2008 - 2013 Flexible Learning Course

A small but interested group today joined the session on Elluminate. We also had someone from the previous class join us - a great way to get more practice with using Elluminate. Read on to see what Clone Trooper (Terry) and Darth Vader (Bron) did on the session today. You will also find out why the name for Bron - I have just thought up this name for Terry....he may well retaliate.

Photo by mkeblx from http://www.flickr.com

Terry did a great job of talking about some of the things to think about when designing for flexible learning. For example, how content is presented and students motivated to interact - animations, discussions etc. The mention of learning styles got me going. There is a very good website with good information about Kolb Learning Styles.

Terry also showed some interesting examples of work he has been doing, and demonstrated some uses of software. For example. Course Genie has been used successfully in the course on Rural Animal Technology for Vet nursing. We saw how Course Genie can transform lecture notes prepared in Word into a well-organised and colourful as well as easily navigable set of resources on the web - well in Blackboard in this instance. I loved the pictures of horses.

I tapped into the session from home and even on broadband some of the stuff looked a wee bit fragmented to start with, but in general it was pretty fast to load and showed up well.

The Moviemaker example for some reason didn't show up, not sure why. You can read more about it here. Also Terry demonstrated an example of an animation used in vet nursing - showing skin preparation prior to surgery in a cat. He also talked about how animation can be used effectively to demonstrate use of machinery. One point to remember before going ahead and spending time and money on creating resources - check to see what is already out there. There is a wealth of information available on the Internet. A search in Google or on Youtube (video) and in del.icio.us can turn up a wealth of stuff.

The examples of websites I put up could be seen okay even when moving between the pages - Elluminate handles web tours well. I demonstrated WikiEducator briefly (using text chat alone was rather wierd but apparently my voice sounded like Darth Vader - a cold does that to ya.

WikiEducator is being used for an evaluation course I teach through TANZ (Tertiary Accord of NZ). We are also going to use this facility (provided by the Commonwealth of Learning) for a collaborative development across countries, for an HIV AIDs course in nursing. The beauty of something like WikiEducator is that it makes development of content so much easier in a collaborative situation. Plus the end product can be easily updated therefore information remains current - so important for a topic such as HIV AIDs. Content can be linked to from either a blog or something like Blackboard.
The following is a list of websites we looked at today:

1. WikiEducator - collaborative content development - http://www.wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_article
2. WikiEducator example - Evaluating the impacts of e-learning
3. PBL Interactive and Challenge Frapp - software for creating mazes and scenarios and portfolios of projects - see http://pbl.massey.ac.nz/
4. Creative Commons for some rights reserved copyright options - information about the types of licence you can use and Home page - http://creativecommons.org/
   

Terry also mentioned software which can be used for problem-based learning - Ramosus. You can read about it here.
Quandary is another software which is used to create simple action mazes. You pose a problem then learners are led through solving the problem using a set of question choices.
A good session...what will Thursday's session reveal? Tune in and find out.
Bronwyn