TALL blog

It is that time of year again when we embark on our online course launches for another term.  We are offering 31 courses this term including our new courses in Literary theory and History of medicine, many are full, but there are still places on a lot – so if you would enjoy some intellectual stimulation in over the next couple of months and are interested in Archaeology, Art History, English literature, Creative Writing, History, or Philosophy do take a look at what is available.

Among our other record breaking recruitment this term we have also launched the Ancestral Voices course developed as part of the Mosaic project for the 3rd time, with the largest cohort yet – in fact our maximum of 32 students.

I am sure this is not statistically significant, but for us it is our first example of freely available content, and students who are still prepared to pay for the full tutored learning experience.   Definitely a good sign for persuading the Department to do more with OERs.

This term we have  a record breaking 1000+ students taking our online courses.   This is especially good in the face of the current economic climate, and  may be a consequence of it.  However I also think it is a great testament to the quality of our courses and the work of everyone in the Department and TALL.

It is  particularly  gratifying to see the high number of returning students, clearly a lot of people are having a good experience on  these courses, and one which they want to repeat.

We are taking enrollments for January already and will be offering two new courses, Literary Theory and our first ever 5 week course, Introduction to the History of Medicine, with new courses in creative writing, economics, literature, philosophy and history coming later in 2010.

After months of work we are finally launching our Ancestral voices: the earliest English literature course today with actual students!  This course has been developed using almost entirely existing content as part of the Mosaic project funded by JISC.  The course as a whole learning experience with tutor will be running for the next 10 weeks, and hopefully for many terms to come.  However as part of the Mosaic project, all the course materials will be made available more widely in the near future as well – more information about that to come.

Oxford University lectures are from 7 October available on iTunes U, which will make available a range of free audio and video podcasts from across the University. TALL have been heavily involved producing resources and overcoming technical and legal issues for the Department for Continuing Education ahead of today’s launch.

Continuing Education is one of the nine top-level ‘categories’ – here you can find presentations and lectures by both members of staff and guest lecturers, including Dr Anna Beer talking about the poet Milton and Chris Day giving an overview of the history of the University of Oxford.

The Department’s media resources are also available at http://media.conted.ox.ac.uk. All new resources will automatically be added to both these pages and iTunes U.

Further National press articles on the launch:

• BBC Online
• The Guardian
• Daily Telegraph
• Daily Mail

It used to be difficult to get good quality maps on a website – or at least long-winded and expensive finding them and purchasing a license, or clearing copyright.

In these Web 2.0 days it’s easy to get a good looking map on your website, and I’ve just done that for Vikings: raiders, traders and settlers (one of the 25+ online courses we’re running this term).

We provide simple maps with settlements marked and annotated, as well more complicated maps with tools to investigate the languages from which town names are derived, and detailed exploration of a town’s heritage of defense against the vikings 1000 years ago – still visible today!

Visit the Vikings maps pages to explore and learn about notable viking settlements through text, video and panoramic images, all linked up using the Google Maps API, blip.tv, and PanoSalado.

We are just in the middle of our termly  launch period for our online courses and it is looking like we are going to hit 700 students  this term, which is really amazing considering how recently we were pleased about having 100!

Most excitingly we are launching new courses in English Poetry of the First World War, Using the Victorian Census and Vikings: raiders, traders and settlers as well as the Postgraduate Diploma in Paediatric Infectious Diseases; developed in conjunction with the Medical Sciences Division here at Oxford.

The poetry course has been written by Sandie Byrne one of our most popular course authors and provides a great tie in with the exciting The Great War Archive project that our colleagues in OUCS are leading.

Developing the Victorian Census course has been an immense task, but I think we have created a great practical course to get people started with this amazing resource.  This course also provides access to Ancestry.com for the duration of the programme  which is probably worth the course fee on its own.

For the Vikings course we have done some really innovative work with Google Maps about which we will be writing some more about soon.

Lastly with the Paediatric Infectious Disease programme we have worked closely with the  learning technologies group in Medical sciences whose expertise in e-assessment has allowed us to include some great self assessment opportunities for the students.

I think our ability to launch four such varied new courses in the space of a month is a real testament to the work of the whole team and everyone at Continuing Education and the rest of the University who has made each course possible.

I have been looking at online resources on the pedagogy of online distance learning, and portals to accessible, free educational material. Some of them are a little disappointing. Many lead to broken links, or to chains of other lists of links, many of which turn out to be dead ends. Online resources for Anglo-Saxon culture and history, and Old English texts, however, have proliferated, and many are very good indeed. Catherine Ball’s website, formerly hosted by Georgetown, which I hoped to suggest that we incorporate, has gone, but Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English has a range of resources ideal for our purposes, and Dr Stuart Lee, of Oxford University Computing Services, has produced a wonderful and accessible online Old English coursepack , and has posted a lecture series as webcasts. There are also readings of Old English texts and a good selection of translations for comparing and contrasting, and some stunning photographs of artefacts and archaeological sites. The difficulty (aside from obtaining copyright permissions)will be in choosing between them. I hope that the authors of the sites I ask to include will see the value of bringing the information and teaching together, and making it freely available.

We are launching a number of Continuing Professional Development courses, this Autumn including 2 new courses.

24th September

Introduction to Electronics

Patient-Based Evidence (NEW)

1st October

Perl for Bioinformatics

22nd October

Key Concepts in Health Care for People Experiencing Homelessness

5th November

Effective Online Tutoring (NEW)

For more information on these courses or to enroll on a course visit http://cpd.conted.ox.ac.uk/

This autumn we are offering more short courses than ever before, including 7 new courses

10th September

Brontës (NEW)
Learning to Look at the Visual Arts
New Economic Powers
Study Skills

12th September

Jane Austen
Learning to Look at Western Architecture
Philosophy Gym
Political Philosophy

17th September

Exploring Roman Britain
Islamic Art and Architecture (NEW)
Victorian Fiction: an Introduction (NEW)

19th September

Contemporary British Fiction; an Introduction (NEW)
Critical Reading
Durer to Bruegel: Northern Renaissance Art c.1480-1580
Learning to look at Modern Art (NEW)
Philosophy of Religion
Reality, being and existence: An introduction to metaphysics

24th September

Philosophy of Mind
Theory of Knowledge (NEW)
Visual Arts of India

26th September

Playing God: an introduction to Bioethics (NEW)

For more information on these courses or to enrol on a course visit Online courses at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, email the online courses office or telephone +44 (0)1865 280974.