Group items tagged

"At the ALT C conference I went to a few sessions where VLE discussion came up, most notably Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos's session "Are learning technologies fit for purpose?". They asked us to reflect on the main question in groups and nearly all of the discussions came back to complaints about the VLE. Lawrie picked on me to give the first response and I mentioned that the problem was not so much the technology but the "institutional sediment" that builds up around it. "

Enhancing and creating student centred portfolios in VLEs webinar ... context setting blog pos.

"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism. Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis. Setting - A university in the United Kingdom. Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011. Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently. Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum. Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an

This one day workshop focuses on the effective use of digital media online including the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). During the workshop attendees will discover how to improve their presentation resources, know when and how digital media can be us

"The primary objective of this project is to investigate how elearning applications can be more tightly integrated with virtual learning environments through the use of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. A range of popular open source and commercial elearning applications (tool producers) are being used to both identify priorities for integrations with VLEs (or other tool consumers) and also to evaluate the benefits which can be derived from adopting this approach."

Interesting article on whether the new, much hyped Google wave can be used to replace VLEs

"Break Through to Education Reimagined: An Inside Look at OpenClass™ "

"Thirty years ago I attended Prescott College, a small liberal arts college deeply rooted in experiential learning. All of the courses involved writing, and the "journal" was not only a part of the demonstration of competence, but it was used like a physical space for our thinking. It provided us with visible and tangible space to think on. I know "think on" sounds funny, but that is what writing can be. A visible process of thinking."

"This benchmarking tool is the latest in a series of resources Jisc has produced to help you improve the student experience at your institution. It was produced in collaboration with the National Union of Students (NUS) and The Student Engagement Partnership (TSEP) as part of the Jisc Digital Student Project (digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/) and the Jisc Change agents' network (jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/change-agents-network)"

"Ruhr-Universität utilizes both Moodle and Blackboard (as a growing number of colleges and higher education institutions are doing) and over the last two weeks was charged with comparing the two LMSs head to head"

Molly is a framework for the rapid development of information and service portals targeted at mobile internet devices. The framework follows a "batteries included" philosophy, featuring a wide variety of applications and connectors to common and standards

York University Independent Learners site

Interesting post on the merits, or otherwise, of Moodle.

Surely nothing could be...........