Today Jisc is releasing a new report: Learning Analytics in Higher Education: A review of UK and international practice (PDF). Drawing on eleven case studies, we examine why institutions are deploying learning analytics, and what the benefits are for learners. We also discuss the main data sources being drawn upon by institutions and the technical […]
Jisc today released a new report: Learning Analytics: the current state of play in UK higher and further education. It was written after a series of visits I made recently to universities and colleges across the UK which were known to be carrying out interesting work in learning analytics. I was inspired by campuses filled […]
Year on year use of online assessment is nearly doubling here at the OU. In the last year around half a million quizzes were delivered to students in our virtual learning environment using a combination of the Moodle quiz engine and the University’s in-house OpenMark system. The use of the e-assessement tools for summative purposes […]
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 […]
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 argument goes […]
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. Our […]
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 […]
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 includes features […]
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 Business […]
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 […]