Online project-based learning activities provide students with asynchronous opportunities to engage their course materials, their course instructor, and their classmates by using audio/visual methods for virtual community building unique to online teaching and learning.  As online courses continue to develop beyond text-based discussion forums that feed off posted instructor overviews, educators will find that the standards for using audio and video will be raised.  What we propose in the use of interactive audio and video is to contextualize our idea of “face-to-face in cyberspace” within the new tactile consciousness that has resulted from the merger of the acoustic and visual consciousnesses.  These consciousnesses, according to Walter J. Ong, SJ, characterized the ages of orality and literacy, respectively, and we have moved into a third age.  Our presentation will deal, therefore, with the modulation of online learning projects contained within 60-second interactive audios and videos that have been databased for the purpose of catering to andragogical principles of contextualized and needs-based learning.

With the amount of work it takes to produce these interactive worksheets, the real question begs:  Do these interactive worksheets increase student learning?

For many years, teachers have either created worksheets or copied them for students from prepared sources . The hope is that by completing the worksheets learning occurs. The learning may occur through reiterations of a given problem in  various formats or through student reflections upon some problem whereby they produce some type of written essay.

While learning the Microsoft Producer product, we naively created worksheets that mimicked the paper worksheets already in place. We soon realized that it was just more work to achieve the same rote principles upon which we were trying to improve. We reflected on what we had accomplished and suddenly we realized that interactiveness was lacking. Hence, in our next attempt, we tried to increase the interaction between the student and learning. If we could achieve guiding the student through an interactive lesson without the teacher's being present, we thought that we might achieve sustained learning of the material. The interactive worksheets allowed for this difference to occur.    Continue