Newsletter,feedback and eMaterials

One aspects of eLearning that I have been very keen to get established is a newsletter. Apart from raising awareness for everyone regarding those things that are actually taking place with eLearning at the college, I also felt that it could act as a link to resources and news items in the e-digital world in general. From the screen shot you will see that apart from the links associated with our OpenSim project and new materials from Skillls2learn, more of that in a moment. As part of the links section I have included a couple of nice little animated infographics on SOPA and Digital Life: Today and Tomorrow, both well worth a look. I have in recent times really begun to see the benefit of infographics and they do come in a variety of forms including animated video clips. As for the title of the newsletter, I wanted to bring a wider perception than eLearning may have on its own suggested, particualry with the work that I am conducting at the present time in virtaul worlds.

As you will have read from previous recent postings, I have introduced Wimba Create as tool for converting Word files into Scorm packages, and these can include embedded webpages, media and short tests. Of course while these new materials certainly look impressive, what is the perception of our students? To that end I have been working on a short feedback system based on a Moodle Quiz. The questions that I have used here are mainly from a eLearning evaluation survey.

I found the resource was easy to use
There was a variety of things to maintain my interest
I learnt facts easily
I prefer this style of learning to traditional documents
The use of animation is a benefit
The application ran smoothly on my computer
The application is accessible (dyslexia)
I found this method of learning enjoyable
My comments

The final question ‘My Comments’ is really a free form text area that students can complete, particular useful I suspect as a means of providing us with guidance in the event that they were not very happy with the material!

The other day I received an email from our Technology department asking if I could install some new eLearning materials onto the vle for them, which naturally I was more than pleased to both do and also take the opportunity to review. The materials came on a CD from Skills2learn, and included a standard network and Scorm package version, nice. Once installed you need to apply for a license key and for some there was also a requirement to download the free Unity Web Player from the net onto target machines. I went onto the Skills2learn website, which I must say is very clean, stylish and intuitive to find the headline ‘E-Learning, Virtual Reality Simulation and Creative Multimedia’. Well from what I can see of the materials that we have so far, Health& Safety, Carpentry & Joinery, Building Heat Loss Calculator and Bricklaying, I would give that headline a yes, very good quality and priced materials, well worth a look if you are in the market for some ready packaged eLearning resources.

Well thats all for now , please stay in touch.

regards Barry Spencer (eLearning Development Coordinator)

eLearning Observations, Codeyear and Web Tools

As our teaching staff here begins to take advantage of the training and resources that we have in place for including, it has come to raise for me an important issue with regard to classroom observations. As part of Learning and Teaching QA, observations by the quality team are carried out at regular intervals. The thing is this; observers are looking for a number of activities and practices that should be taking place in a classroom particularly, learning, collaboration, engagement etc and as such these will be recorded with comments in an observation record, this then eventually finds it way into the staff appraisal process; a practice that I feel certain is pretty much standardised everywhere in teaching.

The question arises however, if and indeed when learning activities such as these take place beyond the class, as for instance as part of an eLearning experience, how are they going to be captured by observers? After all just as in the classroom scenario, they are indeed equal to not only in value but by the same token have been facilitated by that particular member of the teaching staff in the first instance! And so should we not also recognise this within a teaching observation profile. Well not surprisingly we decided to schedule a further, more by way of a heads up session, where I took the opportunity to show where and how observers could capture eLearning activities and participation, along with some examples of good practice from trials that I had run in the past. I am looking forward to seeing how we implement this particular consideration, and will certainly post our experiences. I do invite comments from anyone who has had the same issue arise.


Well I must say I did not imagine commenting in my blog that upon discovering my class had abandoned a programming exercise I had set, and were all fully immersed with some page on the Internet, that I would be happy, but I was. Over the previous weekend I had posted a forum message asking everyone to try-out the new Codeyear initiative. If you have not come across this yet, its basically an interactive introduction to computer programming. I must say it seems to have become just a little addicted at the moment for many of my students. I guess one ingredient of Codeyear that is missing in my own classes is the competitive aspect of point scoring. A couple of days after this I was covering a class of students currently taking one of our Networking courses, a course by the way that does not feature a programming module, and it was all received very well with one student completing the first set of tasks within the lesson timeframe, excellent. Si I recommend giving this one a try, though at the present time you will require either Firefox or Google Chrome browsers to run the service.


