The holiday period between the Fall and Winter Quarters gives me time to review the design of the courses that I will be teaching during the upcoming Winter Quarter. During the Winter Quarter 2003, I will be teaching two courses (Accounting Information Systems and the second course in Intermediate Accounting). Needless to say, with all of the happenings in the business community during the past year or so, there is no lack of current events material for class discussion.
For years, I have used comic strips to illustrate good and bad things happening in the business community. Accountants rarely received press coverage, had their own TV shows, or were the focus of movies. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. I now have several comic strips where accountants are the focus of attention.
Class materials are posted to my course websites. Students access the websites, download materials, view streaming lectures, participate in online surveys, write responses to threaded discussions, and more. Almost everything hyperlinks from the Class Assignment Schedule.
I use a variety of software programs to develop course materials. For example, I use:
- Mind Manager (Mindjet) to create mindmaps that serve as lecture/discussion guides. Mindmaps provide a picture of the topic that helps students learn and remember the material. As appropriate, I include hyperlinks from objects on the mindmap diagram to support web pages.
- Adobe Acrobat (Adobe) to format documents where presentation format is important.
- Impatica for PowerPoint (Impatica) to format PowerPoint presentations. Impatica reduces PowerPoint files to very small files that can be archived on my website and streamed by students. Impatica creates files that will stream easily for an AOL dialup user. Achieving this constitutes a miracle in my book!
- Viewlet Builder Pro (Qarbon) to create animated problem explanations that stream from my website. Viewlets play as Flash presentations. I have not been able to get the hang of how the Flash timeline works. However, Viewlets are created using screen shots. Like Impatica, Viewlet Builder creates very small files that stream without a problem.
- SmartDraw (Smart Draw.com) for creating drawings, flow charts, and various diagrams. The program is very easy to use and diagrams can be published in html format.
- Visual Communicator Pro (Serious Magic) to create video lecture/discussion materials that can be saved in Windows Media Player (.asf) format that streams from my website. Visual Communicator Pro is an incredible program that enables me to turn my computer into a TV production studio.
- MSN Messenger (Microsoft) and AOL Instant Messenger (AOL) to provide virtual office hours for my students. The capabilities of both services have been improving. I use these in addition to Groove.
- Net2Phone (Net2Phone, Inc.) to talk either PC-to-Phone or PC-to-PC with my students. With living in the desert region of Southern California, everything is long distance. The call quality is quite good. The price is excellent, especially the PC-to-PC connection. It's free!
- Email. Because of the variety of ISPs used by students, I prefer for them to use Groove's instant message.
Groove has played a key role in my classes for the past couple of years. The versatility of the Groove workspace is unmatched by any other program that I have used. Blackboard, while an excellent learning management system (LMS) just cannot match what I can do with a student through Groove.
I am currently waiting for v2.5 to be available. I am hoping that v2.5 is ready for download before we get too far into the Winter Quarter.
Getting students up and running with Groove takes considerable time and energy. Most students require a lot of hand holding during the setup phase. Using Groove requires me to be a one-person IT Department. I am getting better at handling this process, but I must admit that it has tested my desire to use Groove at times.
In future commentaries, I will write about using the Groove workspace as the focal point of distance-learning classes. In particular, I will talk about the tools that work well for students.
There's an exciting new tool that Ashok is about to bring to market. He has developed a tool that incorporates Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet. Members of the workspace can view and work on a spreadsheet at the same time. I have had an opportunity to work with the tool. Simply stated, it is impressive! Groove business users will like Ashok's new tool.
Earlier, I mentioned the versatility of the Groove workspace. No other program enables me to tailor the workspace by selecting the tools that meet the needs of my students. Plus, Groove enables me to work one-on-one with students, as well as, get them actively involved in group project assignments.
Combine tools like the calendar, pinboard, discussion, notepad (which has several uses), MediaTeam, and Ashok's Excel spreadsheet, forms, and chat (both talk and finger-chat), and you have one powerful learning workspace. Students are literally blown away by Groove's capabilities. No kidding!
10:47:57 PM 
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