Category: Multimedia Learning

2022-12-04

EDCI 337 Final Group Project

A Beginner’s Guide to Raising a Cat

JiaJing Sun, Chuhe Song, Yihan Liu, Zhuoheng Liu, Isbella Zhu

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this content, learners should be able to do the following:

Familiarize the five stages of cat ownership
Understand the basic skills needed to own a cat
Learn how to deal with cats on a daily basis
Discover what to do with your cat during special times like worming and vaccination

Introduction
This project is to develop a learning lesson for new cat owners to correctly manage raising their cats. Learners will be given instructions at first with the basic knowledge and are going to need to perform hands-on activities that stimulate their learning process. The learners will need to interact with the hands-on learning activities to adopt new skills suitable for raising a cat, to have the learners experience both instructive and experiential learning. The lesson consists of learners learning it by themselves or better with a cat in their hand since some activities might be experimental and are better if you have a cat around. Let’s get started then!

EDCI-337-Student-Questionnaire Download

Phase 1 – Necessary items to prepare before picking up the cat

The first thing to do with a new cat arriving home is getting home set up. A brand new environment for cats means a safe home, especially when on the first visiting home. So, to help get cats feeling better in a brand new home, here are the things that we have to prepare first.

Phase 2 – What you need to do on the first day when your cat arrives home

When you bring your cat home on the first day, they are easily stressed because it is a completely new environment for them. Therefore, owners need to pay attention to many things.

First of all, they will feel more secure by bringing them home in a cat carrier. Each cat’s different personality determines what kind of environment they need, for example, a shy cat will need a quieter room. Be careful not to force the cat to come out, open the cat cage and let them come out by themselves. Prepare the items needed for the cat in the room, such as litter box, cat food, water, cat bed, blankets, toys, etc.

Get along with the cats according to their behaviour. If the cat hides or does not want to contact you, please give them more time and prepare a hiding place for them. If the cat is willing to spend time with you, you can try to make contact with them and open the door to introduce them to their new home. Also, remember to put away any plants, decorations, etc. that are dangerous or harmful to the cat, and keep the doors and windows closed. Please do not be anxious and let the cat have enough time to adapt to the new environment by itself.

BATTERSEA is a website for dogs and cats where you can find much information related to cat raising. Below are articles and videos from BATTERSEA on how to set up a room on the first day your cat arrives home, with more detailed information on what to look for and how to handle different situations.

Settling Your Cat into a New Home

Phase 3 – The daily routine of cat ownership

After the initial acclimation period, cats are mostly alone in their owners’ homes during the day. A cat’s daily activities include sleeping, eating, drinking and playing. Cats spend the majority of their time sleeping, but they also need to play and exercise a lot to maintain their physical and mental health. By establishing a healthy and appropriate routine for your cat, the cat can thrive while growing into becoming a reliable companion.

Things to do every day:

Feed: clean your cat’s dishes, then add food and clean water
Clean the cat toilet: pay attention to whether the feces are normal
Play: half an hour every day
Groom: once a day
Observe: observe your cat to see if there is any abnormality, such as eyes, ears, nose, chin and mental state
Snack reward: give your cat a treat

In addition, here is a PowerPoint presentation on how to pet a cat, so that the viewer can learn how to approach and touch almost any cat without stressing the cat animal out.

How to pet a cat Download

4. Precautions

Clean the litter tray: observe the colour and shape of the poo in order to understand the cat’s health problems. In this video, Dr. Sarah Wooten shares tips for understanding the colour, shape, and consistency of your cat’s poop.

A Vet’s Guide to Cat Poop

Grooming: Cats like to lick their hair to clean themselves up. If they are not groomed, their intestines will not be able to digest the hair over time and they will be prone to hairballs, so make sure they are groomed daily.
Change the water/food regularly: you can change the water and food once a day to reduce bacterial growth.
Nail cutting: Cut your cat’s nails once every half month to avoid their nails being too long and scratching others, but be careful not to cut into the blood and flesh of your cat’s nails.

Bathing: Cats should not be bathed when they first arrive in a new environment and are prone to severe stress reactions. In fact, cats do not need both, they have a strong self-cleaning ability and the cat will clean themselves by licking their hair.

In this video, Dr.Sarah Wooten talked about whether or not cats should be bathed, which situations necessitate a bath, and how to pull off a successful cat bath.

Should you bathe your cat

Phase 5 – Worming and vaccination issues

In this section, we will walk through how to deal with regular infections and how to vaccinate and prevent diseases for cats.

