Combining Multiple Broadcasts in a Series
March 1st, 2010 Filed Under Education, New Features
Today, we released a new exciting feature in the Faculte Broadcast Studio: “Series”. Now you can bundle several broadcasts into a single container, and share them together as a unit. When your viewer clicks on the “broadcasts series”, he or she will be able to browse through all the broadcasts in a series, and play them inside the player one by one. Click on “play” below to see a series in action.
The Series feature comes in handy when you are trying to create a “course” composed of several lessons, a “product demo” composed of a number of slideshows and videos, or a series of tutorials about a single product or subject.
A Series of broadcasts can be Shared exactly like a Broadcast – by Email, Direct Link or Embed as a Player or Widget, and it can of course also be modified on-the-fly. Access of a series can also be controlled and managed exactly as you manage and control access to a broadcast: you can make it public, require registration, protect via a password, or distribute securely to a private group. If you are monetizing your content, you can prompt your viewer to pay one sum for the entire Series, instead of on a broadcast by broadcast basis. Ever thought about creating a course and selling it on your blog? Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Creating a series is very easy. Create it, Add Broadcasts, give the Series a title and Publish it! You can also set more advanced options such as Access Restrictions and Collaboration.
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We’re pioneers, my friends.
February 15th, 2010 Filed Under Customers, Education, Faculte, Faculte Story
“Vernon, please help me. Can you figure out a way I can teach from home? Pleeeease?”, Donna Kato claims she whined to her husband, after being delayed for hours at a desolate airport, trying to make her way back home after teaching a class. “I love to teach, it’s just what it took to get to my students and home again that was really getting my goat.”, she writes in a recent blog post.
Vernon obviously could not say no to a tired, whining wife, and he started to look for solutions. They tried producing videos; it turned out to be way too expensive. They thought about creating downloadable pdf’s; they were so uninspiring. They kept searching and Donna kept traveling.
Then they stumbled across Faculte’s BETA site. To this day, none of us really know how they found us, but find us they did, and this has turned out to be a very exciting partnership for Faculte and what would eventually become CraftEdu.
Imagine the following scenario; you are at home, taking the afternoon off. You are feeling terribly creative, but have neither inspiration nor knowledge to actually create something. You step into the living room, coming to a sudden halt in the doorway: Right there, on your desk, sits metal clay artist Angela Crispin, polymer clay wizard Bettina Welker, fiber art ace Beth Wheeler, scrap-booking champion Brigitte Doss-Johnson, wirework genius Debbie Tlach, fabric printing authority Heidi Rand – in fact, there are about 50 amazing craft artists sitting right there on your desk. (needless to say; your desk is pretty full!) The artist are all eager to show you their artwork, and teach you how you can create it yourself.
This is the vision of CraftEdu - except the instructors will be available inside, not on top of, your computer, so it will not be as crowded as described above.
CraftEdu is founded by Vernon Ezell and Donna Kato, and as a modest beginning they have included 50 Arts and Crafts experts in their team. These experts have picked out their favorite pieces, and with the use of Faculte’s Broadcast Studio they are now in the process of creating online, on-demand classes available to anyone with a computer. The instructions contain step-by-step images, verbal explanations, videos – and lots of inspiration. You can follow them in your own pace, navigate the instructions to see parts of it several times, and revisit the class multiple times.
Being part of this project, the Faculte team has had the opportunity to have quite a few sneak peaks – and believe us, both the art work and the classes look awesome. Everyone is looking forward to the CraftEdu BETA launch in just a few weeks.
A few weeks ago, Donna truly realized what she got herself into, that long evening of whining in a desolate airport. To use her own words; “…there is nothing like it in the craft or art community. We’re pioneers, my friends. This may well change the way all internet instruction is presented.”
The Faculte Team is proud to be powering this amazing project!
Visit CraftEdu to learn more;
Blog
Website (under construction)
Facebook fan page
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Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?
February 10th, 2010 Filed Under Education, Faculte, Faculte Story, Presentations
For a student – and for most professionals – being able to give a good presentation or pitch is a key element of success.
Some elements can be learned through reading theory; how much text should you use per slide? How many slides are appropriate? How should your slides be structured? You can even read theory about how you should walk, talk, stand and dress, in order to make the right impression on your audience.
There is one thing, however, that only comes with experience; the knowledge of how you react to holding a presentation. Will you be able to stick to the script? Do you take detours; and where do these detours take you? Will you keep a fluent pace, or will you let your nerves get to you? Even when you are well prepared – and experienced! – your nerves can play tricks on you, and you end up rushing through the whole presentation, skipping several important points – or spending all the dedicated time on the first few slides, thus never reaching your conclusion. Not to mention all the unnecessary uh’s and ehm’s that tend to jump out of your mouth when you are nervous.
For the fall semester 2009, the Master of Science and Engineering Management Class at Marquette University used, for the first time, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio for their final Presentations. Approximately half of the groups chose to create and pre-record their presentation using Faculte, while the rest distributed powerpoint slides only. All presentations were posted on a class website, and some of them were Presented live.
Instead of me telling you how the experiment went, I will let the students do it in their own words:
“In the future I would attempt to use faculte first rather than using powerpoint.”
“I enjoyed the Faculte presentations much better than the non-faculte presentations. The Faculte presentations seemed to flow better.”
“The overall process significantly added to the quality of the presentations. If students/teams used this for all their projects, additional quality gains would accrue.”
Clearly both the students and the Faculte team were pleased with the results!
When I talked to Professor Polzcynski right after the live presentations, he had made a couple of observations that I found particularly interesting. Usually, with my theatre background, I have always claimed that “being live, in person, on stage, always gives the best results”. However, I think the Professor proved me somewhat wrong.
First, he told me that in one of the groups all but one student were traveling through work. The one student being present not an accustomed presenter, and strongly disliked being in front of an audience. Imagine his relief that their whole presentation was already created, and all he had to do was click a link and press play!
The second observation the professor shared was this: When you do a recording, you have the chance to review your work. This means that a) you write a good script and prepare well for the recording – you will actually have to listen to your own voice! and b) you re-do it if it is not good.
This resulted in the groups using Faculte having presentations that were within the dedicated time, following a comfortable pace, explaining all important points, not de-touring into unimportant details – not to mention, without the uh’s and ehm’s.
The professor said that all the presentations were good – but in the groups that used Faculte, there was not a single incident of student’s nerves or unpreparedness getting in the way of the presentation.
Knowing how you react to holding a presentation comes with experience – and I still believe that being present, in front of your audience, gives a good result. However, in using Faculte for your Presentations, you can relax! Be your charming self next to the screen, and let your nerves kick in when it is time for the questions after the presentation.
Unless, of course, you have prepared another Broadcast, with answers to all the questions you might get. Then you’re all set.
Click here to see the student’s Presentations
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