Tell us about your online learning experiences and we’ll showcase your work here. You can make your online learning story as big or small as you like. Use any medium – digital is obviously best for sharing, but that doesn’t stop you drawing, making, dancing or writing and sending us a photo or video of the results.
Brief
Our brief is really simple. Tell us your story of learning online. It might be one incident or a learning lifetime. Maybe you have accessed opportunities that would otherwise have been closed to you, and that has changed your life. Or you have used online learning to explore a personal interest or to learn from someone you really admire. Perhaps your journey has had many challenges, or one particularly high hurdle. If you’re looking for ideas, check out these undergraduate student voice videos from LSE, postgraduate learner journeys from the University of Exeter, e-learning student voices from Sheffield Hallam University, or learner voice videos from diverse FE students in the UK.
Tools
Use whatever tools you like to tell your story. Write a blog post if you have a blog (e.g. with wordpress , edublogs or blogger). If you have a public e-portfolio or a b(blog)-portfolio you could use that instead.
Take a picture or make a picture collage that tells your e-learning story. Useful tools for photo editing are Preview, PAINT.net , GoolePhotos or any editing tool that came with your operating system. For collages and special effects try prisma, be.funky or pic monkey.
Adobe has a nice storytelling tool that works either on a desktop browser or in a native iOS app.
Why don’t you try your hand at a short video, captured with your smartphone or built-in tablet/laptop camera, or sequenced from still images? Again, the native software that came with your device (e.g. iMovie, MovieMaker) will probably be your best option for editing, but you could also try movavi (Mac), WeVideo (cloud based) or avidemux (cross-platform). If you’re shooting original video do test the lighting, plan shots and rehearse the moves so you get something close to what you want ‘in the camera’.
Easily create your own animation using tools such as e.g. goanimate or videoscribe, which use pre-drawn scenes and characters. Or animate your own drawings with these tools from Crayola and Aardman animations.
Create a mindmap, an image map, or any other map of your online learning world. Or make a presentation using prezi, keynote (Mac), powerpoint (Windows) or google slides. Think about how you communicate visually as well as with words. Some of these allow you to add a voiceover or soundtrack and create a video presentation to run online.
Sharing
Share your story as you would any other digital creation. That might mean putting it (or a picture of it) on facebook, tweeting a link, publishing it on your blog. It might mean uploading it to a photo-sharing site such as instagram or flickr, or a video platform such as vimeo or youtube, or slideshare for presentations. It doesn’t matter where you put it, but make sure you use the hashtag #Olsuccess so we can find and enjoy it!
If you want to be sure of getting your story told, let us know by email where to find it and we’ll make sure we include it on one of our daily blogs.
(Re)using
If you’re studying online, chances are you will be asked at some point to reflect on your learning, or to put together a portfolio or learning blog. This is your chance to repurpose the digital story you created for #OLsuccess week. What’s not to like about being efficient with your study time, using the best principles of the web (repurposing, sharing) and impressing everyone with the public recognition you have gained for your work?!
Going further
Everything I’ve suggested here is explored much better and more deeply in the DS106 handbook, a ‘how to’ guide from a well-known online course and creative community. Once you’ve digested that, look for inspiration among past projects curated by DS106 students. And if you’ve enjoyed your adventure with digital storytelling, why not get involved yourself with the DS106 daily create?