A couple of new stumble-upons for me this week have been with new sites, new to me anyway, that offer free services for producing web presentations

The first was Glogster, this is a free sign up, that allows you to create presentation poster style glogs as they are called, really mashups of music, photographs, videos, links. If you already subscribe to photo / video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Picasa then you can connect to these also. Glogster tools include rotate, resize, image effects and animations. And if you are a serious social networker as I suspect you are to some degree, then a single click will publish your Glogs to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Tumbl. Worth a look

The next was Vuvox. The presentation styles here are created using three default toolsets of Express, Collage and Studio.

COLLAGE to quickly produce dynamic interactive panoramas with hot-spots.
STUDIO to build a personalized media presentation... and, place it in your COLLAGE.
EXPRESS to build presentations with dynamic content from RSS feeds and online albums.

Looking through examples they do present a new a refreshing approach and alternative to the more traditional presentations styles and approaches that we have become accustomed to using, and again I think you will find its worth looking this one over.

Be sure to stay in touch for future posts, regards Barry

First week of 2012

Migration, Migration
As part of the college merger project, the Christmas break has been used to migrate Orpington College Moodle vle away from hosting with ULCC and onto our own internal servers, a move that involved a change from unix/Linux to Windows.
The rationale was primarily a cost saving exercise, and given that we have the in-house expertise to make it happen, we have, and all appears to be running very well. The next stage will be the move from our current Bromley College vle
from our own Linux to Windows server. This means that we shall be running two instances of the vle from a single server with two IP's, should be interesting.


Online OCR
Thumbing through some course hand-outs the other day, I found material that I would like to post onto the vle, but after much searching and delving could not locate the original electronic version; their fate no doubt sealed by the crash of my hard drive between my weekly backups a couple of years ago. The only electronic version that I could find though was in screen shot form, Ouch. Anyway a web search turned up a very useful discovery, and just in case as like myself you have not come across the facility yet, then try the online OCR at http://www.free-ocr.com/ the reCAPTCHA was an easy also, excellent.

SharePoint Guide

If you have been following this blog then you will know that we are in the process of adopting SharePoint as part of our Moodle deployment solution. Should you be in need of a SharePoint guide then take a look at this pdf from MicroSoft. Written as a companion to the SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide for Technical and Business Decision Makers, I found it very readable.

ePolicy time

With the training now in place to support staff in moving components of programmes away from the traditional class approach and toward an eLearning mode as part of our standard course delivery. This change in practice will inevitably begin to influence those activities that we would normally associate with the more traditional expectations of class work and lectures, specifically learning, collaboration and assessment. Within a working eLearning environment these components will inevitably begin to take place at times and locations beyond the more traditional physical and time constraints imposed on both staff and students by timetables.
As part of an overall eLearning strategy, I have put together an initial ePolicy discussion document that I feel should provide us with a reasonable set of outline suggestions and proposals to address thosew particular circumstances, expectations and requirements for eLearning covering :- Student Privacy, the use of email, forum and chat discussions, submission of assignments particularly with regard to deadlines, issues regarding the provision of technical help, Student Codes of Conduct, plagiarism linked to Intellectual Property Rights.
I finally sent the discussion document off this morning and so once these are worked on and approved we can commence thinking about installing them in handbooks and course materials.

Thats all for nowbut please stay in touch for future postings.

Study Stack Flash Cards

I wonder if you have come across Study Stack yet. The site features collections of Flash Card materials that are organised into categories of Geography History, Business, Maths, Miscellaneous, Science, Languages, Agriculture, Law, Medical and Standardized Tests, that you can both use and contribute to. There are in fact even a number of ways in which your chosen Flash Card resource can be displayed, and these include :-
Flashcards, Study Stack, Study Table, Matching, Crossword, Unscramble, Type In, Quiz Test, Hangman, Bug Match, Hungry Bug, Targets, Notes, Apps, Print, Edit, Hmm...
Some of these, such as Hangman, Bug Match, Hungry Bug and Targets, have a definite game feel about them which was nice.

