Video in your course website no longer needs to be time consuming and difficult to manage. There are many sites out there these days that have materials that will work in your course and they are easy to include in your site. Let's start with some of the sources for online video:
- YouTube is probably the prime source. I know what you are thinking, "dancing hamsters and Susan Boyle" but YouTube has come a long way. There is an Education Chanel on YouTube that includes material from Stanford and Dartmouth to Cambridge University.
- Ted - Ideas Worth Spreading has materials on topics from technology and science to arts and culture. The speakers include; Isabel Allende, Robert Ballard, Jeff Bezos, Bono, Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Bill Clinton, and Peter Gabriel just to mentions a few.
- HULU has a great deal of commercial broadcast video but if you make a concerted effort you may find useful materials.
- Odeo sharing both video and audio content
- Academic Earth video courses from a wide variety of colleges and universities.
- There is also a wide variety of current materials available from places like CNN
OK so now you have found just the right video clip that makes just the point you want and you are wondering how to get it into your course site. What you need to look for is the something that says, "Embed" or "Embed This". What you will see there is a long string of code that you should select and copy.
In Blackboard all you need do is create an item. You will not paste the code into the editor as you see it when you start an item you will want to have it in HTML mode and you get this by clicking the icon with the facing angle brackets <> (in your editing window you will see this phrase, "You are in HTML Source mode. Use the [<>] button to switch back to normal mode.")paste the code there and then as always click submit.
Two things you need to be aware of one is the video itself may slow down the page as it loads into Blackboard and you need to make sure that the video itself is still posted on the site where you accessed it.
Nancy
