Short Online Taster Courses

Last week I participated in a Learning Tree ITL online taster course "Preparing for an ITIL v3 Implementation". I participated in this for two reasons the first was to see if there were any aspects of the ITL methodology that I could implement in our team's work, the second was to experience the online delivery. With respect to the implementation of ITL because there are correlations with the project management approach that we already apply which is a very simplified Prince 2 and the fact that we are currently trying articulate what services we provide, the course succeeded in reassuring me that we had already or are attempting to, integrated some of the ITL processes and considerations such as:

• providing clarity with respect to what are planning to deliver
• defining the service we are providing 
• asking the question whether we are doing what we said we were going to do
• providing milestones
• episodically reassessing our objectives and where we want to be 
• establishing metrics for measuring our service
• getting feedback on what we do

With respect to the eLearning participant experience. Firstly, as this was a taster I had managed my expectations with respect to what could be achieved in a couple of hours. The course was delivered using Adobe Connect, which I had used before and the interface and the set-up wizards are straight forward to use. Glitches with sound aka feedback were cleared up pretty quickly sound well done on that side. On my netbook I could control the presentation of the slides to taking over the full window but not the whole presentation interface was very small and there did not appear to be a facility to stretch or take over the full screen, so the participants pane was small and the chat box etc. With respect to hearing me, when I experienced a problem and used my microphone there did not appear to be any problems with audio on their side.. 

On the negative side I think there should have been more questions posed at points through out the presentation like JISC do, this made the taster a little transmissional. Putting this point to one side it is quite nice to have the opportunity to experience something before you decide to sign-up, and after attending some recent JISC webinars I think the webinar format is something that we could consider integrating into the range of services we offer. 

  

Research Methods Activity Design

This post relates to the previous one. As a result of running an activity workshop it has also led me to think that it would be useful to have a set of generic activity designs within our kit that we could refer to. This observation, also, aligns with our findings with respect activity design in research methods that I referred to a couple of months. Our team investigations found that we did not need to do a specific research methods version of an activity design workshop, that it would be useful to have a list of links for research methods resources (- maybe a Diigo group?) and refer colleagues to the generic activity designs that we develop, we could possibly put these in our learning repository. 

Activity Design

Within our team we have developed a workshop to help colleagues with designing online activities.  The approach that we take is that colleagues choose a face-to-face activity and create a plan for it noting

• Learning outcomes 
• Student tasks
• Tutor task
• Resources and tools

Then they consider how they would do this online using a plan with the same variables as above. And that is the workshop. We have very few slides it is mainly facilitated groupwork. However, we have found that the best way to facilitate this is to have somebody from my team sitting with the group providing advice on various aspects and to situate the workshop in programme or module planning to ensure authenticity, which really as a service that we offer.

Although it is early days we have found that activities can be generic and the subject content, resources, learning outcomes are the discipline specific components, the generic aspects means that we can introduce an open approach to activity design which influences the facilitation of the workshop. Facilitation involves getting academic colleagues to talk through what would be feasible taking into account student engagement, tool use (not too many, inducting students into use) and issues of parity with f2f not equivalence.  

ALTC 2011 - Resources

This is an overview of resources that were shared during ALTC-2011

• Enable Project Staffordshire University aims to embed coordination between projects within the university, to enable the development of new processes that will allow curriculum development to become more flexible and responsive.
• Cascade Project aimed to use technology to enable the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education to respond better to the challenges created by the government’s ELQ policy by enabling the Department to undertake its activities more efficiently, develop new, or repurpose existing, activities and augment the services currently offered to students.
• Google New Assessment Tool 
• VERiFy Project  aims to provide an innovative approach to the provision of feedback to learners in video form, accessed through personal computers and mobile telecommunications devices, encouraging learners to engage in a conversational framework by responding to feedback using video.  
• HELF Esubmission Survey

ATLC 2011 - Part 2 Assessment

Eassessment, specifically esubmission and emarking appeared to be hot topics at the ALT conference this year, which was really useful for me as we are focusing on this at our institution. 

The following papers stood out for me at the conference.