Worming precautions

Having worms is a normal phenomenon for pets, the three most common worms are roundworms, hookworm, and tapeworm.

roundworms: Most common ones in kittens at a young age (before 8 weeks)
hookworms: not as common as roundworms, and a cat can be infected by hookworm by eating eggs.
tapeworms: most often transmitted to cats by fleas and eating things with tapeworm eggs on them, for example, rats and mice, are usually for older cats.

Vaccinations procedures

Vaccines help to protect cats from different diseases they will face in their periods of growth. Thus knowing when and what to vaccinate are really important. There are two basic types of vaccines for cats, which are FVRCP and rabies.

Vaccination-and-worming-for-cat Download

Reflection

In developing the lesson for new cat owners to correctly manage to raise their cats, we applied and connected some theories and principles in different phases.

Phase 1: For introducing preparation before picking up, the segmenting principle has been followed. We put preparation into different parts including food, bed, cleaning, etc. It would give audiences time to process and store content by having little breaks, which are images of cat interactions mostly. Also, since images have been largely covered through all the introductions, the multimedia principle has always been kept too, it gives text and images in presentation but not in text only.

Phase 2: We used the Signaling Principle by bolding the key information to emphasize what the owner needs to pay special attention to on the first day the cat comes to its new home.

Phase 3: In the PowerPoint “how to pet a cat”, we used Cognitive load theory (remain only 1 idea per slide and put no more than 6 objects per slide), Segmenting Principle (keep it short), Redundancy principle (don’t read the text of the slide and remove the draft below), Signaling principle (add visual elements), and coherence principles (focus on learning outcomes).

Phase 4: In the infographic “how to cut a cat’s nail in the right way”, we used the redundancy principle, Coherence principle and Contiguity principle of Mayer’s Principles.

Phase 5: We used the continuity principles to help the ready enhance their knowledge by putting relevant pictures beside the point. For example, I put pictures of the different types of worms cats might get each beside the name of these worms.

Moreover, we made use of PowerPoint, infographics, and other multimedia to guarantee that our learning objectives were achieved. We hope that the learners of this course can learn with a cat, take the initiative to learn at different stages, and become qualified cat owners.

References

Animal hospital, Sharon lakes. (2020, June 15). Cat vaccinations: When and why indoor cats should be vaccinated. Cat Vaccinations: Why and When Indoor Cats Should Be Vaccinated | Charlotte Vet. Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://www.sharonlakes.com/site/blog-south-charlotte-vet/2020/06/15/cat-vaccinations-why-vaccinate-indoor-cats#:~:text=There%20are%20two%20basic%20types%20of%20vaccinations%20for%20cats.&text=Rabies%20kills%20many%20mammals%20

Care, I. C. (2022, November 22). International Cat Care. Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://icatcare.org/advice/worming-your-cat/

Hilary Parker, 2021, The Scoop on Cat Poop, https://pets.webmd.com/cats/the-scoop-on-cat-poop

Hilary Parker, review by Amy Flowers, DVM, 2022, Slideshow people foods cats can eat, https://pets.webmd.com/cats/ss/slideshow-people-foods-cats-can-eat

Settling your cat into a new home. Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. (2022, March 7). Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.battersea.org.uk/pet-advice/cat-advice/settling-your-cat-new-home

YouTube. (2021). Settling Your Cat into a New Home | The Battersea Way. YouTube. Retrieved December 4, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-n3W3icnyQ&t=6s.

2022-11-27

Blog 10 – The Personalization of Learning

In recent years, artificial intelligence has gradually come into the public eye. The first time I had a deep impression of AI was in the romantic movie Her. In the movie, a man falls in love with his AI assistant, which raises the question: are we close to having a supercomputer that can recreate functions of the human brain?

The video below shows the scene of the hero first meeting OS1 (the AI system).

When you used the AI games this week, such as Magic Sketch or AI Duet, how did you find the process of having your work completed by an algorithm? Did it feel true to your intention? Were you happy with the results?

I think their algorithms are excellent when I use Magic Sketch and AI Duet. They can provide excellent responses with a bit of input from the user. While these AI games may have needed improvement along the way and may have been a little slow to respond, the results exceeded my expectations.

A screen recording of using Magic Sketchpad

Have you used Duolingo? Do you think that their approach to AI will ultimately lead to better learning? What do you think of the author’s use of the word ‘humanize’ to describe the application of AI to their software? Do you think the fact that the training data used is largely from English language learners will impact the user experience for other languages?

