Archive for March, 2007

Phoebe at CAL ’07

Tuesday, March 27th, 2007

Liz Masterman is presenting Phoebe at CAL 07 – ‘Development, Disruption and Debate’ today, as part of a symposium, on Designing for Learning – revolution or evolution. Our paper is “Disrupt or co-opt? The role of a pedagogic planning tool in promoting effective design for learning.”

ContEd website Revamp

Monday, March 19th, 2007

TALL have been working with everyone in the department to develop a new and improved website for the Department for Continuing Education, our parent organisation at the University of Oxford.

The new site went live on 19th March 2007, and features:

  • improved course catalogue integration,
  • online enrolments,
  • a new visual design,
  • improved organisation,
  • lots of behind the scenes improvements.

Thanks to everyone in the department who made this possible.

Visit the new website at: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/.

Some real data on Web 2.0 use

Friday, March 16th, 2007

As part of the JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project we ran a survey to try to discover which online services people were using and in what manner. We were interested to find out which services were popular and if they were being used for work, for study or socially / for fun. The SPIRE project was originally looking into the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies in UK HE and FE for informal sharing but switched to a more Web 2.0 focus as it became clear that these types of services were already having an impact on the tertiary education sector. They also appear to be where most of the informal sharing and collaboration is currently taking place online.

The survey was advertised to the Department for Continuing Education’s online students and on the online courses marketing pages. We received circa 1400 responses which left us with a lot of data to analyse. I have processed this data in to a number of colorful charts which are in the PDF below.

I have already drawn a number of conclusions from these charts but have not included these thoughts in the PDF as I would be interested to know what others think the data might mean.

Results of the survey undertaken by the JISC funded SPIRE project (PDF)

For the full analysis of this data please download the final report here:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf

Pedagogy Experts Group

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

I have just got back from JISCs latest pedagogy experts meeting. Always a good place to find out more about things that are going on in eLearning (from a pedagogy perspective) either JISC funded or otherwise.

Had a very interesting discussion about the future of (e)assessment – I am looking forward to seeing some of the stuff coming out of this area, as whatever about massed mcq question banks I think that social software is going to completely change this space, but this presents a lot of challenges for the institution.

Also an interesting update on the SIMPLE project which looks like a really interesting example of simulations for learning.