The Open University has taken the decision to adopt a suite of online tools provided freely for education by Google. In our first foray into cloud computing, Google will be hosting for our students:
email (gmail)
contacts
instant messaging and presence
calendar
document creation, storage and sharing
websites
All of our 200,000 or so students will be able to use the [...]
Categories: Announcements |
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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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Apple made available content from a few European universities for the first time on iTunes U this morning – including from the Open University. Our Vice Chancellor, Professor Brenda Gourley, said:
The iTunes U project is an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to Open University courses. [...]
Categories: Announcements |
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Our latest incarnation of Moodle was released this morning. New functionality includes:
Audio resources pages – enabling audio files traditionally distributed on CD/DVDs to be made available as mp3 files for download
New blog module – we found the existing Moodle blog too restrictive so have had a new system developed – this allows the setting [...]
Categories: Announcements, Moodle, OU VLE |
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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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The second edition of Horizons (PDF – 375k) is now out and about to hit every staff desk in the OU.
It includes an interview with OU VLE Programme sponsor, Pro Vice-Chancellor Prof. Denise Kirkpatrick, articles on the eassessment work, library search tools, the new audio recording tool, podcasting, and a course in the [...]
Categories: Announcements, OU VLE |
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This week saw the release of OU VLE v.2.0, the culmination of a lot of work by many people over the past few months. Highlights of this version (most of which will be made available in the main public version of Moodle, some already in Moodle v1.9) include:
A new audio recording module for short [...]
Categories: Announcements, OU VLE |
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Horizons, the first OU VLE Newsletter (PDF 2.77MB), will hit every OU member of staff’s desk next week. The articles include an interview with a course manager who likes the extra control she now has in editing her course website, a case study on wikis in a course on software requirements engineering, and details [...]
Categories: Announcements |
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After well over a year of having an official blog for the Open University Virtual Learning Environment Programme I’ve decided that blogging doesn’t work in that context – at least not for me. Having to present an institutional position inhibits the informality and spontaneity which appear to be some of the key features of [...]
Categories: Announcements |
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