Visualising the holistic assessment experience – The use of Google tools to support effective design. Mark Kerrigan, Rita Headington, Simon Walker

This presentation demonstrated a development using google forms that tracked the assessment diet landscape, and illustrated assessment bloating, either too many assessments at the same time or too much of the same assessment. The reports provided

"displays assessment diet, landscape and importantly an experiential timeline. The timeline, based on a Google Motion Chart, interactively displays assessment periods, type and weighting concurrently for each course within a programme. Staff are then able to interact with the assessment parts of their programmes and see graphically, in real-time, the consequences of their design decisions. By linking this process to the face-to-face curriculum design workshops, staff are better informed about their programme’s design, thus permitting the evidential-based development of a supportive holistic curriculum that is aligned to both the staff and student experience and good assessment practice." (Kerrigan et. al 2011)



Managing Change in the Development of Sustainable Online Assessment PracticesAnn Liggett, Christopher Cramphorn

I should give this presentation a shout as it was from colleagues at NTU, and they did us proud. It provided an excellent overview with respect to the issues identified during piloting e-submission and e-marking. It clearly identified the processes and the roles and responsibilities of colleagues within the processes, as well as, providing an overview of the evaluation process. Again this presentation emphasised the importance of admin staff in the process. It, also, with respect to emarking, stated that the amount of time it takes to mark reduces with practice. The majority of students were in favour of esubmission, because it meant they did not have to queue, regarding e-marking they found the comments easier to understand/read than written comments. The presentation, also, noted that external examiners need to training in e-marking and that anonymising papers still posed a challenge.

Using Asynchronous Video and Mobile Technologies to Enhance Learner Engagement with Formative FeedbackJames McDowell

This presentation provided an overview of the project VERiFy which aimed to go beyond transmissional approaches to assessment feedback by introducing a conversational framework and using video "feedback loop system"
.
'has enabled the asynchronous exchange of video-feedback, facilitating a feed-forward conversation between learners and tutors around work-in-progress; a series of case-studies explores the learner and tutor experience of the intervention.' (McDowell 2011)


The project has also produced a repository of feedback objects, which provides another avenue for reusable objects. I was wondering in the next round of OER if any projects will focus on open assessment objects.


eSubmission – UK policies, practice and supportBarbara Newland, Lindsey Martin, Andy Ramsden

This presentation provided an overview of the Heads of Elearning eSubmission survey. It found the following

'Only 21% of institutions have an institution-wide policy on eSubmission with 18% have separate regulations and 24% included in existing regulations. The most common technologies used are Turnitin integrated within the VLE or the institutional VLE rather than “home-grown” technologies. Academic attitudes to eSubmission are more positive than those for eMarking and eFeedback. The variety of staff development includes 82% face to face and 82% how-to-guides with 58% providing online video/screencasts. Examples of good practice were identified as well as a range of issues...Effective eSubmission has the potential to increase efficiency in organisations by improving their business processes and eFeedback may enhance learning. The survey outcomes, sample guidelines and examples of good practice can inform institutional adoption and changes in policy and practice. (Newland et. al 2011)'


It was interesting to see that the majority of institutions surveyed did not have an institutional policy for e-submission.


Squaring the Triangle: Institutional Compliance, Academic Freedom and the Student VoiceAlice Bird



This presentation discussed students increasing involvement of students in policy at Liverpool John Moores University. LJMU have, also, piloted e-submission and have found that you cannot ignore marking and feedback when looking at esubmission. The presentation, stated that one challenge is that although institutions want e-submission not enough resources are being put into it.

ALTC 2011 - Strategy

Nearly 2 weeks late but not forgotten, my feedback on ALTC-2011 . I thought I would organise my blog according to specific categories that relate to my interests and what I was looking for at the conference. Before I go any further I would like to congratulate ALT for their excellent arrangements and hospitality. This conference goes from strength to strength, it attracts a very warm crowd of practitioners from various parts of the elearning world, who are willing to openly discuss and share best practice in a non-intimidating manner, which I think is really important.

Strategy:

Leadership in a cold climate. Leading where the past is no reliable guide to the future. A reflection on the strategic leadership of people, technology and institutions in UK HE. Ewart Wooldridge:
This presentation held back no punches with respect to how leadership should change to understand the potential of learning technologies. Wooldridge argued that institutions should move away from focusing on the operational aspects of technologies, to focusing on the strategic use, illustrating the shortcomings with respect to management and the exploitation of technology..He stated that leadership within universities should take a less adversarial and more collaborative approach. The great hoorah of the presentation for people based professional services was that Wooldridge said that he had banned the terms non-academic and back office, he could also clearly articulate the need for professional services in today's universities a contrast to this recent discussion in the THES with respect to changes at Northampton.



