Build Your Course Online - The Blog

Got a note today from Emma Taylor who’s working with AccreditedOnlineColleges.com.

She asked:
“My name is Emma, and I’m writing in regards to your site. I’m currently working with Accreditedonlinecolleges.com, and we recently published an article entitled “10 Latest E-Learning Trends in K-12 Education”.

“If you find this resource would be of interest to your audience, please feel free to share it with them at your discretion.

“Either way, I’m glad to have come across your blog. If there’s anything else on our site that interests you, please feel free to let me know. Thanks again for the great content!

“Sincerely,

“Emma Taylor”

Here’s the link:  http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/10-latest-e-learning-trends-in-k-12-education/

Here’s a window onto the page. Let us know what you think:

claude

This is the third posting in a series of three sparked by a question posted to the E-Learning 2.0 group on LinkedIn.

Caveat: Anything I say about pricing and numbers of seats is subject to change by manufacturers without notice.

First off, there are quite a few good web conferencing platforms out their with free trials, free versions, or are actually open source.

You can read one of the many top 10 lists about them here:

http://tomuse.com/top-10-free-web-conference-services/

My personal experience, having tried a lot of these is that for most active learning or teaming uses of an LMS/web conferencing combination, you’ll end up paying something for the number of seats you need in the web conferencing tool.

That’s because the biggest constraint on numbers of seats for the freebies (not counting the fact that the free trials expire) is that they don’t give you a lot of seats for free.

But there are some pretty reasonably priced, quality solutions.
Read the rest of this entry »

As I said in the previous posting, the last post, this one and the next one were sparked by a question posted to the E-Learning 2.0 group on LinkedIn. (Since those groups are access controlled, for the sake of anonymity I will call the person asking the question Sally Cider.)

Sally Cider who got me started thinking about this runs her own training company and she wants to add e-learning to the mix. She innocently asked her own IT guy about using Moodle but quickly ran into resistance. There could be several reasons for this.

First, there is nothing wrong with Moodle. But there could be some technical issues her IT guy is aware of that need to be addressed. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the professional groups I belong to on LinkedIn, one of my favorites is the E-Learning 2.0 group.

Recently group member asked a very interesting question of the group in a quest for solving the always challenging issue of how to add e-learning to an existing training or educational program.

For reasons completely unfathomable to me, I have a lot to say on this subject. (Maybe its because this is how I’ve been making my living for the last 20 years.) Ha, ha!!!

But seriously, my company FutureU was launched back in 1998 specifically to answer this question and we’ve been at it ever sense with clients ranging from the American Hospital Association to the NASA Astrobiology Institute, from Pacific Bell to Fujitsu America, from Dominican University of California to Missouri State University, from Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico to King Abdul-aziz University in Saudi Arabia, to name a few.

So I decided to post my suggestions to my “Build Your Course Online” blog then share a link to it with the group. That gives me double the traction for half the work (I know it may be seen by some as cheating, but I don’t have a marketing staff, so I must get as much function as I can out of everything I do, to keep up with the demands of maintaining a social media presence).

I’m not the only one with some good ideas about this though, so if you have a LinkedIn account, jump on over to the e-learning 2.0 group to see what other people have to say.

My first caution is to take an organized approach. Use a simplified design cycle model to start with. I prefer the simple 4D’s model I developed for working with my own clients:

1. Discovery (learn everything you can about the initiative your planning; what’s gone on before; what are the features you think you’ll need; and so forth.)
2. Design (run some pilot testing of “bench models” you design that you think will meet your needs. For LMSs that could include actual pilot courses within the software. Many vendors will support this.).
3. Development (with everthing you learned up to this point, prepare for roll out. get the hardware and software into place or finalize the arrangements with the hosting partner. have some volunteers do real work in the environment to make sure evrything seems to be working)
3. Delivery (hold a launch event for the benefit of both your people and your customers, keep track of any problems that arise, collect feed back on how things are going on a regular basis, after a sufficient time period, conduct an evaluation and identify what needs to be dropped, changed or added).

Next post: Let’s talk a bit about IT resistence.

Moodle 1.9 Testing and Assessment by Jason Myrick. PackT, 2010.

[Visit PackT to learn more about this book or purchase from Amazon by clicking on the image at the right.]

The author of this book, Jason Myrick, is another expert level user of Moodle. He calls what he’s done here a "book that contain[s] the basics." But he is far too modest. Beyond being a manual on how to use the assessment features of Moodle 1.9, it is also a basic introduction to testing and assessment.

The old fashioned seat-of-the pants way of creating, administering, grading, and recording the grades from educational assessments feels to most teachers like something everyone is born knowing.

But, needless to say, that’s not the case. Understanding when to use the various assessment alternatives we have to choose from isn’t difficult, but it IS complex.

What You Will Learn

A careful study of this book will help you learn to:

Read the rest of this entry »

Each of the books we’ve reviewed so far include expert tips about using the tools within Moodle from people who have advanced knowledge about Moodle. Here is another.

Moodle Teaching Techniques: Creative ways to use Moodle for constructing online learning solutions by William Rice, Pack-T, 2007.

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques: Creative ways to build powerful and effective online courses by William Rice and Susan Smith Nash, Pack-T, 2010.

In the previous posting, we reviewed two editions of William Rice’s books on using Moodle, written primarily for beginners to Moodle and/or beginners to teaching online. As with those two books, these two are essentially the same book. Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques is also Read the rest of this entry »

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development – A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle by William Rice, PackT, 2006.

Moodle 1.9: E-Learning Course Development – A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle 1.9 by William Rice, PackT, 2008.

These are almost the same book. Rice wrote the first one a year after Cole’s Using Moodle, reviewed in the previous posting.

For the purposes of this review, I will focus mainly on the 2008 edition that is Read the rest of this entry »

Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole. O’Reilly, 2005.

Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole and Helen Foster. O’Reilly, 2007.

As far as I know, Jason Cole’s 2005 edition of Using Moodle, was the very first book about Moodle. My comments here are based on the latest release of that original book, circa 2007.

Jason is a long-time member of the Moodle community and he seems to have done a great job of gathering the early folk wisdom of community members into a well organized, unofficial Moodle manual. In this second edition he is assisted by Helen Foster in updating everything. Overall, it’s the same great book as the original.

Using Moodle assumes you are a teacher and that someone else will provide you with the technical Read the rest of this entry »

Martin Dougiamas is the founding developer of Moodle, the development team leader and prime mover behind the Moodle community.

While doing his graduate studies, his school installed WebCT, one of the early LMS platforms. Dougiamas was frustrated that the software’s intellectual property restrictions prevented him from enhancing the system. This is one of the major drawbacks to all commercial LMS systems. You are at the mercy of the company’s own development schedule and team and while you can make feature requests, you can only hope that your’s will be the chosen few implemented in the near future.

Because of this drawback, Martin began developing his own online learning and teaching tools and even before he Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to move on to a few book reviews that will help you make the most of the Moodle LMS. But first a look back at what we’ve said about Moodle so far, a couple of links to possible sources of free Moodle space, and an introduction to the founder of Moodle, Martin Dougiamas, with an explanation of why that is important.

Looking Back

In previous postings, I’ve argued that you don’t need an LMS but that if you’d like to use one, there are several to choose from that don’t cost an arm and a leg. I mentioned Moodle in that list and because it is the world’s most Read the rest of this entry »