Sharks: Predators or prey?
Welcome to the website for my Remote Proffesional Practice that focused on creating an online course about the relationship between humans and sharks.
My RPP project with the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO) had the aim to create an online course with the title "SHARKS: PREDATORS OR PREY?" about the relationship between humans and sharks in the past, present and future and to approach the topic interdisciplinary from many different fields such as biology, ecology, anthropology, economics and law.
The target audience for the course were not only marine science students but undergraduate students from all backgrounds, which made it important to create the course in a way that it is easy to understand for participants who might not be familiar with topics of marine science yet.
The goal of the course was to raise awareness for the fact that sharks might not only be dangerous predators but also are extremely threatened by humans and our activities.
We were a team of three students supported by eight supervisors working on the creation of the course.
But what are the different steps you have to take when creating an online course?
DEFINITION OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES OF THE COURSE
The relationship between humans and sharks is complicated. And while we students all have a biological background it was important to investigate the issue interdisciplinary and trying to understand the different aspects that lead to this complicated relationship.
The aim of the course is to not only teach about sharks as animals but to show how humans have interacted with them in the past and present and to give an overview over the different stakeholders involved in the current problematic situation.
DEFINITION OF LEARNING OUTCOMES
Just like we students had to define our Personal Objectives for the Professional Practice, it was important to establish similar goals for our online course.
The Learning Objectives give the participants of the online course an overview of which skills and knowledge they will have aquired by the end of the course. It also helped us during the course creation stage to keep in mind what we wanted to achieve with the course.
CREATION OF A COURSE STRUCTURE
There are many different ways to section a course and depending on the type of course one or the other might work better. We chose a probelmatic approach which deals with the different issues in an analytical and interdisciplinary way.
We divided the course into 5 weekly modules with 2-3 hours of content each. Each week was build around one central question that the course participants should be able to answer after the module.
SELECTION OF CONTENT TYPES
During the second semester most of us will have experienced online classes. And we probably also realized that while you can of course convey a lot of information through written texts and PowerPoint presentations, this might not achieve an optimal learning outcome.
Therefore we focused on creating diverse types of content that are engaging and interactive. In addition to regular presentations we included videos and animations. In order to encourage course participation we created different quizzes, one of which you can find below.
We also planned to include interviews with experts on different topics, question-and-answer sessions and a final webinar after the last module where participants would work in groups and give presentations on their results.
Overall it was important to create varied content to make the course interetsting and keep the participants attention.
CREATION OF COURSE MATERIAL
So after making all these decisions and plans it was time to create the actual content.
This meant a lot of time spent with literature research accumulating the information we wanted to include in the course as well as learning about copyright regulations for the material, such as pictures, we wanted to use. And then of course making presentations, quizzes and for the second module I made a video.
All the content we created was uploaded to the moodle e-learning platform which hosted the online course.
But how to create a video with no experience, skills or equipment?
A step by step guide:
What do you want to make a video about? Write a scipt.
Find an easy way to visually present the information you want to convey, e.g. with a simple animation or stop motion video, which is what I decided to do.
No equipment? No problem! Just go through your house and try to find things that could be useful. I ended up with a kitchen spatula as tripod and used my phone camera to shoot the video.
Create the footage: this can mean to draw the animations or to film the videos. For me it meant taking hundreds of pictures that would later make up the stop motion video.
Final step: Editing. There are several free programmes, I used OpenShot. It is easy to use, even without previous experience in video editing.
And DONE!
Bonus Round: Enjoy what you created!
All the materials I used for my video.
Including the very professional spatuala-tripod.
The process of shooting the video.
Pro tip: Don´t use a rotating office chair. I learned the hard way!
The setup.
No sneezing, or it will fall apart!
THE FINAL RESULT
This clip only shows a short part from the full video. If you want to watch the entire video click here:
WHAT DID I LEARN FROM THIS EXPERIENCE?
I also learned a lot about how my personal mindset and attitude towards my work affects the qualitiy of it. In the beginning I struggled with adapting to this new situation and only saw the downsides of it. But staying open minded and positive even in unexpectde situation is important and once I realized that I was able to learn a lot from the Professional Practice experience, even if it went differently than initially planned.
THANK YOU
Any questions about the project or the work I did?
Feel free to ask me directly on July 2nd between 12.30 - 14.00 PM CEST in the live chat room.
Or contact me via email: svenja.stoehr@imbrsea.eu
Image header: Unsplash, Gerald Schombs
