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 […]
Sally Jordan gave a workshop today on how to use the Intelligent Assessment Technologies system we’ve got plugged into our VLE to develop short text response questions. One example she gave (I’ve reworded it slightly): A raindrop falls vertically with constant speed. What can you tell from this about the forces acting on the raindrop? […]
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 […]
Initial feedback on the new Moodle gradebook is promising. Tutors on the Open University course SDK125 “Introducing health sciences: a case study approach” reported: Gradebook seems very useful, as I now get to view a list of all of my students results, without having to go into each of their StudentHome pages. It was also […]
This is a major issue for universities. Back-end integration work is carried out so that details of which courses students are signed up to and which lecturers/teachers/tutors are assigned to them are generally passed from the central systems to the VLE. There are other types of integration too such as passing assessment results from the […]
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 […]
Chris Jones and Anne Jelfs recently evaluated a two-week course called Moodling for Beginners which was carried out earlier this year with 80 Associate Lecturers (tutors) from the Open University (OU). The participants were from all faculties and all OU regions and nations. All but one completed the course. There was an 81% response rate […]
Some issues come up frequently in my travels around the Open University regions and nations. On Saturday I spoke to a lively bunch of tutors at Tulliallan Castle, North of the Border. The debate got fairly heated at one point when we strayed onto the topic of Scottish Independence and matters reserved for the Westminster […]