On Friday, I attended an excellent event organised by JISC RSC London: Testing times: the future role of e-learning in Higher Education 26th Feb

testing times?

2010. 

The event coincided with a post on the UK Champ list asking for examples of ‘cashable efficiencies’ which sparked a host of indignant replies smugly expounding e-Learning ideology (’this isn’t about cost-cutting or replacing staff, etc.)  Of course, I’m not against these sentiments but it does rather miss the point. Read more …

FDTOM Graduates at House of Commons

It was a pleasure to attend reception at the House of Commons to congratulate the first graduates of a Foundation degree in Travel Operations  Management. This was a major milestone in a project co-ordinated by fdf (Foundation Degree Forward) involving 5 universities and the travel company TUI who employs all the first batch of graduate.

ULCC’s role in the project has been to provide the e-learning platform using Moodle and Mahara. We’ve customised the service so that it brands the interface to the student’s employer and university and provided support for the universities to develop a high quality online learning experience. Read more …

David Hooper, ULCC

Another packed event for Wonderland 2009 that saw some really inspirational keynote presentations and workshops covering a range of applications and concepts.

One presentation that struck me was given by ULCC’s new Web and e-Learning Services Manager, David Hooper, who gave a review of the year’s work.  A series of graphics illustrated the huge and exponential growth of customers, many of which are now becoming much larger.  We recently won contracts with a number of universities who prefer to have ULCC manage their Moodle hosting.

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There is a growing interest in students and learning providers making more use of Cloud technologies, in particular the services offered by Google Apps or Microsoft Live@EDU. With recent Moodle integrations released for both platforms I have been looking into how these work and what this means for providers who may be choosing to go with one or both options for their learners.

Why the Cloud?

The main benefits of using the cloud offering are predominantly that it saves money and resources. Students can be given lifelong emails and potentially link these with personal accounts and they have ‘always on’ access to a wide range of leading technologies supporting collaboration and communication. There is a challenge to IT departments who currently restrict access to such technologies on the whole as this will be taken out of their hands by outsourcing student spaces to the cloud.

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JISC InfoKit Lifelong e-Portfolios

Preparing for my presentation at the JISC PIOP Round 3 ITT event, gave me an opportunity to revisit portfolio interoperability as well as an opportunity to explore the new Mahara 1.2 version on our live site. Two new significant interoperability features were now available to Mahara:

1. LEAP2A Import/Export
2. Moodle Assignment/Outcome Integration

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The RA Courtyard

The Web and e-Learning team were seen lurking around Piccadilly last Monday, with small groups huddling over their Lattes and Espressos.  Instructions were to meet at the ‘Pret-a-Manger’ but intelligence had failed to spot there were several of them within yards of each other.  After dexterous use of technology we were able to synchronise directions to finally meet at the splendid Linnean Society of London where we were to spend our team ‘away day’.

Situated in the same block as the Royal Academy, the meeting room overlooked the courtyard housing the truly extraordinary sculpture by Anish Kapoor called Svayambh (Sanskrit meaning self-generated).  The Society provided an excellent venue to hold our meeting and we felt inspired to continue the great work in the very same rooms that would once echo with the voice of the great Charles Darwin delivering seminal works.
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'There have been many nights when I have ventured down corridors and polished staircases without encountering a single librarian' - Borges

I attended the JISC DepoST show and tell workshop yesterday at ULU. The event was a chance for various projects to share what they have been up to with the hope of informing future project programs. It was also a chance to explore collaboration where projects overlapped.

My colleague Richard Davis and I were there to show some of the work we have been doing with e-Prints and Moodle to support better management of CLA licensed materials. It was also an opportunity for me to learn something about the repository world.

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I attended a focus group at Kingston College to evaluate the enrolment process.  It was a mix of academic and support staff led by the facilitator Julia Rogerson.  Their first task in groups was to prioritise what they considered to be the key aims underlying enrolment.  It immediately struck me that this was a particularly useful exercise and one that most of the staff involved had never done before.  What quickly became clear was that people’s role and responsibility in the enrolment process coupled with what decisions they’ve been asked to make determines very different key aims.  Read more …

September is very busy; trying to get things ready, and finding out where things have gone wrong just at thelast moment.  Keep hold of the relaxed holiday mood longer with our useful Moodle Admin planner.  Last year, I asked some Aministrators what we should be thinking about.  lThe following was kindly sent by Ian Davis, e-Learning Development Coordinator at Orpington College:

“At the start of the year, I concentrate on helping teaching staff make preparations for the start of teaching. This may involve training and troubleshooting MOODLE problems often on a one to one basis. I send the follwing email to all staff before teaching begins to help them prepare”

Take a look at Ian’s table below and repurpose for your own requirements.  Let me know if you think we should add anything, or perhaps processes that should be looked after by someone else:

Task

1. Unenrol old students
2. Spring clean course e.g. check for broken web links, reset the course etc.
3. Upload schemes of work / teaching schedules / other course information etc.
4. Plan for induction / How will include this in your learner’s induction
5. Check on minimum content criterion and whether you meet it
6. Ensure that all students are enrolled on your course
7. Set course targets for end of year
8. Explore and implement course development ideas
9. Identified requirements for next year

Useful to consider what, if anything, from above are tasks that they can do unsupported, or is it worth running some workshops to help staff achieve success.

Marc Loewenthal

1. What is your role?
I’m the E-learning coordinator at Brent Adult and community Education Service.  This mainly involves administering learn.brent, which is our moodle site, and training teachers to use it.

In addition, I also train teachers to use our whiteboards and help and advise them on using technology effectively in their teaching.

Read more …