I was particularly encouraged by the inclusion of Apps in the list as it will allow you to make the resources available to smartphone, tablet, or laptops mobile technologies, and lets face it most students in my experience here at college these days are more than likely going to be carrying at least on of these around with them.

I was further impressed to find that having selected the Flash Card subject and type, there is a text field of copy-n-paste code that you can drop into your web app or vle, which is in fact exactly what I did.

You will see from the screen shot here that as I had simply dropped the code into a web page Resource and emailed everyone to have a try and feedback to me, I did feel the need to include something by way of brief instructions on use at the top.

If you are into the Flash Card approach then I can recommend this site, it is very easy to use there are plenty of resources to choose from.



Please feel free to comment, Barry

Creately Web Based Diagramming Tool

A little bit of cross posting between my blogs here but if you have use for a diagramming tool and not come across Creately yet, then I think it is well worth paying a visit to the site. There are a number of pricing models available, including a free version that has plenty of features. The models available cover Business Diagrams, User Interface Design, Software, System, Network Diagrams and more. It was the inclusion of software design particularly UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams and Database design diagrams that particularly took my attention. You will find that in creating a new document the examples list will provide sets of templates, some of which seem to be partially complete, these would be particularly useful for teaching. AS well as the many diagrams available, the user interface also includes a standard set of drawing tools, basic shapes, arrows, call outs, you can add notes, comments and share your diagrams thought the free version limits you to five of these. Upon completion diagrams can be exported in either png, jpeg or Creately format. As a unique virtual trial I decided to create a shared media block at my landing point in Second life, so feel free to get a couple of avatar friends together a try it out. Please feel free to reply to this post with your impressions.

regards Barry

The LMS is Dead!

Have you come acrosss OpenClass yet?

It's a new kind of learning environment that goes beyond the LMS. It’s open to everyone, easy to use, and completely free — and it's making an amazing impact on education. (quote)

The ambition for the OpenClass LMS, utilising cloud and Google Apps for Eduaction seems to be centred on transforming outcomes by leveraging modern social technology to encourage collaboration and communication for students, faculty, institutions, and administrators around the world. (partly quoted)

There is a Take a Tour option that’s worth looking at because it provides a nice insight into the appearence and feel of the system in operation. I look after a Moodle installation here at the college and its hosted internally, a good option really as you get to have control over many issues such as upgrades and local management of the system, so I am not to sure how these would translate for cloud based solutions, but lets see.

Will OpenClass compete with Moodle, who can tell. One thing is for sure though, and that is competition is always good, at least that’s my view, so let’s sit back and see what happens in the coming months.

I for one have signed up to the service and will be staying in touch with developments and interested to see the uptake and use for this new and welcome initiative.

Do take a look at the video, it does seem to suggest to me that there is a certain implicit assumption, though I could be wrong, that by leveraging the benefits of social networks we will see a transformation in outcomes and the student experience.

If you are using Moodle or any other vle for that matter, do you make use of the social networking tools such as WiKi, Forums and Chat, and if so, have you been drawn to any conclusions? If you have then please feel free to reply to this post.

Personally, I make use of these features regularly. Take a look at the chart here, it measures transactions from twelve students over a one month period; in fact the chat was about double the figure shown as some were using msn and I only included Moodle stats. Is this typical of your own experience, please comment. My experience is, and a recent effort on my part just last week proved to be little more than a self fulfilling prophesy, that unless a grading outcome is clearly established as part of the activity, as was the case for the transaction results in the screen shot, then all to often I find Forums are empty and chat rooms silent, do you find the same? please comment.

