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.