New eILT Strategy group

I was invited to attend a meeting to look at the expectations that we should be adopting for the coming academic year in the department, where I must say, I did seem to attract a somewhat disproportionate number of action point, but no matter. Toward the end of the agenda of items that we were covering that day, I was asked to put into place a proposal for a department ILT strategy. I was not particularly enthused by this one, as I am already an active and consulting member of the College Wide ILT strategy group anyway, which is by its nature fed by department needs, and so it all felt a little like replication. I went away from the meeting and decided to think outside the box on this one a little. What is a strategy anyway? a plan by which you can achieve some ambition or aspiration, right, so how about instead the usual ILT what do we have, is it available and what do we need, think more in terms of how should it be used, and that thought interested me far more and here is my proposal.



That we should compliment the existing College ILT Strategy, but taking the attributes of best practice in ILT application within an academic environment as our terms of reference.

In order to inform on a fully inclusive basis, I recommend that three fundamental requirements be put into place.

1: The inclusion of a new item in the core meeting agenda that will typically include the following within the general umbrella of eILT:-

· Availability: are the resources that we need actually in place i.e. standard build +
· Reliability: are the resources functioning as they should
· Procurement: Is there a case for new resources
· Use: how are we making use of ILT in our teaching, what seems to work, what does not.

2: Establish a regular meeting forum, where we can discuss, demonstrate and share best practice.

3: Contribute to a repository of documented recommendations and examples for wider dissemination.


I emailed this to our Head of Department and very soon received an extremely enthusiastic reply.

There are in my recommendations though just a few agendas of my own and I shall reveal these as time goes by, but here is the first. For some years now, I think it may be about four, and you can actually check on how long by reading back through this blog, I discovered the content repository Dspace. Dspace I felt would form the ideal means of storing and retrieving learning materials and other course specific content. Well that was a long time ago and despite the use of Dspace by myself and one or two others, the application has seen little use and attracted equally little interest, despite demonstrations and presentation across the period. Well the third option of my list of proposals is going to begin changing that, because at the very first meeting, I shall be recommending Dspace as the principle repository, Wow here we go at last.

Please stay in touch for regular updates and do feel free to comment.

regards Barry

New Experiments in e-Learning

After all the inevitable turmoil of applications and enrolment for the new academic year, I finally got down to some regular classes. I met with my new first year level 3 students and during the session introduced them to the vle. I demonstrated how we would be using the various resources that it has available, and wound up with an invitation for them to contribute to their own learning resources for the Website Production module by contributing to an online Glossary. At the end of the class I suggested that they might like to join my Facebook; so much faster communication than college email for some reason!. Not a bad start for a first class of the term, but that’s not what this post is really about. The other day I came across a video from the Ted talk series, where Sugata Mitra was presenting the results from new experiments in self-teaching. The video has really caused me to stop and think around the whole idea of collaborative eLearning and the problem we are possibly inflicting upon ourselves it seems with issues of plagarism. At the end of the video Sugata suggest that we should consider that - ‘Education is a self organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon’, fascinating and well worth a look-n-bookmark.

Please feel free to post your comments, regards Barry