Through Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG), the University System of Georgia (USG) aims to provide affordable textbook alternatives to distance-learning students. These electronic alternatives are low cost or free (most typically in the form of open education resources), and build on GALILEO and USG library resources.
Recently, ALG shared information about how you can use GALILEO resources within your D2L course. Let’s have a look at what is available to you and how it can benefit our students.
GALILEO
GALILEO, which stands for Georgia Library Learning Online, offers cost-effective, authoritative, subscription-only online resources to participating institutions (and we, at Georgia Regents University, are participants). Through GALILEO’s numerous databases, we can access peer-reviewed journals, periodicals, and videos in virtually any field. For more details, refer to the GALILEO fact sheet.
So far nothing new, right? The novelty for our institution is the availability of a GALILEO auto-login widget and an integration with GALILEO films on demand.
The Auto-Login Widget
Look for the auto-login widget at the top left of your D2L course, as captured in Figure 1.
Why use the widget, you might ask? More direct access, less clicks, and overall less time spent accessing the the resources. You do not need to authenticate with a GALILEO password; the widget automatically logs you in.
The Films on Demand Integration
You can insert all sorts of things into D2L content: text, images, URLs, Kaltura videos, YouTube videos, web cam recordings made directly in D2L, and much more. One of the new things you can now add are GALILEO films on demand, as shown in Figure 2.
This repository contains an extensive collection of science and humanities videos. Out of curiosity, I looked up “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (a field in which I expected to get few, if any resources) and found 20 results!
So how exactly does the D2L integration bring these amazing videos to our student’s fingertips? In 6 clicks within D2L, you locate the video that meets your instructional needs (you can also locate videos outside of D2L, through the repository’s direct http://digital.films.com/Dashboard.aspx link) and insert it into your course as a news item, email, checklist, discussion topic, content file, etc.
Quick instructional design tip: Add a little text along with your selected video, giving students some context as to why you find the video useful and what students are to do with it.
To learn how to take advantage of this integration, please see the step-by-step tutorial available through Service Now.
Hope you found this post useful. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and takeaways from your user experience.