Kind regards Barry

Preparing for elearning the first run

This week finally saw the launch of the third phase of our Moodle vle roll out at the college with the delivery of a new 2 hour cpd staff training session Preparing for e-learning. If you have been following the blog here then you will know that this centres on the use of Wimba Create, in the production of learning objects from otherwise standard materials or handouts produced in Word. I see these new materials, as putting into place the final part of a resource package for implementing an e-Learning strategy that draw upon those other tools available in the vle in support of collaborative learning. From this last statement, you can correctly conclude that a certain amount of discussion took place on the very subject of learning objects themselves, principally some definitions and advantages they represent for both students and staff / developers alike.

The objective of the session was to take a typical class handout and see how it could be converted into a learning object with navigation, embedded videos, an embedded website and various question and answer feedback question types. I was pleased enough to see a range of IT skills among those attending especially as everyone completed the task in good time. After the initial production work we exported the material in scorm format and upload onto the vle. In fact I think it was the features of this last stage i.e. the launching and tracking of the object by Moodles Learning Management System that impressed the assembled group as much as the transformation of the material itself.

Since this first run of the course this week, I have already received requests to run more training, one in particular was for everyone in a single department, so very promising.


My objective then remains very much unchanged, and that is to move learning beyond the physical boundaries and time constraints of the scheduled curriculum. In the near future, when students enrol at our college, they will be enrolling into a very real vibrant working social environment, while at the same time enrolling into a very real, social virtual environment.

Please stay in touch for future posts and feel free to comment.

Barry Spencer e-Learning Project Coordinator

Innovation Showcase

Our Technology School are exhibiting at the Excel Conference Center WorldSkills London 2011 05 from Oct 2011 to 08 Oct 2011, so for that alone, I would certainly recommend getting along for a visit in this coming week, I should be there myself on Friday, and really looking forward to it. I was even more pleased when on Tuesday Afternoon of this week, I was informed that a group of delegates from the conference would be visiting us at the college, and so would it be possible for me to arrange / organise a suitably impressive innovation technology type of showcase for them. I ran through a few of the broader possibilities, which I must say seemd to all go down very well. It occured to me, that we should together with our Marketing department, assemble in addition to any visitors pack that may already be in existence, include a folder, pad, pen and coloured flyers. The flyers being my suggestion would naturally be my job, OK with that. I finally delivered the draft version (shown here), to the Marketing team on Thursday afternoon and they did a great job of applying some desktop publishing effects.

I am planning for three of us staff to deliver the sessions, each lasting around 15 to 20 minutes, and taking place in separate IT rooms.

From the screen shot you can see that I finally settled on four, which are :-

The CISCO lab that we have as part of tour BTEC BXD Networking programme, with units that cover IT Essentials, CCNA – Discovery, Exploration, Security and CCNP.

Producing e-Content with Wimba Create. This is part of a wider eLearning initiative with the ambition of extending learning beyond the traditional curriculum boundary, using a learning objects approach for course materials.

Mahara, our fully featured open source electronic portfolio. Mahara is integrated with our Moodle system, and provides the tools to set up your own personal learning and development environment; used mainly in our Work Based Learning Projects for Foundation Degree students.


Finally Open Simulator, a web 3.0D collaborative face-to-face working environment, that we are deploying to enhance student communication and social skills both within the college and as part of the Comenius project, that will link us with two colleges in Holland and one in Belgium.


Looking forward to the coming week.

Free Content for Educators

I was putting together the finishing touches to my new training notes on producing eLearning content today and came to the section on content repositories. If you have read this blog of recent then you will have seen that I am intending seizing the opportunity to push the use of our DSpace repository with a quick how-to guide. Working on the idea of a supplement to this, I set about compiling a list of similar repositories and teaching resources by way of showing the value of this very open approach to course materials; and not least to help strengthen my own view of, 'should we not start getting into the practice of assembling material instead keep creating'.

