Much of the criticism levelled at virtual learning environments / learning management systems relates to the control of the environment by the institution rather than the learner. The individual student has minimal ability to upload their own content or to set up collaborative tools unless this has been pre-ordained by the institution. The [...]
Categories: Announcements, Architecture, Collaboration, Moodle, OU VLE, Web 2.0 |
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I’ve been attending the Elluminati Community Conference today which gave me the opportunity to be both a speaker and a delegate, very similar roles to those of teacher and student. During one of the other presentations by Kimberly Gates, I realised that my use of Elluminate for my “class” left something to be desired.
Kimberly’s [...]
Categories: Collaboration |
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Warning: do not read this unless you are obsessively interested in twitter and have nothing better to do with your time.
I’ve been stimulated into thinking about this by various sites I’ve seen recently which measure your online connectedness – plus some tweets and blog postings by Tony Hirst. Some of these [...]
Categories: Collaboration |
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Socialisation is generally considered to be a necessary or at least useful precursor to effective participation in online classes. It forms stage 2 in Gilly Salmon’s widely applied five-stage model. I’ve been thinking about this since I asked her in, I think, 2000 if she thought online classes ran better if the people [...]
Categories: Collaboration |
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Cath Wilkins, an Open University Associate Lecturer among her other jobs, gave an interesting presentation this morning at the Teaching Mathematics with Online Tutorials conference. I’ve reported before on the Elluminate maths trials at the OU. She teaches on the OU MSc Programme which has 500 students actively studying on it and [...]
Categories: Collaboration |
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A press release yesterday announces the selection of Elluminate for our synchronous desktop collaboration and communication requirements. This comes after a lengthy procurement process in which 14 vendors submitted tenders. Elluminate scored the highest on our educational and technical criteria. Our evaluation team think the product is particularly well-suited for distance education and [...]
Categories: Announcements, Collaboration, Moodle, OU VLE |
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Videoconferencing has been around for a long time now and its educational potential has been exploited in many ways. Telepresence is videoconferencing on steroids and gives the impression that the people you’re speaking to remotely really are sitting on the other side of the same table. I tried this out in a meeting [...]
Categories: Collaboration |
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Our Maths, Computing and Technology Faculty has been running trials with Elluminate, a suite of synchronous collaboration tools, on a range of mainly maths courses. Ben Mestel reported last week on the work he’s been coordinating on this with colleagues Tim Lowe, Gaynor Arrowsmith and Gareth Williams. Elluminate, is being deployed for a [...]
Categories: Collaboration |
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