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