Portfolio

Featured Work

Microlearning Samples Created with Articulate Rise 360

Satire, Fake News, or Real News?

How to not embarrass yourself on social media

Social media have opened the floodgates to misinformation, disinformation, and malarkey (aka Fake News). Take your digital literacy to the next level by taking this microlearning and improving your skills on how to recognize these information modalities.

Course Sample

How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure

Take positive risks and pursue your greatest ambitions

The fear of failure is a universal human experience that can interfere with professional development. This microlearning piece was adapted from a course template provided by the good folks on the Articulate Rise 360 website.

Course Sample

5 Cognitive Distortions that Undermine Happiness

Could Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Improve Your Life?

This microlearning piece was also adapted from a course template provided by the good folks on the Articulate Rise 360 website. It can be easily adapted to provide a quick self-assessment for anyone who is struggling with relationships.

Course Sample

A Champion of Digital Literacy

Cyber Security

Sample Module Created with Articulate Storyline 360

To help our employees be mindful digital citizens, I developed eLearning modules that were engaging, and informative. The platform for this course was Articulate Storyline and this unbranded version has been enhanced with an animated character and a touch of humour.

Course Sample
MS Teams Presenter Mode

Digital Literacy Video

To promote digital and media literacy among our 1200+ employees, I produced a regular series of brief videos and blog posts that focused on topics that helped folks to follow best digital practices and streamline their work flow.

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University Film Festival

21st Century Multiliteracies Video

With the increasing influence of social media and “democratization” of many other media types, digital literacy has become a necessity. One way to begin teaching this and other new literacies is by organizing learning activities that involve such literacies – such as a campus film festival.

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Green Screen Innovator

Some background…

Charged with the task of revitalizing my organization’s online courses, I brought such innovations as video feedback for quiz results, professional voice-overs,  and chroma key (green screen) videos to the L&D Team. The resulting increases in learner engagement were extraordinary!

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Before/After With Chroma Key: This is an excerpt from a course that had a completion rate of over 98.6% of our 1200+ employees. Mouse over the image to see the before and after effects. Tap/click on either the image or the button to view a demonstration video.

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The Setup

Because of the extraordinary results of using green screen videos, I gave a presentation about this innovation at the UBC Digital Media in Education Conference in Kelowna. A key part of this presentation was a video demonstrating how easy it is to put together a basic chroma key setup. As shown in the video, the setup should include lighting to evenly illuminate the green screen, more light to illuminate the talent, and good quality microphones to capture clean, undistorted sound.

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Making Lemonade to Meet Deadlines

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade – especially when deadlines are looming and your concealer isn’t working. In the case of this film shoot, I drew on my sense of self-deprecating humour to get the job done. Humour not only entertains, but it also keeps folks engaged by sparking their curiosity about the next bit of comic relief.

Making Lemonade to Meet Deadlines

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade – especially when deadlines are looming and your concealer isn’t working. In the case of this film shoot, I drew on my sense of self-deprecating humour to get the job done. Humour not only entertains, but it also keeps folks engaged by sparking their curiosity about the next bit of comic relief.

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Authored with Articulate Storyline 360

Storyline Sample Module on Diversity & Inclusion

Unconscious Bias

This module raises awareness of biases that can lead to discrimination and inequality. Recognizing the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity is essential for healthy organizational growth. Embracing diversity and creating an inclusive workplace leads to increased productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction. This eLearning module is a crucial step towards building a better future for all.

Course Sample

Additional Work Samples

Hover mouse over the green icons for more information.