Not future-proofed but future-focused: graduate attributes and the digital universityNeil Witt, Helen Beetham

 Works at the University of Plymouth found that:


'while students have diverse preferences and expectations around technology use, there is a common need for consistency and clarity about digital practices at course level. Students want 24/7 access to course information and learning materials, but they also need opportunities for reflection and review of their own strategies for study. They value e-learning experiences where these are clearly relevant to their long-term goals, and they recognise the need for teaching staff whose own confidence and competence are high.' (from abstract)

They also, found that by improving admin processes they could improve student experience. The project, also, investigated the opportunities for e-submission. Successful initiatives, were online course payment, producing generic content and providing support via the VLE.

Improving Student Employability using Active Portfolio – the GWizards ApproachLachlan MacKinnon, Liz Bacon, Elaine Major

Mackinnon began with a challenging statement that the HE sector can only afford 4 research intensive universities. In this climate the University of Greenwich School of Computing and Mathematical sciences has initiated a project called GWizards that addresses the issue of student employability giving them the opportunity to be involved in real world projects. The project:

'seeks to re-engage the university with the local community. In particular, this involves working directly with all types of organisation to identify project activities of mutual benefit. This mutual benefit is determined by opportunities for students to gain experience in the workplace, organisations to gain practical technical help for little or no cost, and academic staff to gain project experience and publishing opportunities. To facilitate this process, CMS has developed credit bearing modules on its programmes that link to these employability opportunities, so students have the chance to follow directly relevant project work within their academic studies to earn academic credits for practical work, and also to be engaged in the management and control of these activities both internally and externally to the university within a student-run company structure.' (from abstract) 

It would be interesting to see if this could work in other disciplines.

Understanding the Development of Learning Technology Support Staff to Push Beyond MaturityJebar Ahmed 

This 5 year longitudinal study at the University of Huddersfield analysing VLE data and data from interviews found that:

'support strategies were initially capable of targeting large groups of teachers effectively via staff development workshops which led to an increase in the use of the VLE. Pushing beyond a level of maturity meant that LT support staff required additional skills to provide course teams with bespoke and specialised advice, an aspect often overlooked in strategic models. Once adoption of the VLE across the school had reached its peak' (Ahmed 2011)


Again emphasising the importance of strategic integrated approach to staff development when engaging academics in technology enhanced learning. The study found that support staff require technical and pedagogic skills. It argued that support staff personal development should include:


a) research on tools, techniques and trends; b) teaching and learning through courses such as a PGCE – Teaching Certificate and additional higher qualification' (Ahmed 2011)


I think the challenge with respect to PGCHE courses is making them flexible enough so that support staff can meet the assessment criteria if they are not full time teachers.

Students overwhelmed by surveys on feedback

I was interested in the overview in the THES in its article Efforts to secure feedback 'missing the mark' of the "Effective Course Evaluation Report" - The report found that:

• Many universities seeking feedback on courses and lecturers via surveys struggle to achieve a meaningful response from students.
• Student representatives have indicated that students are not effectively engaged in the feedback process and, for some, providing feedback can even be intimidating.
• Universities need to work harder at feeding back to students the actions they will
  be taking as a result of input provided for course and lecturer evaluation surveys.
• End-of-module evaluation is a particular stumbling block in the provision of feedback to students - and feedback can be slow - but moving to mid-module evaluation can help to improve the process.
• Ideally students want the opportunity to express their views on course improvements at a time that their feedback benefits them directly.
• Universities need to embrace new technologies to improve turnaround time - but effective feedback can be gained via a combination of paper and online surveys.
• Universities should establish a more consistent (centralised) approach to survey administration - including a standard set of survey questions - to enable effective benchmarking at course and institutional level.
• In-class student involvement in survey administration can increase commitment as they are stakeholders in the process.

Looking at these observations, I think the following are particularly important:

• the move to mid module evaluation 
• the involvement of students in survey administration
• more effective feedback on feedback  
• the need to embrace new technologies 

I think technology enhanced learning has something to offer here, with respect to course design and digital literacies. If evaluation feedback was integrated into course design this would establish a more proactive approach to gathering students's thoughts, if student's were involved in designing and delivering this process there is an opportunity here to develop their digital literacies, with respect to designing evaluative activities in an online environment whether this be surveys or qualitative approaches. However, my only concern is that focusing on a more centralised approach to survey administration may create a tension and may be slightly incongruous with this personalised approach, may be we need to be more creative with respect to coding feedback and establishing benchmarks.

