wish, but they must complete the class and assigned exercises the evening before the face-to-face class. They don’t have to sit for 2 hours to take a class. The online exercise also gives them instant feedback on whether they understand the topic. This asynchronous format gives students the freedom to control their own schedule and their pace of learning. Typically, they watch one topic for a few minutes and then they are directed to try an online accounting exercise. For problem-based courses such as my Accounting course, I teach theory within the video mixes, and assign simple online exercises provided by the publisher on their companion websites for the students to do while they are watching the videos.
I use the videos differently depending on the type of course. This means that I meet the students face-to-face once a week and the second class is at a distance. I also use Microsoft Word to present complex tax problems in my taxation class, as I find it works better than PowerPoint for this type of learning activity.Īll of my courses use a hybrid structure. For example, when I am explaining complicated concepts in my Accounting class, I simply split the screen to show my calculations in Excel with a spreadsheet. Therefore, I can record anything that I would do in the classroom. Office Mix also has the ability to record the screen. Students answer for participation marks and it helps keep the students interested and engaged when watching the video. There are some pretty neat features, such as pausing the video to ask the students questions. Each slide becomes a video, so editing and rearranging the video is simple and quick. The tool facilitates creating short videos with audio narration.
There is no new software to learn, and you can use existing PowerPoint presentations to get started with producing your videos.
When you install Office Mix, it simply adds another ribbon to the PowerPoint interface. Since the Office Mix add-on is free, it was not difficult or expensive to have it installed on my computer. At Dawson, teachers already have access to a Microsoft Office licence. This platform requires an annual licence and teachers wishing to use the platform had to get authorization from their Dean. For the past five years I held synchronous online (live) classes using the Adobe Connect virtual meeting platform and recorded my lectures. I created video 'mixes' to present the theory in my flipped classes and spent face-to-face class time on application of the theory. Combined with a flipped classroom pedagogy that includes problem-based learning, integrating this tool into my workflow allowed me to produce learning material that dramatically improved the success rates of my students. I was excited to try it when I returned to Dawson in the fall. I discovered the tool at a teachers’ CAAA conference in Newfoundland over the summer of 2016.
Office Mix is a simple free screen recording add-in from Microsoft that integrates directly into PowerPoint.