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Video Collaboration

To shed light on technologies and affordances, I participate in video and in-person meetings. I also create short demonstration videos for SMEs, instructors, and other stakeholders. This save time, demystifies technology and enhances relationships. For some examples, tap/click on the image below:

 

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Blended Learning For Adults

This multimedia writing course was truly transformative for both learners and the course designer/instructor (me). For more info, tap/click on the image below:

 

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Augmented Reality (Video)

Using Google Translate to augment reality in an EFL classroom in S. Korea was only the beginning. For the future, the AR possibilities are endless. For more info, tap/click on the image below:

 

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Memetics and Digital Storytelling

One of the most informative research projects in my masters program involved a deep dive into Web 2.0 technology and memetics. To introduce my Multimedia Writing students to the power of the internet meme, I created a relatable digital story. For more info, tap/click on the image below:

 

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Mobile Learning In Higher Education

Mobile devices account for 50.48% of total web traffic. Therefore, it is vital that learning design reflect this reality, as demonstrated in this video, shot in 2015 at Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea. For more info, tap/click on the image below:

 

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Learning Management Systems

My experience with learning management systems includes Moodle, Canvas, and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management. To host sample courses, I use Moodle 4.1. For more info, tap/click on the image below:

 

Academic Writing

Thought Papers on Objectivism, Empowerment, and Constructivism

Classroom Management - Mechanics of Learning

Are behaviourist classroom management techniques effective for higher level learning?

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Empowering Teachers - With Neuroscience??

Does a basic understanding of neuroscience really increase the potential for empowering teachers?

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Truth, Knowledge, and Constructivism

Do positive test scores that result from behaviourist pedagogy related more to training or learning?

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A Comparison, a Critique, and a Research Proposal

Provincial eLearning Comparison

COLLABORATION – Comparing Two Provinces: Postsecondary eLearning in Ontario and Alberta

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Lesson Plan Critique

Should lesson plans be so precious that they are written in stone or should they live for new info?

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Research Proposal

How can in-person classes be successfully redesigned as Blended Learning courses in Higher Ed?

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Interactive Images

Learners can be better engaged and informed by augmenting images with interactive hotspots. This can be experienced in the map image below by hovering/tapping over the silver markers.

Canada's Provincial & Territorial Capitals
Hover or Tap on Markers for More Info

Tap/click here for StatsCan Infographic

 

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Copyright © 2023 Gary Bartanus, MET. All Rights Reserved.

Hanyang English Film Festival

Chair, Organizing Committee, Hanyang English Film Festival (HEFF)

In addition to developing the multimedia writing course and advocating for media and digital literacy, I served as Committee Chair for the annual Hanyang English Film Festival from May 2015 to February 2017.

This project was both challenging and successful, as described in the backstory (below, in the blue toggle). The Why Do a Film Festival? video was created with Camtasia, one of my favourite eLearning authoring tools.

The Backstory

The festival began in 2013 and, because it was a huge success in that first year, it was soon allocated a healthy amount of funding. This enabled the organizing committee to offer substantial incentives for both students and staff to get involved in the 2014 and 2015 festivals. However, shortly before commencing my term as Committee Chair for the 2016 iteration of the event, a major source of funding was unexpectedly withdrawn and the amount of available prize money was reduced to less than half of what it had been in previous years. With such a decrease in monetary incentives, it was necessary to find an alternative way to generate student interest and participation.

Also, because there was no longer any money to compensate faculty members (for emceeing, judging, etc.), motivating colleagues to promote the event suddenly became another major challenge. To meet these challenges, I regularly consulted with university administration, our organizing committee, and departmental faculty members. I also conducted some additional research and created two important videos that were widely recognized as crucial to the success of the project. The one that focuses on the importance of multiliteracies in the 21st century is posted below:

Educational Video: a research-based tutorial on the importance of 21st century literacies

Certificate Sample

Another key aspect to generating student engagement and participation in this project was the "Certificate of Merit" that was provided for all students who participated. A sample of the certificate was prominently posted on the festival website and students were reminded of the value of collaboration skills and fluency in 21st century literacies. A duplicate of the certificate is posted in the toggle below:

Duplicate of the certificate of merit that festival participants all received

 

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Outcomes and Reflections

The annual film festival was, in every sense, a long-term project. Planning for the 2016 iteration began exactly one year earlier, when the baton was handed over to me and I was advised to begin considering who to ask to take on the role of co-chair. To make it even more challenging, the person who originally agreed to take on this role was soon dealing with a medical emergency in his family, which meant that I had to ask someone else.