ALTC Orientation

Just familiarising myself with the ALT-C site - and finally figured out how to load the short presentation I am doing with Anna Armstrong at Nottingham Trent University. For presenters who are still having difficulty finding the instructions on how to load your slides you may find the following extract from the guidelines useful:

A. Uploading your presentation to CrowdVine
CrowdVine is the networking site for ALT-C 2011. Its URL is http://altc2011.ac.uk/.
Some of you have already got accounts on CrowdVine, and, by mid to late July, all
conference delegates will be given active encouragement to create accounts.
There are two helpful things that you can do to help other delegates to get the most out of
your session and attract a wider audience.

Firstly, please use the “Calendar” tab to find your session on CrowdVine and sign up to
attend it. Please encourage fellow presenters to do likewise.

Secondly, if and when you have a PowerPoint or other presentation to share with
conference participants, please upload it to CrowdVine as a comment to the session in
which you are presenting. If you do this, please include in the covering note to the upload a
clear reference to the number of your presentation. This appears in bold font immediately
before the title of your presentation. It is typically a 2 or 3 digit number deriving from the four
digit unique ID by which your presentation has been identified throughout the submission,
reviewing and other processes.

For obvious reasons it is best to avoid uploading large files – say over 10 MB.
As an alternative you may wish to consider pointing instead to a URL elsewhere that
contains your presentation

If you want to attend our presentation it is on the last day 9-10 8th November 

0146 One Year On: Nottingham Trent University’s SHARE Project reflects on the challenge of engendering a digital sharing culture Vicki McGarvey, Anna Armstrong - It would be lovely to see you there. 

I will also put the slides on slide share. 

ALT - C 2011 Thriving in a colder and more challenging climate

So I have finally got on top of pulling all my ALT-C loose ends together, with respect to accommodation Crowdvine, profile etc. Just need to decide how to get to Leeds, plane, train, automobile etc. and to decide which events to attend. The dilemma of splitting time between presentations that link to my strategic professional roles and also, seeing new innovative developments. If I am lucky I may be able to catch both in one presentation!.

Research Methods and Open Activity Design

I know there has been quite a bit of exploratory work in the area of designing open activities, particularly by Diana Laurillard 

My team is currently investigating whether epistemological research methods approaches have specific learning activities or whether more general learning activities are used and the specificity sits with the integrated content and resources. The aim of this is to see if research methods need to have their own online activity sequences or whether we can reuse existing activity sequences. For example a common activity sequence for online research methods is:

• read article/overview etc.
• answer questions on the article/overview etc.
• share answers or reflect on what you have learnt

Now this activity sequence is very common in other subjects even though I still think it is quite a stretch for academics to acknowledge the generic nature of some of the learning and teaching they do. The only thing that differentiates the activity or defines it according to its discipline and level, is the embedded content and resources e.g. the article and questions. With respect to our research methods challenge we may need to dig further e.g. are probing questions structured in a particular way, are specific areas covered, what about activities for quantitative stuff e.g. statistics. Watch this space.

eLearning Developer Skills

As a manager in an eLearning development team I episodically review the skills required by colleagues in order for them to carry out their job confidently and competently. Googling this I was surprised how little there was out there to support managers in their task.  There were quite a few blogs out there asking the very question I am asking here - not much from professional organisations.  Maybe I should be turning this on its head and looking at eLearning skills in general rather than focusing on the role - or just take it after working 7 years in the area as a manager I pretty much know.

So here is my quick overview of the skills required:

A knowledge and understanding of:

• Learning and teaching approaches
• How to integrate learning technologies within learning and teaching
• Curriculum and course design
• Accessibility
• Copyright
• Current issues in learning and teaching and eLearning

Skills:

• Content creation and delivery e.g. VLEs; web skills; audio/video production social networking technologies; re-purposing content (I slipped this one in) -
• Training and support skills within context of learning and technology 
• Project management 
• Ability to work as part of a team as well as independently 
• Problem solving
• Proactive with respect to professional development  
• Articulate simply complex issues
• Presentation skills 
• Ability to communicate with individuals from different professional backgrounds
• Ability to work flexibly and to deadlines 
• Ability to prioritise work

And overall tenacity and enthusiasm.  There may be greater emphasis on some of the above depending on context, organisation's priorities and also the grade of the job - which is something managers need to bear in mind when writing a job description.

Is the VLE dead?

