Group items tagged

Grainne Conole proposes 12 dimesions for better classification of MOOCs. the degree of openness, the scale of participation (massification), the amount of use of multimedia, the amount of communication, the extent to which collaboration is included, the type of learner pathway (from learner centred to teacher-centred and highly structured), the level of quality assurance, the extent to which reflection is encouraged, the level of assessment, how informal or formal it is, autonomy, and diversity. She then evaluates five example MOOCs against these dimensions.

The government of Switzerland has issued a statement declaring that it will not take action to alter current copyright laws allowing the downloading of music and movies for personal use. The statement is the result of a lengthy study conducted by the Swiss government into the impact of so-called "piracy" on the entertainment industry. Despite the industry's claims that downloading undermines their business, this study shows that the effect of unauthorized downloading on the industry's bottom line is negligible. One key finding of the study is that downloaders spend as much if not more to acquire content legally as those who do not download. Researchers found no change in amount of disposable income spent on music and movies, despite the fact that roughly one third of Swiss people engage in some form of downloading. The government concluded, then, that no change to the current legal structure was necessary, and urged the entertainment industry to grow and adapt with the changes in technology and in consumer habits, rather than trying to suppress progress.

Jane Jacobs wrote about urban planning and her descriptions of how a city operates influenced some of the development of 'The Landing' (Elgg) at Athabasca Uni, particularly around the structures that were created to support community development.

Excellent article on a different approach to getting teachers engaged with elearning (and any pedagogical innovation). I think we've already bed this overall idea i.e. that we need teachers to participate in the design of their courses but this provides structure around it and also theoretical underpinning.

"Wikipedia Miner is a toolkit for navigating and making use of the structure and content of Wikipedia"

"The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information."

PIVOTE is a virtual learning authoring system for virtual worlds. It was developed as part of the JISC funded PREVIEW project, where it was used to develop training material for Paramedic students at St George's Hospital and Kingston University. Although based on the Medbiquitous Virtual Patient standard the feeling of all involved in the project was that the system could be used for any sort of structured learning in virtual worlds. The result was that JISC have funded the creation of PIVOTE - this open source project.

"The conference is part of the Re-engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project, a £1m initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council under its e-Learning Transformation initiative. REAP is a collaboration across the University of Strathclyde, University of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian University. REAP is evaluating the impact of new assessment practices supported by technology at course, faculty and institutional level.Conference themes: Focusing on assessment FOR learning in tertiary education the conference has three themes to be addressed through keynotes, case studies and structured discussions.Assessment and the first year experienceGreat designs for assessmentInstitutional strategies (designs) for assessment"

"Social media and online games have the potential to convey 21st century skills that aren't necessarily part of school curricula - things like time management, leadership, teamwork and creative problem solving that will prepare teens for success in college and beyond. Making the transition between a highly structured environment in high school to a self-driven, unstructured environment in college can prove a huge challenge for many kids. Educators spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix this problem. The solution doesn't lie solely with games, but a lot of the psychology that motivates teens to play games holds potential. We need to figure out how to tap in."

A new web-based learning environment instrument is described in this paper. The Web-based Learning Environment Instrument (WEBLEI) contains four main scales. Three scales (emancipatory, co-participatory, and qualia) are built upon the work of Tobin (1998). The other scale focuses on information structure and the design of on-line material.

"A second change proposal outlining a detailed organisational structure will be provided to staff for feedback at the end of March."<--this is what TEC staff were briefed on last week I believe.

Slides on the new Moodle file structure as it relates to course files

Serious games / gamification. This is an interesting model built around personal health. The 'See how it works' link gives a handy diagram to visualise the structure in applying game theory.

Be open about what is hard, allow ideas to flow anywhere and anytime, don't be tied to titles but focus on roles. Keys to a collaborative culture.

Notes for a 15 minute presentation about research in social software and teacher professional development

Interesting little tool to test the effectiveness of your organisation. Built around large businesses but try it with ours.

This resource is intended to distil lessons learned from various JISC innovation programmes into a "Good Practice Guide for Sustaining and Embedding Innovations". It is intended to support project steering groups and management teams in further and higher education in decision-making in this area and focuses on: Changing people and culture.Working with existing institutional structures to influence organisational change.Embedding or aligning with strategies, processes, systems, initiatives and services.Creating usable tools and resources (as part of project outputs) to meet stakeholder needs.Developing commercial and open approaches to sustaining and embedding innovation.

Suggestions as to why the education system is broken and then the 1st comment offers some suggestions to fix it.

One of the activities we are currently all engaged with is mapping our existing curriculum design processes and developing a baseline document of curriculum design which we can use as a benchmark of progress achieved on the projects. A key issue for all of us is how to represent curriculum design - what representations might be useful, for what purposes and for whom?