Abstract

This paper reports on a study of integrating instructor-produced video ‗profcasts' Keywords: Audiovisual materials; Education; online teaching and learning; Writing Introduction: The need for audiovisual dialogues In an age where technology must constantly respond to change, e-educators play a major role in delivering, maintaining and sequencing authentic, engaging and reusable learning objects within cohesive pedagogical frameworks (Juweh, 2006). The conception of online learning environments as comprising a motivating array of dynamic multimedia resources has effectively led to a new culture of learning. Within this culture, e-learners potentially face nearly unlimited resources and multiple possibilities for interconnectivity Educationalists in disciplines such as Writing strive to create sustainable learning environments within their disciplines; but at the same time the investment learners have in developing their identities as writers depends on trust This paper reports a case study focusing on integrating customized, pedagogical audiovisuals into an online Master of Arts in Writing delivered asynchronously at Swinburne University. Foregrounded by an investigation into previous studies of using audio-videos, podcasts and profcasts to enhance learning and a description of the project, this paper presents qualitative data from 26 students and 8 staff responding to the question of the value of customized profcasts to their learning experience. The study is similar in nature to that of Stodel, Both research into online learning in asynchronous modalities and our own student evaluations indicate that a key challenge lies in learners' perception of the e-lecturer as faceless (Flecksenstein, 2005; At the program level, the team aimed to create dynamic learning objects to motivate and provoke students through the incorporation of the human into the electronic. At an institutional level the challenge is deeper than merely proving lecturers are not, as several students commented, ‗cyberbots'; it's about creating more futureproofed and sustainable learning interfaces drawing on unique human capital. This capital comprises the teaching staff themselves. It's the personalities that make the materials unique and different from other institutions' products. Instead of producing streamed talking-head lectures replicating lecture material in a sageon-stage manner, the team decided to have lecturers and tutors in dialogic conversation to create a more socially constructivist, more challenging, interactive televisual experience for students. This paper plays into a discernible research gap around non-reiterative customized audiovisual production for online delivery, particularly in the postgraduate levels in Writing. ‗Non-reiterative' refers to materials that do not replicate the materials of ‗the lecture; or ‗the text', but which are spontaneously co-constructed dialogically by specialists in the field. Few studies in the wake of Edirisingha, Salmon and Fothergill's ‗profcasts ' (2007) have, however, considered how audiovisual materials designed for asynchronous use can be used to supplement and complement core lecture material to create more a more engaging and sustainable learning interface.