Thankfully, the original co-chair was able to keep his commitment to co-host the 2016 event and he and his partner did a fabulous job. It was gratifying to hear from many other colleagues that, thanks to the amazing team efforts that our committee members, emcees, judges, and faculty colleagues had made, this was the "best HEFF ever." And in a break with tradition, I was asked to chair the committee again for 2017's HEFF.

The Essay

As the need for digital literacy increases and the internet continues to evolve from Web 2.0 to its next iteration, the need for advancement in adult education pedagogies becomes increasingly important. This essay, written in 2015, explores this topic and posits that the key to this process will be in transforming technologically reluctant instructors into technologically competent educators who are fully committed to implementing the necessary changes. Much of my learning was based on the work of Richard Dawkins (Emeritus Professor at University of Oxford) and Tim O'Reilly (Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media) in their respective fields of memetics and Web 2.0.

To download a PDF of the essay, tap/click on the image below:

The Digital Story

This video was created to introduce Hanyang University students to the multimedia writing course I developed in 2013. The story not only helped my students gain a greater appreciation for the potential impact of digital media, but it also showcases my ability - nearly 10 years ago -  to create engaging content that effectively communicates complex ideas.

Mobility in Blended Environments

This is an analysis that recounts my personal experience--and growth--with mobility in the classroom. During my ongoing and evolving initiative of redesigning courses from traditional face-to-face lectures to blended constructivist environments--mobile and wireless technologies have advanced enough to make them affordable for most Korean university students. These technologies also, as shown in the accompanying video, provide an excellent way to implement such affordances as collaboration, privacy, and a more democratic decision making process in higher education.

Tap or click to read details about this assignment (straight from the course page).

A1. Analytical Publishing Project

Assignment #1 will be worth 25% of your final grade.

DESCRIPTION:  Individual students will author & publish an original media-based critical analysis of an emerging facet of mobility that is of special interest to the student. Think of this as a self-contained, first-person research product (videocast, podcast, blogpost, media essay, etc) whose value is founded on your credibility and presence as a professional educator & MET researcher. The subject may be a technology, application, cultural phenomenon, social trend, educational program or learning product. No direct connection to teaching or learning is required, but one focus of the analysis will concern education potential, or lack thereof. The primary objective is for the analysis to be published as as a highly relevant, usable & valued Knowledge Mill resource in (at least one of) the Mobile Technology, Mobile Culture, and Mobile Education streams of 565M.

FORMAT:  This is not an academic paper. Employ a presentation format consistent with effective viewing on mobile devices, optimizing relevancy, usability, and value for a prospective, global audience of education technology professionals. Make it just long enough to deliver true audience value (probably between 500 words / 90 seconds and 1,500 words / 6 minutes, as aiming to sustain attention for a longer period might be a dubious proposition). Consult your instructor if in doubt.

SUBMISSION:  The analysis may be posted directly in 565M or embedded from any reasonably permanent web host or platform, using the appropriate Knowledge Mill category or categories. Notify your instructor by email when your post submission is live.

Tap or click to read additional reflections

The Chosen Medium

I chose to produce a video podcast (vodcast) for this project because YouTube videos are always responsive and easy to play in mobile devices. Furthermore, as one who has no respect or time for platforms that force users to download and install a proprietary app just to have access to a bit of content, I chose YouTube because it does not require mobile users to do that.

Current Common Drawbacks

To shorten the vodcast, I edited out the footage in which I talk about two common drawbacks that currently exist with this technology: battery life and Wi-Fi reliability.

If students’ devices are low on power, they may not be able to complete a mobile activity. This can be minimized by proactively advising students that coming to class with a sufficiently charged device is their responsibility and that they will be held accountable if they repeatedly fail to do so.

Regarding the Wi-Fi connection, there is little that one can do, except to either use a different service (Google Forms instead of Socrative, for example) or have a non-WiFi “Plan B” (whatever that may be) readily available in the event of a connectivity issue.

Of course, as the technology continues to evolve, these drawbacks will cease to be an issue and there will undoubtedly be new challenges to deal with.

