Lesoco trip

eLearning training continues to move along very encouragingly, with a well attended course last Wednesday and my diary filling with appointments for one-2-one mentoring sessions for the first piece of eLearning material package.  This week in particular brought along an excellent opportunity to see how these things are done in another college because on Monday this week I was invited to a LeSoCo meeting at Lewisham College.

Similar to our own deployment they are Moodle based, with implementations of Mahara and Turnitin, along with hosting and custom upgrades from ULCC. Interesting to see the inclusion of a wide range of Google education services including email, blogs and docs. I must admit that Google education does offer some very interesting and tempting features, something to look into for me in the not to distant future.

The blended learning programmes make use of Mahara for eportfolio’s with a mixture of learning material including Scorm packages, tracked using Grade book .

It was encouraging to see that own approach of using Bronze, Silver and Gold training standards was being used, though not surprisingly details for the content of these was different; must get Mozilla badges going soon.

Some interesting discussions developed on the day that included those recurrent themes of how does the inspection process fit into or for that matter support the collection of what could be broadly described as e-processes.
If you have read this blog before then you will have picked up that my subjective measure as to the usefulness of events is measured by the amount of note taking that I complete, and given that the event only lasted 2 hours six sides of a notebook, so all in all good.  When I say note book by the way I am not referring to the Apple kind, why, well because I wanted to try something new, instead of scribbling / keying lines and lines of text, I wanted to try-out a technique that I came across recently called Distance Graphic Recording posting on Elliot Masseys eLearning site. If you have not across this before you may like to give it a try, it certainly reduced my word count and aided later understanding of my own notes.

Thats all now, and as usual, please feel free to comment

Week four and going well

This week is going to be number four in the rollout of the eLearning training. The whole exercise is in fact proving to be extremely worthwhile; the actual sessions themselves are to introduce our staff to converting their desktop materials written in Word and then showing these can be enriched with media and assessments. Of course training in itself is not on its own going to produce the type oif culture change that we are looking for and so at each session I request a topic that will be used, which I am starting to follow up on with a one-to-one session, to assist with both technical and design issues. To address the subject of design , and given the core principles that we are considering here I came across a very useful pdf 'Guidelines for Authors of Learning Objects' by Rachel S. Smith.
If you have not coma across this particular publication before and you are interested in creating Learning Objects I can certainly recommend, main section titles include:

Placing Learning Objects in Context

Creating Learning Objects: Some Practical Advice

Marketing Learning Objects

Evaluating Found Learning Objects

Summary of Guidelines

If you are in the process of introducing these type of change the you may be interested in the an article I found the other day called ‘How to Builda Faculty Culture of Change’ By Robert Zemsky

That’s all for now and please feel free to comment