Publishing for iTunesU - Pitfalls and Successes
Presenters: Anton Proppe, Lisa Germany, Joe Malignaggi, Mark Van de Velde
Digital Media Support
Information Technology Services
Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne is one of the first 7 Australasian Universities to feature in iTunes U - the educational section of Apple's iTunes Store.  iTunes is one of the most popular podcasting and music download services currently available and allows Swinburne to highlight its research, teaching excellence, student work and unique aspects through video and audio podcasting.

We will present an overview of our experiences and challenges so far.
The presentation will be from a variety of perspectives

General overview of iTunesU process
Selecting content for iTunesU
Visual design considerations and limitations
Designing iTunesU RSS feeds

Educational Mysteries.
Presenters: Zennie McLoughlin, Iain McKay, Bill Lane
Educational Media Group
Educational Technology Advancement Group
RMIT University

Students from the School of Education race against time to identify the source of a mysterious illness that is killing children. Information emerges and the teams must use their wiki's to explore the clues and their conclusions.  Educational Mysteries utilises the Drupal CMS and Abobe Flex to create a collaborative multimedia environment.

Trak.
Presenters: Zennie McLoughlin, Iain McKay, Bill Lane
Educational Media Group
Educational Technology Advancement Group
RMIT University

A lecture widget built using Adobe AIR.  Designed to sit over the top of Powerpoint's to display lecture progress and define custom intervals between presentation and interactive lecture segments.

Morning tea / Networking

About your Medicines DVD
Presenter: Greg Nelson
Biomedical Multimedia Unit
Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences
The University of Melbourne

The presentation will discuss the pro’s and con’s of DVD authoring for a text heavy user centric hybrid DVD.Originally converted from a template PowerPoint Presentation, this hybrid DVD project for the Uni Melbourne School of Nursing is able to be taken into the field to clients or to loop on a DVD player in the foyer of a GP’s waiting room.

The user is able to play the presentation on a computer or conventional television via a DVD player, and to navigate through the text heavy presentation at their leisure, and able to find content easily through the use of chapter points, allowing indefinite time to study each slide.

Discussion points:
So why not use PowerPoint?
PPT will not play in a DVD player, and when exported as a Quicktime movie, text looks appalling.
Traditionally we are not in the business of creating video DVD’s and what made this more difficult was the heavy text base of the content.
We decided to use DVD Studio Pro on a Mac.

GAIT
Presenter: Andrew Bonollo
Biomedical Multimedia Unit
Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences
The University of Melbourne

Gait is a program that examines the phases & events in walking and running cycles. The project use Flash Video to develop time based exercises where students can measure, on screen, walking & running events such as toe strikes or heel strikes at the times they occur within the videos. By measuring these events students learn how to measure and calculate various aspects of gait and stride.

Using Flex to Assist Formative Assessment
Presenter: Michelle Park
Biomedical Multimedia Unit
Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences
The University of Melbourne

The presentation will showcase the formative assessment module developed as a self-paced knowledge check for University of Melbourne’s first year medical students.

Adobe Flex’s free open source, component-based framework leverages Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) to accelerate development and increase ease of maintenance for expressive web-based applications. We’ve used Flex and AS3 to develop an application for students to check their knowledge by completing a quiz, and receiving customised feedback for their answers.

Benefits of using the Flex framework:
Cross-platform
Speed to Market
Ease of use
Open Source/Standards Based
One Language to Rule them All.

Under the microscope: Microscopy in focus.
Presenter: Darren Britten
Online Teaching Support Unit
Latrobe University

In previous years, Biological Science students needed to view a primer video on how to use a microscope: a TV was wheeled into a lab on a trolley, a bit of video was shown, paused, questions asked, and continue until the end. This provided little opportunity for students to actively engage with the workings of the microscope, resulting in a low rate of understanding of basic microscopy prior to commencing labs. This presentation describes the development of a Flash-based microscopy learning object intends to address the previous shortcomings, giving students the ability to direct their own learning through self-discovery.