Using Adobe Spark (now Adobe CCE) for interactive online lectures

The global pandemic forced us to deliver our lectures online. In courses where a large number of students are international and are based in countries where internet connectivity is not always strong, asynchronous delivery is the most suitable way to provide contact time.

Delivering lectures asynchronously however is challenging. Engaging students in the lecture content, ensuring active participation and attention is harder when students and staff are not in the same room. Also ensuring that lectures retain the flow of activities, variety, pauses to take stock and progression as they would in a face to face environment means that designing and organising content and pulling it together into a coherent whole is a must.

Course unit lead at AMBS, Dr Ilma Nur Chowdhury, used Adobe Spark Page to effectively collate different parts of the lecture – videos, images, exercises, questions and quizzes – together in a seamless and interactive manner and mimic face to face delivery. Ilma attempted to add the human touch by including the following: a designed break; unexpected images or quotes; sharing some day-to-day activity while discussing examples; changing the scene of recording (in my garden/on the street); reminders for activities students need to complete at the end of the lecture.

Ilma talks about this in the following AMBS “Lunch and Learn” video:

Here are two examples:

Evaluation / Student Feedback

The layout of her lectures were really good. It was more engaging than watching 5 30 min videos

I find that Professor Ilma’s online lectures were interesting and enjoyable because she made them interactive and not entirely videos, which I found make the learning less boring. In addition, the cute pictures totally helped to freshen my mind.

Online lecture material was very, very well laid out, easy to navigate and made it far easier to absorb than a traditional style lecture.

Benefits

An added benefit was that Adobe Spark Page has its own licensed images so one does not have to worry about copyright!

Top Tips

Keep videos short, ideally 5 minutes, design in a break into your online lecture, make it interactive by allowing students to post responses to questions (Padlet is very useful in this case – Padlet online resources).
Follow up your lecture videos with questions for reflection; provide links to other Youtube videos or blog posts as part of wider reading (could also be linked to subsequent seminars).
I invited practitioners for 10-minute Zoom meetings and uploaded these as mini guest lecture videos that helped link theory to practice.