Distance Education Technologies

To engage learners in distance education and eliminate passive learning, it is imperative that educators enrich and build their courses with technologies that promote interaction and create an active learning environment. Here are two programs:

www.emaze.com

Emaze is an online presentation software built by Visual Software System. This platform allows users to create interactive presentations. It offers a variety of features such as 3D scenes and 2D slides. It can be accessed from any electronic device to be edited by the educator and viewed by learners. It’s also a cloud-based presentation software and runs with any browser. Recently, automatic translation has been added to make presentations in any language, which will facilitate and eliminate language barriers and enable users to create presentations that communicate in the clients’ native language.

Basic presentations are free of charge and limited to the four templates offered by the company. Emaze Pro costs $4.89 per month with 3 collaborators and 2G storage and Emazing for business costs $14.91 per month with unlimited collaborators and unlimited storage space.

The company offers unlimited tutorials to support their clients and its customer service representatives respond to inquiries within 24 hours.  

Implementing this technology in my adult education enriches my presentations and creates an interactive learning session. Students can prepare their own assignments in this format, which promotes hands-on learning, creativity and critical thinking.

www.educanon.com

Educanon is an online collaboration tool that enables educators to integrate questions and activities within a Youtube video, TeacherTube video, screencasts and many other online videos. This integration promotes an active learning environment and increases students’ engagement. In addition, this technology offers instructors a system to keep track of students’ progress, which will assist them to review the critical aspects of a lesson with their students.

Using this collaborative tool with my adult learners will enhance the videos and create an active learning environment. The ability to remove some segments of the video and create questions and/or comments on main contents supports the learners and veer their attention to the important concepts to be learned.

Reference:

http://www.emergingedtech.com/