YouTube and Webcam for instructor presence

I post a weekly video for my fully online classes to help establish instructor presence, which is one of those best practices for distance education. Initially I thought it would be tough to do but the use of a webcam and YouTube's easy basic editing tools make it a breeze. The caption tools in YouTube are especially useful for short videos, which include the ones I use. For longer videos, especially instructional ones (like the one embedded on this page), I use Camtasia Studio.

Sharing campus info with students

Periodically I get emails about campus events that might interest my students. Instead of announcing these in class or forwarding the emails to my students, I decided to post the information inside my LMS course accounts using the News widget.

Then I thought of the implications. First, I would need to post these items in each of my course offerings. Also, my students might miss the class-related news items if those items are surrounded by non-class items.

To solve these problems, I created a blog just for campus events and posted a feed of that blog on my course account home pages. Now all I need to do is update the blog with each email and the information is there for my students automatically.