doing a course on this topic now, but advancing very slow with the data collection. If one wants to contribute, please do feel welcome.
question: how do you do this prompting with images, answer with names??? I am not sure about the final format of the course, as I have some sources for equivalents in Chinese and Indonesian, even in some Melayu…
(I’ll do as soon as possible a flora course, of the same region. The same applies.)
Does “Step 12” in my guide help?
yes, in the second column i found the “images”, just have to keep with that name for the column. Gracias!
It shouldn’t matter what names you give your columns, or even what order they’re in. As long as you have a column of type “images”, you can set it to be the “prompt with” column for any level in your course, and items on that level will use images as the prompt.
Although I haven’t tried this, I’m pretty sure you could even have two image columns, and have “prompt with” one and “test on” the other, to prompt people with images from one column and have them pick an image from the other column to match.
In my fish course, I set it so that levels come in pairs, and each pair of letters has all the same fish, but the first is prompt with pictures, test on common name, while the second level of the pair is prompt with common name, test on pictures. That way people can choose which direction they want to learn or, like me, do both and learn in both directions. I think that could be useful for your birds course too.
If you upload many images for the same bird, in the same images column, then people will get a randomly selected image each time. I try to have lots of images for each fish in my course, because that way people don’t learn to recognize particular photos. I think the same would be great in a course on recognizing birds. I’ve taken a few online bird identification things like this and they usually just have one picture of each bird, so I end up remembering the picture, not the bird. Like, oh yeah, that’s the one that’s on a blade of grass with a dark background!
Yes. This is good advice. I did the same with my geography courses. It’s worth the extra effort.
@cos, you’re basically right, but… that is a huge amount of work… I am happy if I can get one, two photos of a bird… when dealing with most birds databases for birds you get from contact person/webmaster answers such as “you have to contact our (more than 100) photographers to ask them about rights”… that is a full-time job with 0 payment, sorry, can’t take it 
the Indonesian wikipedia does know quite a number of local birds, indeed, but seldom are the photos of good quality. I found one excellent Taiwan site for SE Asian birds - excellent photos, all with Latin names (which makes easier fooling around for equivalents in other languages), but the contact person never bothered to answer my request…
How about using images from Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons - including a suitable acknowledgement, of course? I expect you have already been down this route. 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Birds_of_Asia_by_country
yeah, I’ve been there 
… takes hours to find three relevant photos
unfortunately wiki is very far from being comprehensive… birds databases have close-ups, your can see breeding plummages, juvenile and adults, how birds fly and forage etc. And, above all, the correct Latin, and many equivalents. Ok, the classification, in strong well-built databases, has no copyright on it, so, one can use the Indonesian or Chinese names :-))
Well, I don’t have my own photos, did not have (yet) the opportunity to spend months in those areas, with my pockets full and three cameras around the neck , not yet!
I totally understand where you’re coming from, because it has taken me such a large number of hours to do the fish course this way.
Personally I felt strongly enough about it that I left a lot of species out if I couldn’t find several photos of different individuals of the species, which meant that there were species I didn’t add when I first added their families even though I wanted them in the course, and some of those I eventually got around to many months later. One way to handle the workload is simply to spread it out over years like that.
If I were doing a course on North American birds (which I have considered doing and may do sometime), I’d probably ask the Cornell School of Ornithology for help finding images with appropriate rights. Maybe they can help with southeast Asian birds, or know of another institution that can help? It’s worth asking them.
Wikimedia Commons has been a very useful resource for me, and probably would be for you, but I agree that it does take significant time to use. I’ve found that it’s much more effective to skip Wikipedia, though, and go right to commons.wikimedia.org. Search for the scientific name of the species in the search bar at top right. Sometimes you find nothing, or only one, but sometimes you find a lot. And even if you find only one or two, that can be a great supplement for a species that you only had one or two photos of before.
Since most Wikimedia images are CC BY, requiring attribution, I use OS X’s “Preview” (what you get by default when you double click on an image file) to add text to each image with an abbreviated form of the attribution text from Wikimedia. For example, if the wikimedia attribution text is “By Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble - yellowtail parrotfish Sparisoma rubripinneUploaded by Amada44, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25258404” then I will edit that down to “Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble - CC BY 2.0”, or if there’s room on the image to comfortably fit a bit more text, “Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble - CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons”.
BTW, one really frustrating thing about one of the bird courses I take online, aside from it having only one picture of each species, is that the watermarks on some of them identify the species! Be careful, it’s easy to do that by accident - notice that would’ve happened here if I’d just copied the text from Wikimedia without thinking about it too carefully, since the title of a photo often includes the name of the species it’s of.
It was really really helpful to me to find, when I started, a couple of sites that were one photographer each, who could give me permission to use any photos from their site. If I hadn’t found those two sites, I would have started with my own photos only, which means I would’ve started with a much smaller number of species and taken a lot longer to ramp up initially. With that in mind:
Can you find a web site that has a lot of photos of birds you want in your course, all from the same photographer? A photographer’s own site, perhaps intended as a bird guide?
Do you know someone who’s interested in birds and recently gone to, or is planning to go to, southeast Asia to see and take pictures of birds? Maybe your friend/acquaintance would let you use their photos?
@cos: thanks for sharing. I did not find a serious site on Asian birds with only one, two photographers (there is one for Malaysian birds, but the fotos are not the clearest), I found excellent “official” sites /authorities, etc, but most had an explicit mention about data not being available to use on other sites, regardless of type …
ha! friends travelling there more often than meine Wenigkeit, yes, but! they stick to the cities and beaches… if they aren’t there for work and do enjoy good shape, they go diving and stare at the latest underwater Buddhas and some blue pinkish remains of … whatevers. Typical tourists…
truth you speak 
… this is quite a task, indeed: it takes years to make a good course… years! Buddhom saranam gacchami.
I’ll try for a while only national/local conservation agencies/state authorities …and focus also on sites of one, or very, few photographers… maybe this will bring some luck
btw, do you know this one, is great (but in German!); to hear the bird click the arrows in the first column. I post a page with samples/birds from Thailand: http://www.xeno-canto.org/set/1529