I may be a late adapter on this, but I just started using Microsoft’s Office Mix for PowerPoint, at the suggestion of daughter Karen Freberg.
I’ve used Panopto over the years, but feel somewhat guilty about holding onto one of our very expensive campus licenses when I don’t use it more. I’m told we have a very limited number for the whole campus. Office Mix seems like a reasonable alternative. It’s free and adds in seamlessly to Office 2013 and more recent versions of PowerPoint.
I started off with the idea of using Office Mix to record a couple of lectures each for my Fall intro and behavioral neuroscience courses for students to review when I miss a week of class for the Crisis4 Conference in Sweden. You can embed quizzes and video into your presentations. It’s super easy to record your voice-over. Once I saw the rich options available, I decided to incorporate Office Mix in my classes more extensively. I’m not ready to flip yet, but perhaps this will look more like a hybrid when I’m done.
For fun, I used Office Mix to adapt an idea that I heard about at last summer’s PsychOne Conference at Stanford University. You’ve seen those t-shirts that say “it’s in the syllabus?” Getting students to follow directions was the subject of a very lively roundtable discussion. Several faculty at the conference said that they no longer go over the syllabus in class on the first day, as it’s a boring way to start off. I agree, but then how do you make sure the students know what they need to know? On Polyratings, our campus version of ratemyprofessor, one of my former students complained that I only post the syllabus on Moodle (renamed PolyLearn) instead of printing the syllabus off, “ensuring that nobody reads the syllabus and then you lose points because you don’t know the policies.” Hmmm. Another idea that I heard about from Missy Beers, who runs intro psych at the Ohio State University, was to do a bit of a syllabus scavenger hunt. So I set up an Office Mix quiz that hopefully will encourage students to actually download the syllabus and look through it. Will this work? As my dissertation advisor, Bob Rescorla, was fond of saying, “It’s an empirical question.” I was blown away, though, by the fact that three of my behavioral neuroscience students completed the quiz more than a week before school starts! I’m pretty sure they’re likely to be among the A students this quarter.
If Office Mix only let you record your lectures and offer quizzes, that would be great, but the analytics are super powerful. You get to see how many people viewed each slide and for how long. Their performance on the quizzes is recorded for you.
Are there any downsides? Although you can embed some websites directly into your presentations, they have to be secure ones (https). Many of the websites I like to include, like Mouse Party, are not https. That’s a small inconvenience, though, compared to the many strengths of the system. Unlike many of the programs available from textbook publishers (which I also use), the scores from Office Mix have to be manually entered into your LMS. Again, I’m used to this, and my classes are reasonable (under 60, usually), but this may be a consideration for faculty with large lectures.
School starts in a week for us (quarter system), so I’ll update on my progress.
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