To demonstrate the value of adopting this more open approach, I decided to compile a list of free repositories and resources available on the Internet for teachers to use. I started by including those that I have known about for some time and often browse for myself such as Merlot, OpenSpace and Jorum, and then decided to trawl around for anything new, and as it had been a while since my last search, felt sure that I would turn something up. I was pleasantly surprised to very quickly stumble upon 12-dozen-places-to-self-educate-yourself-online. At first glance I thought it was 12, but no it was 12 dozen, though I confess to having not actually counted, but the list is very long. The collection of resource topics should prove to have something for just about everyone:-

Science and Health
Business and Money
History and World Culture
Law
Computer Science and Engineering
Mathematics
English and Communications
Foreign and Sign Languages
Multiple Subjects and Miscellaneous
Free Books and Reading Recommendations
Educational Mainstream Broadcast Media
Online Archives
Directories of Open Education

As I am sure you can imagine, the materials vary enormously from collections of MP3 podcasts and video’s to standard web pages. There was one particular site, and I did forget to tag it, that will allow you to convert the text into web content that you can copy and paste into your own site, interesting. If you have not come across this collection before, I would certainly recommend taking a look and tag.

Comments welcome, regards Barry

Training and Workshops

Apart from all the very predictable events and chores of a post enrolment week, I have managed to get a good amount of time both in college and out for the production of new phase 3 vle training notes. If you have read any my earlier posts on this then you will recall that I am using Wimba Create as the tool to leverage Word skills in the production of eLearning content. One initiative that I do intend driving forward in this new approach to our production and delivery of materials though is to recruit student feedback. After all lets face it, we are all in one way or another going to be learning here, and I feel this would seem a reasonable way forward for us all, so next step, use the vle to produce standard feedback, and there will be more on this in a later post.

Looking into the longer, maybe medium term, during the course of this week, and I am happy with the way things are going, I really am, but also aware that there is a bigger picture here. The ambition for sustainable eLearning in reality is actually going to require the adoption of wider application and practice. These new efforts some may say amount to little more than e-Delivery, a reasonable point maybe. For my own part I anticipate the inclusion of a collaborative delivery framework and new assessment strategies are essential, do feel free to comment.

So more training sessions? My own initial reaction was yes, but the list begins to grow, and I thought why not produce a set of small eLearning modules, for instance:-

An appreciation of what we understand by the term eLearning
Developing - adopting a delivery and assessment framework
Considerations for eLearning content design
Integrating Moodle web 2.0 tools
Using content repositories

Much of this does actually exist in the form of case studies anyway, thinking particularly of JISC here and hopefully the whole process will attract a realistic amount of cpd hours, once again more in later posts.




I am not sure, but would like to know so please comment, if others find a fare frequency of re-booking takes place on their courses. My own guideline for course notes presentation has been in the style of click-n-go, basically a sequenced approach with screen shots, while keeping text to a reasonably informative minimum. And yet, we do have repeat bookings, even though in the vast majority of cases the information that is required is clearly in the handout. So in an endeavour to resolve the issue, this week I have launched one-2-one and small group 30-minute workshops. Naturally I am still available for any ad-hoc requests and meetings that come along, but feel a more formal workshop is going to be of value, we shall see.

Well that’s my week, please stay in touch for future posts

As virtual environments merge

The arrival of shared media in Second Life, has meant among other things, that I can now give access to our vle and all its facilities to students from inside the virtual world. The effect of this is producing not only a merging of the two virtual environments, but also my two blogs it would seem, and so I post a link to this latest article on Shimmer-Island from here.

I am also pleased to inform everyone that the fan for a downed server is on order and will hopefully arrive soon, and so restore our full range of blog features.


regards Barry (Skipper)

New Year Starting

I will start with an apology for the broken links on the blog, the server that I am using here at the College has recently been moved and has since developed a problem with the fan, which eventually failed. The server itself is a little on old side, and so we are unable to get a replacement and so have decided to virtualise the server, hopefully all will be well very soon.

I am pleased to say, that on a personal note, it appears I am being awarded a new job description that will be based around the general theme of eLearning, and that this role will account for half of my usual contracted lecturing hours. This has actually come at a very timely moment for me given the imminent role out of my Moodle phase 3 training that will go considerably beyond the traditional single period sessions of phases 1 and 2. In the third phase of the planned Moodle rollout I will be introducing content design specifically using Wimba Create. The exercise will not simply be on how to create or convert existing Word documents, but equally getting everyone to start thinking in terms of Learning Objects and eLearning for future materials and their long term storage in a content repository; we have been running DSpace for some years now and it will be really rewarding to see it being used in earnest. My ambition here ultimately is to deploy our Moodle system more as a Virtual Learning Environment and not just a Course Management System, so you may like to stay in touch to see how we get on.