Research Proposal

Academia Meets Real Life

While working on one of my master's courses (ETEC 500 - Research Methodologies in Education), I was blessed with the opportunity to base my final assignment on a real life project that I had recently undertaken while employed at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.

The project involved redesigning and co-teaching a Basic Academic English (BAE) course. The final assignment was a research proposal that focused on the challenges and implications of converting in-person classroom courses into Blended Learning models. It proposed some specific research methodologies and included a sample Screening Questionnaire for faculty and students.

Screenshot: Basic Academic English - Online

Evolving Reflections 

As often happens in life and learning, our views and opinions sometimes change as we acquire new knowledge. That is exactly what happened with my research proposal, as the two separate reflections (below) will illustrate:

Reflection #2 (July, 2015)

My Second Thoughts (after some new knowledge acquisition):

This second, more recent, reflection is entirely the result of new knowledge that I have acquired while working on the MET course ETEC 520: Planning and Managing Technologies in Higher Education. As a result of now being aware of the reality that universities are usually dominated by a collegial culture in which it is a "given" that faculty needs for autonomy and research pursuits are to be respected--and, at all costs, protected--I have found myself needing to do some serious rethinking about my earlier position while preparing the research proposal. In other words, I now realize that the course redesign project that is considered in the proposal has most likely evolved in the best way possible, given the fact that my university is, like most others, currently undergoing a period of change that is seriously challenging its collegial culture.

Among many other factors, a combination of cost cutting measures, technological advancements, and student demand for quality education, has prompted this change and the institutional leaders who manage the university's operation have recognized that a major shift towards Blended Learning (BL) could significantly lower costs in the long term. To design, redesign, and implement more BL courses requires the cooperation and collaboration of both managerial staff and instructional staff.  However, managerial staff culture is very different from the faculty's collegial culture. In fact, according to higher education e-learning thought leaders, they are often very much at odds with each other.  Therefore, if the shift to BL courses is not handled with great care, such cooperation and collaboration between the two cultures may not be possible.

Now, in retrospect, I have a better understanding of why the decision makers for the proposal's redesign project took the minimally interactive approach to BL  that they did.  Had they directed the redesign team to make the online portion of the course fully interactive immediately in its first iteration, they would have been ignoring the concerns--and collegial culture--of many faculty and probably increased their resistance to the use of educational technology and the entire BL initiative.  That is why, before submitting it to my university, I would need to seriously rethink and rework the entire proposal.

Because this ePortfolio is intended to document my learning and professional development, the first reflection that I originally composed several months ago, is posted below, inside the other toggle.

Reflection #1: Original Reflection

Please Note: The following reflection was written before I had a clearer understanding of how collegial and managerial cultures co-exist in higher education and my views have since changed considerably. It is posted here solely as a means of tracking my professional growth and, as stated in Reflection #2, I now believe that the entire research proposal needs to be redeveloped according to my new understanding of how higher education institutions function.

Reflection #1

This reflection is being posted more than 18 months after completing this assignment. It was not posted immediately because, when I took this course, I was less than half way through the UBC MET Program and had not yet completed enough scholarly work to feel confident about defending this paper, should it ever be necessary. However, now that I am literally just weeks away from receiving my Master's with a solid A+ average--and continuing to enjoy respect from my UBC peers and UBC professors--the time has come to go ahead and confidently publish this work, knowing that it is thoroughly researched and well supported.

The proposal is based on a real-life situation at my current place of employment--and it accurately describes a series of events that may cause some discomfort for the decision makers who were responsible for those events.  But, more importantly, my research proposal also involves a much wider scope than just my immediate workplace and deals with an almost universal dilemma in higher education: how to implement instructional design changes that are pedagogically beneficial to students without being excessively problematic for effective and dedicated instructors. Please note that, although the proposal itself was very highly regarded by my UBC professor and UBC cohort collaborators, it was, for reasons that will be articulated in a future reflection, not possible to implement it at my current workplace. Regardless of that, I present my ideas here and now because they have relevancy and value that should be considered as we search for viable solutions to some increasingly complicated and challenging issues in higher education.