Well not at many institutions, including mine. I am presently taking an online course on preparing online courses and last week there has been robust discussion about learning environments. The main discussion was on the affordances of using discussions in VLEs and much was said about the additional tools that enable the management of discussions such as tracking, conditional release, summarising, archiving and the integration within learning and teaching. There were, also, some comments about VLE's being perceived as learning space where as other resources e.g. Facebook is seen as social space. I do think that these issues are worth of consideration but I do think that VLE vendors could do some work on interface design to make tools like discussions less clunky. The debate that was held on this course was done using a voicetool that was integrated into the discussion forum which was a new one for me and I really enjoyed using it, it was good to put a voice to a name. Although, I am aware that considerations with respect to accessibility have to be addressed and I did a whole masters course without to speaking to my fellow participants, it did help me to focus on my argument and the arguments of others.

Until we can fully integrate tools in the cloud with student management systems for large institutions I think the VLE will still remain a feature for some time. However, there are tools out there that can compliment the existing tools that are in institutional VLEs and will help to enhance the student experience, for example, we were referred to this site http://ltdufreeware.wordpress.com/ . Furthermore, institutions still have a challenge to skill-up staff using the most basic of tools in the average VLE and to get them thinking about new approaches to learning and teaching that can integrate technology, within the context of pressure to make full use of a system that has demanded a considerable amount of resources to maintain.

eLearning who are the learners?

I don't teach students I work in a support service, supporting staff with curriculum re-design with the respect to the integration of eLearning, so in this context who are the learners that I am influencing? Indirectly I am influencing the students at my institution as hopefully one of the main rationales for integrating technology is the enhancement of learning. However, this enhancement is dependent on the quality of the learning as a result of using technology. In order for this to be possible staff need to develop their technical and teaching skills to facilitate learning in an online context and that is my job, so really for me staff are the learners. These non-traditional learners, still have their anxieties relating to developing new skills and entering an unfamiliar territory together with a learning and teaching belief system that has developed as a result of being part of a learning and teaching and discipline community of practices. When taking on the development of this group the challenge is integrating learning and teaching beliefs whilst enabling them to move on to new territories. 

However, research in New Zealand has found that

"Having ongoing relationships with staff developers, and the ability for situated and flexible learning assistance was seen as desirable. It was through an ongoing relationship where help could be accessed on a needs basis that staff felt their learning and the development of courses, most benefited. " (Professional development: assuring quality in e-learning policy and practice Mansvelt et. al 2009 Quality Assurance in Education v17 Issue 3)

and this is a challenge when resources are limited within institutions and it is slightly incongruent with the approach to staff development which is often via training programmes with a calendar of events that staff book on to.

I am a constructivist learner and I feel that training is wasted when it cannot be immediately integrated into practice and I think this is the issue with much of staff development that is delivered in institutions, the movement from a skills tick box exercise to its integration into day-to-day learning and teaching is not persistently addressed. To face this challenge programme teams need to have a clear rationale for integrating technology within the curriculum, there should be identified support within schools and faculties, that can work with the centrally based staff development teams and there should be a realistic plan of implementation e.g. x programme will be using technology in this way for this reason by next year.

A resource to support content creation

In my current institution we are trying to replace 1:1 support for integrating technology in learning and teaching with self supporting online resources. This is quite a job as technology enhanced learning is a large area, we have created stuff and there is lots to repurpose out there. Differentiating between content creation and delivery is quite a challenge too and given that this is a sizeable resource in itself it needs to be constrained. The approach that we take when creating a resource is to cover:

• what 
• why 
• when 
• how

So with respect to the above, what, why and when will have some interrelationship as this covers the rationales and examples of best practice. The how relates to tools and also to an extent delivery. We are going to take an institutional perspective look at the etools we already have but we may want to look at stuff in the cloud and also, we want to include diy audio and video production, something that commonly gets raised by colleagues when we talk about creating online content. 

We have started off with a brainstorm to hone in on the areas we want to focus on and some of the issues we want to address - I used de Bono to help with this. As this is the project I will be overseeing I will use the blog to keep myself up-to-date with progress and you may find this interesting too!

Publish Post

OER11

Finally managed to blog in the NTUSHARE blog on this excellent event.

Online activity then technology or technology then online activity?

At team of us at work are designing a face-to-face workshop on designing online activities. Although the process has been quite lengthy as inevitably collaborative processes are, it is useful to get thoughts and illustrations from a group of individuals who have approached it from different angles.