Another project that I am pleased to have acquired is to evaluate the integration of Moodle and SharePoint, it was at a recent ILT strategy meeting that a majority vote was carried to run down and close our staff network storage drive and replace it with SharePoint. I spent some time looking around the net for case study material as a starting point and came across a really useful guide from Microsoft Education Labs, this looks very encouraging, so we are giving it a try.

Bye for now

Facebook for Educators

I have in past postings made both positive and not so positive remarks regarding the use of Facebook as part of course delivery. In one particular year, I certainly managed to get pretty much wholesale agreement with using the social network for both easy contact and handing out achievement comments’ and graphical badges and general course information. In the following year, a similar attempt led to me being almost completely unfriended, strange? Given all this, I do still continue to see articles and postings where clearly the application has worked well, then the other day I came across a YouTube video ‘The Basics of a Facebook Page for Educators’ If you have not seen this for yourself then I can recommend it as a good starter. The Movie walks you through the layout and tabs, which include:-

• Discussions, that student can join and post into



• Standards, that relate to course and using the medium



• Documents, that teachers can upload for students to access



• Strategies, on the use of social media and Facebook



• Polls, these can be setup to gather student feedback

Basically it all looks very much like a Facebook / vle / teachers website solution, and if you are in need of such a facility then this would seem as good as any.

I went on to look around the net for more on this and soon discovered http://facebookforeducators.org. This really does tell you all about it, and there is a pdf download guide, agian worth a look.

I also came across this rather large sample of (The teachers guide to using Facebook)
Facebook the missing manual from OReilly. This is one of those, have a read before you buy promotions that I seem to be seeing with increasing frequency these days, and I must say the sample pages are extensive, so again you may like to take a look at the link if you get the time.

Finally how about ‘7 Best Practices For Educators Using Facebook’ I always like reading these little summaries of best practice, after all if someone has gone to all the trouble of teasing out the details its certainly going to save the rest of us an equal and unnecessary amount of work.

So am I going to use Facebook, well probably not, because I have Moodle, would I discount Facebook, absolutely not, clearly it can and does work.

Please feel free to comment

Regards Barry

Moodle training news

Last week was our official end of term and so classes are now over for the academic year, which opens the way for other activities such as staff training, and this morning I delivered the Introduction and Web 2.0 sessions for our Moodle vle. I of course run sessions most weeks for these and usually attract three of four candidates for each, but this morning sessions were very much full with fourteen for the first and sixteen for the second, almost filling our training room. I think I could a make tentative assumption from this that for many staff the idea of training during term time is still difficult to manage. Overall the whole morning ran very smoothly and candidates have been generous and encouraging with feedback. Of all the aspects in using the vle that we covered today -Forums and Chat seemed to attract the most enthusiasm and time, all very good, and often amusing.

On a common thread, I am getting on with the new course notes for the phase three training and really looking forward to rolling that out in September, which brings me into a very interesting and chance meeting that I had with a colleague who on their own initiative have a new mobile learning project that will get underway in the coming academic year. The thrust behind the proposal is that for some students, finding themselves timetabled into rooms with no computing facilities, wouldn’t it be a good idea to provide some low cost, low spec netbooks and make use of the college WiFi provide access to web resources including Cloud apps. You can certainly see the rationale here, when you have group of students where course delivery has increasingly drawn in the use of the technology in both teaching and learning style, suddenly get themselves dropped back into pre-digital, though not impossible, does take some degree of willing flexibility. And so if all does indeed go according to plan, in the coming year you will be able to provide students timetabled into those rooms with standard Word style electronic hand-outs distributed from the vle, very nice, very smooth, much better than issuing ball point pens; by the way the original patent for these was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud. Just a thought though, as MS Word actually dates back to 1984, which makes the technology almost thirty years old itself, is it not time for us to move on once more? A comment that drew a somewhat frowned expression, to which I replied - book into my Moodle phase 3 training program, you will enjoy it.