I have tried using Duolingo to learn different languages. During the pandemic, the Duolingo English Test even began to be accepted by some colleges and universities, with the same recognition as the IELTS or TOEFL test. I think AI will give Duolingo users a better experience. Duolingo constructively built a half-life regression model with a large amount of data. In addition, they use AI to design the appropriate curriculum. In this way, personalized learning experiences can be brought to different users based on different situations. AI, like a real teacher, teaches students according to their aptitude. Besides, my experience in learning other languages besides English, such as French, German and Korean, is constantly improving. I think transfer learning has played a good role.

Dr. Burr Settles is the Research Director at Duolingo. He studies machine learning, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. In this video, he introduces the use of AI in Duolingo.

What other AI tools have you used? Did you find them effective for learning? If not, what did you think was missing? If it was effective, what was the do you think was key element that led to that experience?

One of my most frequently used and favourite AI programs is Quillbot. QuillBot is an AI text rewriting website. It makes suggestions for writing within seconds and adjusts them for different writing styles, such as standard, fluency, and creativity.

A revised example is shown above. In addition to replacing certain words with synonyms, the text has been rephrased to make the sentences shorter than the original text and to preserve the meaning of the text without introducing any grammatical errors.

2022-11-20

Feedback on Lauv’s Blog #9

Hi Lauv,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your own experience with active learning. I agree with you that it is necessary for college students to understand and master active learning. In the traditional teacher-centred lecture format, students are passive observers. In the traditional teacher-centred lecture format, students are passive observers. Therefore, the instructor should also change the teaching strategy and let the students be active participants in their own study, either by themselves or in cooperation with others. Instructors should design student-centred learning (Universal Design for Learning) where they learn with problems (Merrill’s First Principles). In addition, you make good use of H5P, a tool for creating interactive learning objects, which has given me some insight into motorcycles.

2022-11-06

Assignment 3: Core Multimedia Skills

Presentation skills are necessary for any professional, but they are more important for educators. The audience will have a much better learning experience if the presenter can design and produce powerful PowerPoint slides to accompany the presentation.

In the core multimedia skills assignment, I choose to update one of the PowerPoint presentations I made for another class. I will use Prezi to reflect my current understanding of multimedia learning principles. Prezi is a kind of presentation software that makes ideas more interesting mainly through zooming and shortcut actions. It broke the traditional PowerPoint single-line sequence, using systematic and structural integration of the way to demonstrate, with the route of presentation, from an object suddenly pulled to another object, with rotation and other actions being more visual impact.

In this project, I want to demonstrate how the design thinking methodology can be used to produce multimedia and interactive learning materials. I will also identify and discuss the principles of good interaction design.

Pipeline-Problem-in-Alberta Download

The original slides were based on the essay, I did not make too much effort, just selecting the contents and reading the paragraphs straight. In the updated version, I make significant modifications to both the content and the layout.

https://prezi.com/view/qbL7nrm8WVq3qSv5wV7a

New version Download

Here are some important adjustments and principles based on:

Key Changes	Multimedia learning theory/principle
Remain only 1 idea per slide	Cognitive load theory
No more than 6 objects per slide	Cognitive load theory
Don’t read the text of the slide, and remove the draft below	Redundancy principle
Use an illustrative image and short text on a slide (add images and videos), and then tell the rest of my story via narration	Multimedia and modality principles
Use contrast to move your audience around the information	Signalling and coherence principles

Week 5 Post

There are also other components of the original slides that I do not enhance because I believe they are already effective based on multimedia learning principles and related learning theories.

Remain Unchanged	Multimedia learning theory/principle
Maintain each slide’s subheadings	Segmenting and coherence principles
Make sure the most important thing is the most prominent	Signalling principle

Overall, the information and knowledge I intend to deliver should be transferred more efficiently owing to my updated and enhanced presentation, which is based on the mentioned principles and theories of multimedia learning.

2022-11-05

Blog 8 – Active and Passive Learning

Nowadays, more and more teaching and learning activities are accessible via the internet, students are more readily distracted by their surroundings. For example, when I search for related videos for weekly posts on YouTube, I will watch the videos of the bloggers I follow. Because of this distraction, learning efficiency declines. As a result, it is critical that we enjoy studying and improve our learning efficiency.

Passive learning includes traditional lectures, reading, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. Active Learning, on the other hand, is a technique of teaching that involves actively engaging students with course material through discussions, reflective blogging, group projects, and other ways.