We are all eLearning developers and have worked in the field for quite a few years, I came straight into eLearning as a manager and have predominantly managed technology implementation projects and course re-designs that integrate technology in learning and teaching e.g. new VLE and a Learning Repository. I finished a Masters in Education in eLearning (online part time) at Hull Uni last year, which gave me a good grounding in learning and teaching strategies and organisational issues. The online design and authoring I have been involved in has been using wysiwyg editors in blogs, google sites, wikis etc., in the cloud; Dreamweaver, Wimba, screencapturing software e.g. captivate and the whole range of tools in VLEs. The colleagues I manage have a broad range of multimedia online creation skills, as well as learning and teaching knowledge which compliments the team. Anyway to cut a very long technical story short when we undertake activities like this we always have the chicken and egg conversation is it technology then create activity, create activity then technology, I alway opt for the latter possibly because of the way I have been immersed in eLearning it seems to make more natural sense to think about the teaching first then see how the technology can enhance - but not for everyone. I am aware for others the technology is more interwoven with respect to what they can do in the learning and teaching e.g. we have a VLE what can I do with it and even though institutions emphasis is on learning and teaching when large proprietary systems are purchased it is possible that the sometimes the shift sometimes moves to how can these e-tools be integrated in teaching, so the innovation influences the practice.

So the question is - is there room for both approaches. When I am running a workshop I start from the learning and teaching perspective as this engages with culture of the group, however, sometimes we need to get the innovators testing the tools so that we can have the illustrations for the practice.

Why I am still at blogger

Saw this and I although we do use wordpress for NTUSHARE this is the reason why I suppose I chose blogger http://learning-rocks.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-im-still-at-blogger.html - blog from Learning Rocks: Why I'm still at blogger Dan Roddy.

Trials & tribulations of an online student

I am just about to complete a course on international students. It was a very intensive 4 week online course. On the positive side it had a good combination of activities and integrated content well. On the slightly negative side there were too many activities and readings for the allotted 4 learning hours per week. The structure for each week went something like:

• Audio overview of the weeks up and coming activities (and a reflection of the previous week after week one) - with transcript which ticks the inclusiveness box
• Essential reading and suggested additional reading
• Collaborative activity in the discussion forum collating outputs in a wiki e.g. short overview; table to complete on a given topic
• Additional discussion with the rest of the group on an issue; challenge; case study

All good online activities.

One of the problems is that this course took place over 2 bank holidays so people were popping in and out including me, which meant the groupwork did not work as well as it could. Maybe the organisers of the course should had thought about these exceptional circumstances in the planning, although, some of the participants were outside of the UK I think the our bank holidays inadvertently may have had an impact on them. It, also, meant that we all did not get to know each other as well as may have been expected, despite a good start with respect to sharing our profiles in the wiki.

The good thing is that the organisers are leaving the course open which will give me the opportunity to reflect on what I have learnt with respect to the subject of teaching international students. Despite the course being quite intense I have picked up quite a few ideas from my fellow participants which I think I could transfer into an online context so blog post on this to follow.

From an eLearning practitioner side to keep up your art of eLearning up-to-date I highly recommend regular doses of being an online student. It help you to get ideas on online activities but also you get the experience from the other side.

I have another online starting in June preparing courses for delivering online (I just wanted to see if I have missed a trick), a few of my colleagues are on that it will be interesting to see how this impacts on the dynamic of the group.

Challenge of Designing Openness Into eLearning Design

Over the last couple of years I have become increasingly interested in the OER movement, from the angle of getting resources that take away the anxieties with respect to reuse by licensing via Creative Commons but also how we can get teaching staff to design with openness in mind. For example at the institution where I work we have numerous of courses on research methods, end of year projects and project management. What are the commonalities with respect to design and delivery across these courses, what are the specific elements relating to subject discipline?


However, sadly it is unlikely that my team will be involved in nationally funded projects in the future because of capacity and the institutional senior management wants to devolve this engagement locally to schools, therefore my team will not be focusing solely on OER initiative, my professional challenge is to see how I can integrate openness into all our priorities within the team, and then disseminate.

Welcome

Welcome to my eLearning blog. This must be the 3rd personal blog I have started in about 7 years, so lets hope this is 4th time lucky.

I will be blogging on all issues relating to eLearning that are of interest to me and may be of interest to the wider community. Often resources arrive at my desktop via Twitter and RSS feeds so I thought a blog would be a good way share these too. At times I will, also, link up to the blog for NTUSHARE funded project I have just finished managing www.ntushare.org.and also my VickiMcGarvey twitter account.

With respect to moderating posts I am just deciding how to do this so be patient with me while I decide on this.