Distance Course on Electronic Democracy and Identity Theft

I recently became frustrated because many of the students in my distance learning class are not "coming to class" on my WebCT site as often as they should. So, I decided to record and post a short video explaining what I believe a distance learning class is all about and what the student obligations are. (This example is from Coastal Policy class).

The video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an8rZyqCXW0

I received several e-mails from students in the class thanking me for giving them specific advice on how they should deal with a distance class. Apparently they could not figger out how to do this on their own!

* do the readings in a timely manner
*"come to class" frequenlty - log one once a day
*post discussion when they are due and be serious about your postings
*treat this the same as you would a face-to-face class

Another point I need to make is that we are discovering that now 75%of the Internet bandwidth is being used by streaming media (mostly digital video). I have been shooting, editing, and putting short mini lectures (many shot in the field out on beaches around the world) for many years. I found ISU to be very unhelpful in this regard and I had to pretty much scrounge around for help.

Now i plan to develop a whole series of small docu-lectures and post them on YouTube. ISU still has no user freindly video serving system except Camtasia. We need a revolution in this regard!