How have you found the balance of passive and active learning in this course for your learning?

Active learning enhances learning outcomes and provides a more enjoyable learning environment for teachers and students. In this course, I generally use the active learning method.

Passive learning:

Review weekly posts by the instructor
Read articles and watch videos

Active learning:

Weekly assignments including blog posts and comments
Work in small groups and collaborate with others
Structure assessment and other activities
Quick feedback to make improvements

How does it compare to your experience in other courses?

It is an online course and compared to other traditional courses delivered face-to-face, EDCI 337 is more active learning required. We learn multimedia learning principles and related learning theories mostly through readings and videos on the website.

Active Learning Classrooms: Transforming Teaching and Learning

Indiana University’s Mosaic Initiative provides an example of an active and collaborative learning classroom.

2022-10-23

Feedback on Bruce’s Blog #6

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for sharing your experience of storytelling, I am also familiar with the story of the Ming dynasty’s emperor. In addition to arousing empathy and creating suspense, I try to make my stories interesting and increase interaction with the audience, such as asking questions or answering their doubts. I am committed to helping learners imagine new experiences, inspire empathy, and promote their understanding.

2022-10-22

Blog 6 – Storytelling with Video

In Rich McCue’s example of storytelling, what senses does he appeal to in his story?

Rich McCue, UVic Librarian, talks a story about how and why we should back up our personal digital files in both audio and video formats. He introduces a topic that is closely related to our study and life in a friendly, enthusiastic, conversational tone. His video has a clear structure, with an anecdote (introduction), a solution, and a conclusion.

Which of the guidelines does he follow?

Keep it short (Mayer’s Segmenting Principle) — The length of both sources is less than five minutes.
Focus on Learning Outcomes (Mayer’s Coherence Principle) — Both sources focus on the topic, which is why we should back up our laptops.
Use a Conversational Tone (Mayer’s Personalization Principle) — McCue uses a friendly, enthusiastic, conversational tone.
Add Visual Elements (Mayer’s Signalling principle) — Rather than just talking in the audio, McCue adds some images to Illustrate his example vividly.
Keep Text and Images Together (Mayer’s Spatial and Temporal Contiguity principles) — McCue’s talk and related images are presented simultaneously.
Build in Accessibility (UDL Guidelines) — Auto-generated captions are included in the video.

Are there any that he doesn’t follow?

I think McCue does not Include active learning (Merrill’s First Principles). He could post questions and ask the students to solve problems or consider alternatives. For example, after discussing Jen’s experience, he can ask if any of the audience have had similar struggles in order to engage the learner in active learning.

2022-10-16

Feedback on Lauv’s Blog #5

Hi Lauv,

Thanks for sharing the nice infographic. You continue to keep such a good schedule during the post-covid period, which is worthwhile for us to learn. For the design, you include many “good infographic” components in your infographic, such as alignment, hierarchy, repetition, negative space, etc. You avoid cognitive overload and exhibit a solid grasp of segmentation and coherence principles. What I recommend doing differently is including illustrations or pictures the next time to help readers better understand the Multimedia principle.

2022-10-14

Blog 5 – Instructional Design and Lesson Planning

Where do you see constructive alignment and backward design used in this course or another course you are taking/have taken?

I believe that the majority of the courses I am taking or have taken meet the requirement of constructive alignment and backward design. The outline is the first thing we see from Brightspace in most courses. An outline contains the following basic information: introduction, learning objectives, assessment, and schedule. In this course, we begin to learn about the learning objectives at the beginning of each week. The objectives are what teachers expect students to know, know, and be able to do. Next, we know what the assessments are: weekly posts and feedback, an assignment involving core multimedia skills, and a multimedia design group project. Finally, we study from the lectures and materials. By doing this, instructors could make sure that the assessments accurately, purposefully, and effectively reflect the intended learning outcomes.

Is there anywhere where it seems to be missing?

In comparison to traditional teaching, I believe the backward design and constructive alignment are strongly correlated to student achievement. In order to better target student success, instructors could modify courses and programs based on the results (e.g., assignments, discussions, and exams) by the end of the semester.

EDCI-337-planning-template Download

2022-10-09

Feedback on Bruce’s Blog #4

Hi Bruce,

The use of multimedia is widespread in the post-pandemic era. I appreciate how you are taking into account the needs of various groups by using UDL learning guidelines. It is crucial that we design with the learner in mind, not just in multimedia but also in general. If you could elaborate on some text, images, and videos that use inclusion design in real-world settings, that would be great.

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