Please stay in touch for updates, regards Barry

Techno rant but not really

I was at little gathering recently when I overheard a conversation between delegates from a college who had apparently made the case that engagement and achievement would be improved simply by providing students with access to the very latest technologies. So you are going to throw a shed load of money at it, and that basically is it, and this is going to work? I really do wonder sometimes whether the message will ever get through that Silver Bullets only work for the Lone Ranger.


All in all this was reminiscent for me of a presentation that I was attending, possibly presenting at, on one of the many events led by a leading FE and HE support service. The presentation started with an image of an operating theatre circa 1900+, a click of the mouse and we see a picture of an operating theatre 2000+. The question was posed: could a surgeon from 1900 function in a modern operating theatre? Not much in the way of audience participation to that question as I recall, but no doubt everyone was having similar thoughts.

In the next slide we see a classroom circa 1900, teacher at the front of the class with chalk and blackboard, students in orderly rows equipped with chalk and chalkboards. A click of the mouse, and the image was joined by a classroom circa 2000. The question was posed, how much has changed? Well given there would be a very brief explanation of how to remove the cap from a dry wipe pen for the teacher and similarly for ball point pens for students, granted not much seems to have changed at all, unlike the world of clinical surgery it would seem.

But what am I supposed to draw from this? While at the time I was reluctant to be reactionary, especially given my own evangelical disposition with eLearning, let me put it this way. Using what is essentially teaching and learning styles that have clearly changed very little in a century, or so it would seem, we have been able to stand on the Moon, understand the cosmos back to a micro second after the big bang, crack the genome, have all the benefits of consumer micro electronics, super computers, artificial intelligence, anti-biotics, fly in machines at over twice the speed of sound dressed in casual clothes while sipping champagne and eating canapés. Is it being seriously suggested that we have it wrong with teaching and learning? From the preceding list, surely even the most casual observer would conclude, no, but a serious question of course remains, how can engagement and achievement be improved, because of course it can, and should, given all the surrounding technologies and best practice at our disposal.

From my own early experience of running vle’s where chat rooms are silent, forums are empty and class notes that did not work or were not read in class were similarly useless when posted online, I have come to appreciate that the change we need does not lye with the introduction of techno paraphernalia alone, but must be accpompanied with the necessary collaborative delivery frameworks, content and assessment strategies that allow us to make use of the technology in support of learning.

I think Fire and forget really does belong firmly in the domain of heat seeking missiles not teaching and learning, rant over.

Food for discussion? comments welcome, kind regards Barry

Making Mobile Learning Work

Thinking about and talking to the project team as I am right now regarding the likely and best use of our new iPad’s when the initial project ends. I have started to look around the net and came across this really interesting publication ‘Making Mobile Learning Work’, this is a free pdf from escalate featuring five mobile learning case studies. If you have been a reader of this blog, then you will no doubt recall that I have been posting on the subject of mobile learning going way back, what I immediately liked about this publication was the 12 page introduction by John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton. These early pages clarify and establish extremely well where mobile learning originated, where it can make a difference, for instance with respect to:- contingent , situated, authentic, context and personalised learning. It does make very clear among other things, that we need to establish the difference between material that we may feel is suitable for a vle, and so typically being viewed from a desktop machine and material for a mobile learning resource. I can certainly sympathise with this last point, as a similar shift in perspective exists between class hand-outs and vle eLearning materials, which is precisely why we are heading down the Wimba Create route at the moment, but that’s an on-going story so please stay in touch for that. There is a very pertinent and real point raised here also, that many students these days already own a device i.e. smartphones, Galaxies, iPad’s, tablets etc that is perfectly capable of handling the requirements of mobile learning, and that we consider for many reasons, moving away from the concept of an institutionalised product for the purpose, mmm.

