This post first appeared on eLearning World in October 2017. http://www.elearningworld.org/ Image: https://www.storyblocks.com/ An aspiration Designing online course is a bit like computer programming in that there are: some rules or heuristics you can follow (design patterns) some creativity you can introduce some experience you can draw on some limitations imposed by the language (perhaps in our
I recently worked on a project requiring some SCORM-based assessment activities to be updated within a Moodle course (to reflect changes in the law). The original developer was gone, as were the original files that produced the SCORM export. In this case the SCORM assessment was not doing anything that could not have been handled
This is a text version of a talk I recently gave at the iMoot, http://2015.imoot.org/. It was also published at eLearning Industry (http://elearningindustry.com/top-5-tips-online-facilitators). One of the biggest mistakes that can be made is to think about online facilitation as an extension of face to face teaching. It isn’t. If you are also the designer of
This piece was prompted by reading an article from McGraw Hill Education CEO David Levin. Clearly McGraw Hill sees huge, expensive textbooks as a hard sell in this era and recognizes the advantages of digital textbooks. The advantages are there for the publisher – lower production and distribution costs and timely updates to content. The
This article was originally published in Band of Brothers – The Southport School Magazine. November 2012 Richard Jones, Director of eLearning It is no secret that the world is changing fast and the pace of change is itself accelerating. The graph below uses one measure (transistor count) to show that we are now at a
The Horizon report from New Media Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/nmc-horizon/) for K-12 schools for 2015 has recently been released, the full report will be released in the (Northern Hemisphere) summer. The report identifies key trends for K-12 education and highlights some challenges these trends will lead to. In the first section it looks at those trends which are accelerating
There’s a lot of buzz around this topic in New Zealand and elsewhere right now. Here’s my take based on 25 years’ experience teaching Computer Science to School students. There is much more to Computer Science than being able to program in high level languages. Much more significant is the ability to think in abstract
Susan Smith Nash and Michelle Moore Packt Publishing April 2014 ISBN 978-1-78328-681-2 http://www.packtpub.com/moodle-course-design-best-practices/book This book falls into two main parts. The first deals with general issues such as preparation, planning and configuration of Moodle sites. These sections give a broad brush overview of the software, introducing the major features without overload on specific issues. Readers
There is no doubt that creating a forum that learners (or others) want to contribute to is about creating the right climate and culture in your organisation. This requires thoughtful and carefully planned facilitation but there is a bit more to it than that. In this post I will cover some aspects of using forums
Mahara is an ePortfolio in which the default for all stored information is private. It makes a great “walled garden” for introducing students to the concepts of social and mobile networking as well as being a great learning tool for individuals and groups. The tool is seen by teachers and students alike as intuitive and