5130: Tutorials and Culminating Projects Progress

Well, I feel like I am making some progress on the final Culminating Project now. I decided to go with Windows Movie Maker. I had used it before but only put in audio and pictures. So I spent time learning how to make "slides" and put them in (I made a rough draft of the visuals in PowerPoint then copied them over to Fireworks for the final markup and so they would be in .jpeg format). I am happy with how it is coming along so far. I still need to work on the print message part and am a little confused on which direction to go for that. I did not do super on the first Instructional Message in Print and want to make this one much better. Then there is the Design Script. Going through all the readings and having these design guidelines and ideas from the authors has been so helpful. I want to make sure and address them all appropriately and effectively.

I really liked reading Marty Tessmer's "Writing Online Training Tutorials." He has a great sense of humor but also presents everything in a very straightforward manner that makes it easy to understand. And attending his guest lecture on the same topic helped me understand it all even better. I hope that I can make a tutorial he would approve of! I have struggled some with wondering if my project meets the criteria of being a tutorial. It is not like a step-by-step process of how to do something. The idea is to give students a list of ways to succeed in my class (ie. come to class on time and prepared, follow the rules, study for tests, etc.). So it is not so much teaching them how to do one specific task, but I feel like it is an important topic that needs to be addressed with them. But Marty talks about the idea of interaction being a definitional element...the student interacts with the content, not just watching a video. So do I need to add some interaction somehow? A quiz at the end to show they understand the content? Could this be part of the print-based component? Would there be a way to include a Flash quiz component with the Windows Movie Maker part? I think I am coming up with many more questions than when I started and should go back and re-think the direction I am going....