Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

1. How much and what kind of help can I get from the institution in choosing and using media for teaching? Is help easily accessible? How good is the help? Do the support people have the media professionalism I will need? Are they up to date in the use of new technologies for teaching?
2. Is there possible funding available to ‘buy me out’ for a semester and/or to fund a teaching assistant so I can concentrate on designing a new course or revising an existing course? Is there funding for media production?
3. To what extent will I have to follow ‘standard’ technologies, practices and procedures, such as using a learning management system, or lecture capture system, or will I be encouraged and supported to try something new?
4. Are there already suitable media resources freely available that I can use in my teaching, rather than creating everything from scratch? Can I get help from the library for instance in identifying these resources and dealing with any copyright issues?

If the answers are negative for each of these questions, you would be wise to set very modest goals initially for using media and technology.

Nevertheless, the good news is that it is increasingly easy to create and manage your own media such as web sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and simple video production using a desktop computer or even a mobile phone. Furthermore, students themselves are often capable and interested in participating or helping with creating learning resources, if given the chance. Getting students involved in media production is a very good way for them to get a deeper understanding of a subject. Above all, there is an increasing amount of really good educational media coming available for free use for educational purposes, so it is not necessary always to create media from scratch.