I can without any doubt recommend this as a worthwhile download and read for the daily commute if you have that opportunity, and given the many facts and insights, I suspect like myself to will choose to keep a copy. If you have any comments then please feel free to post.

regards Barry

The iPad has arrived

Today I had first site and contact with our new iPad collection. This eLearning project has been a while in coming to life it seems, but I can certainly appreciate the constraints of wise prequrement, given the arrival of the iPad 2 at such a sensitive time for us. Our network support team are managing connection issues right now and this week we are going to be looking at how we will be deploying these resources beyond the initial project once it completes. I was really impressed by the still and movie camera performance and some of the more entertaining apps that have been installed, like talking to the cat, not sure about the apps app, if you get my drift, but it was so smooth. I guess my first impressions are that we should introduce the technology to one of our media courses and see if we can start to make use of the mobile activity / learning potential, but that needs some thinking into at the meeting. I will be sure to blog on any decisions that come from that, so please stay in touch, and do post any experiences and use that you may have put the iPad to.

Regards Barry

Serious about eLearning

If you have been reading this blog and any others of a similar nature, then I guess it will go without saying that in answer to the post title, you most certainly are serious about eLearning. Which is why I am posting a link to an article I came across from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online? The article pulls no punches, and this becomes very clear from an early statistic quote 'With countless studies showing success rates in online courses of only 50 per cent—as opposed to 70-to-75 percent for comparable face-to-face classes'. Well I remain convinced that while that is not a global statistic, certainly the selection of courses appropriate for full blown eLearning and the need to adopt a blended approach are clearly principle contributing factors. The article has a lot of feedback responses that are equally worth reading and like myself I feel sure you will find some serious food for thought, much of which I am pleased to say I felt was reinforcing and positive. Please feel free to comment.

Regards Barry

Preparing for eLearning

If you have been following this blog recently then you will no doubt have come across my Moodle trading level document that I posted on . The three levels ultimately translate in the first instance to training options for our staff and the first two levels really deal with learning how the use the most common Moodle options available in the standard distribution to get a course up and running, with second level showing how to make use of what I have come to refer to as web 2.0 features. Toady I managed to get5 approval for the third and final level training, which is going to be centered around the design, production and storage of eLearning content. My ambition here is to encourage everyone to begin designing materials in a form that is more inline with the concept of learning objects as opposed to complete topics or classes, and part one of the course will comprise an introduction to and examples of learning objects. Next creating the content, and potentially that could be very difficult, in that am I really expecting everyone to either rewrite existing material, and fortunately the answer is not really, instead we are going to be using Wimba Create. I first began using Wimba Create a few years ago now, when it was called course- Genie. The software is basically a Word plugin that using a series of new style tags that will allow you to insert features from navigation to quizzes. Finally I want to include the practice of storage, not just dropping the files onto an intranet, where discovery given the changing nature of folder structures, can make the practice all to often less than likely, but instead using a content repository. A few years ago now, and it is a post somewhere on the blog, we managed to get DSpace up and running. Myself and a few others have used it and remained committed to idea, but despite demo’s and the odd presentation we have had very little by way of real success, but as part of the course, I am more than hopeful that this will now change, as we have been harvested for some years now.

Comments welcome, regards Barry

Hone Virtual Presentation Skills

I was looking through my emails today and came across what appears to be a useful little publication on virtual presentations. I have downloaded a myself copy, and after an initial signup of course, it does look to be an interesting read and so I thought I would pass it on. I have copied the introduction text from the webpage below:-
Research shows that the top fears for online presenters are: "How can I deliver a powerful presentation to an audience I can't see?" and "How do I compensate for the loss of body language and eye contact?"

The truth is that any medium changes how messages are sent and received. The good news: with The Virtual Presenter's Handbook, you can transform presenting online from a second-rate alternative to a potent new asset in your professional toolbag.

In this handbook, webinar veteran Roger Courville will teach you:
• How to prepare and deliver online presentations that stand out
• Ways of grabbing and keeping your remote audience's attention
• How to avoid the 'webinar killers' made by most presenters
• Powerful new techniques that aren't possible when presenting face-to-face

Please feel free to reply with your impressions and comments

regards Barry