Theory and Practice of Online Learning

Athabasca University offers a 2004 handbook on a Creative Commons license.

"a wonderfully perceptive and complete guide to the theory and practice of online learning." Sir John Daniel, Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO

Anderson, T. and F. Elloumi, Eds. (2004). Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca, Athabasca University.

Webconference & web-presence

In a meeting with Erik Duval last week, he introduced me and my colleagues to two interesting tools that are being developed at the Centre for New Media at the Open University in the UK. These tools are being developed in support of e-learning activiteis. Both tools are developed in Flash, and are therefore platform-independent. All you need is a recent browser, Flash-player 7 (or higher), and a webcam, microphone and speakers/headphones.

• Hexagon is a web-presence tool that allows a number of (international) users to be in virtual rooms and see who else is present.
  
• Flashmeeting is a full-fletched web-meeting tool, that combines audio/video-conferencing, with text-chat, URL-sharing and voting options. One can also choose to have the web-meeting recorded, and then have it stored on a server for later playback.

Neat stuff.

Strategic use of e-Learning in higer education

On the European-Commission-financed portal site elearningeuropa.info there is an interesing interview with dr. Tony Bates about the strategic use of eLearning in higher education.

Predictions for 2005

Always nice to read what specialists predict for the coming year:

- Last year Stephen Downes was tempted into predictions for 2004: "2004: the turning point"
- Recently, he reviewed his predictions in "2004 in the rear view mirror"

- Also this year, he attempts a prediction, albeit in the Lisa Neal's column in eLearn magazine

- A Dutch-language prediction for 2005 can be found in Wilfred Rubens' weblog: "Hoe zal e-learning zich in 2005 ontwikkelen?"

About blogging and RSS

In the Elise course, I have learned about (we)blogging, Wiki and RSS as possibly interesting technologies for e-learning.

RSS
Since that course module, I have installed Mozilla's Firefox as my default browser, partly because it is non-Microsoft and it allows 'tabbed' browsing, but mainly because it integrates RSS-functionailty in the form of 'Live bookmarks'. This means that the 10 most recent RSS-feeds are available from a pull-down menu.

I have also replaced Netscape Messenger by Mozilla's Thunderbird, for similar reasons. The RSS-feeds in Thunderbird are treated like e-mails, which allows one to store them locally, search them, and use them as a personal knowledge base.

The advantage of RSS - dubbed by some as the 'Next killer app for education' - has the advantage that each individual Internet-user can subscribe to content that he is interested in, without having to go look for it. For example, I keep track of what is happening at my old university, what is happening in my region of the country, etc. Even commercial information aggregation services, such as My Yahoo! now allow one to add RSS feeds to your personal pages, thus allowing you to keep track of your information, even when you're using a public computer.

(We)blog
(We)blogging is a technology (or a service) that allows you to write your personal online diary. You can use a weblog to share personal thoughts, poetry, pictures (so-called photo-blogs) or even audio (so-called podcasting). Even serious media, such as the quality newspaper 'De Standaard' have a weblog. There is quite some interest for the educational use of weblogging, for example for student portfolios.

(We)blogging and RSS are often combined, thus allowing one to keep track of people's personal thoughts or interesting discoveries. A landmark in this area is Stephen Downes's site.

Well, that's it for now.

Networking

First of all: Best wishes for 2005!

Spent a large part of the past few days further developing my network within the LinkedIn environment. LinkedIn is an online service that allows you to connect to people that you know, have worked with or are working with. The larger your 'virtual' network becomes, the more opportunities you have of finding people who are doing relevant work (either in research, consultancy or implementation) that could be of interest to you.
Check it out! It's free.

New eLearning projects

Most of the week, I have been preparing for the new eLearning R&D projects that will be starting in January 2005:

• "REVE - Real Virtual Erasmus", co-ordinated by Europace.
  

• "Victorious - Virtual Curricula Through Reliable InterOperating University Systems", co-ordinated by the Coimbra Group of universities.

• "e-LERU, creation of a virtual LERU campus", co-ordinated by the League of European Research Universities.

• And finally, "EUREA - European Meta databases of E-Academic resources", also co-ordinated by the League of European Research Universities.

My department is partner in each of the 4 projects. The first three projects will be co-financed by the eLearning programme of the European Commission, whereas the fourth will be co-financed within the eContent programme.

We're also interviewing people who will be working as research assistants in these projects.

Interesting sites and references

Done some surfing yesterday and today and came up with some interesting sites:

• Instructional Design Models, a comprehensive overview of different models of instructional design.
• An interesting book by some of people at OU in the Netherlands: Integrated e-Learning: Implications for Pedagogy, Technology and Organization
• Finally, I also got my hands on a paper bij Van Merriënboer, with his model of the four-component instructional design system. Hope I find time to read it.
  

Commercial vs. OpenSource (bis)

Earlier I reported that one of the Flemish Universities decided to move from BlackBoard to Dokeos. This week, also the students at my own University decided that the current BlackBoard implementation just isn't good enough. In the students' weekly magazine, they argue for a profoud evaluation of the current system, ans they are especially concerned with a) some aspects of user-friendliness of the interface, b) the link with external dabases, and c) the 'inappropriate use' of the environment by teaching staff. You can find the (dutch) text of the article here.
To be continued, I guess (and secretly hope)...

Commercial vs. OpenSource DLE

Within the framework of the Elise e-learning course that I am taking this fall, I had an interesting discussion on the choice between proprietary commercial software for digital learning environments (e.g. BlackBoard, WebCT) versus OpenSource solutions (e.g. Dokeos, Moodle).

It turns out that one of the Flemish universities decided to fully move from BlackBoard to Dokeos next year.



The reasons for this move are enumerated in this (dutch) pdf report. The reasons are related to (1) the expensive licencing policy of BlackBoard, (2) the relative ease of integration with existing administrative systems, (3) the possibilities of extension (e.g with an e-portfolio) and customisation, (4) the use of IMS and SCORM standards.

Such a decision seems to reflect a gradual shift away from commercial systems such as WebCT, as suggested in this article, which I found this article in Stephen Downes' blog. The conclusion from the article is the following:

With so many comparable open source softwares [OSS] emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT, one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive? In the case of WebCT, the short answer to this is - possibly two years. If, as has been suggested, the vendor will no longer support earlier versions than Vista after 2006, it will either gather massive upgrade payments from many of its clients in the interim, or will lose them altogether to the new OSS systems. So is this WebCT's last attempt to make large amounts of money in the face of the growing OSS challenge, its “last hurrah?”

Interesting discussion...

Students of applied economy

This afternoon, I met with a couple of final-year students of applied economy here at Leuven university. For a course on English language skills, these students are organising a workshop on e-learning and its business potential.

I tried to point out that there is no simple economic rule about:

• What is the added value of eLearning as opposed to face-to-face learning
• How to do a cost/benefit analysis of eLearning
• How to motivate learners in companies to use eLearning

I am afraid that I kind of overwhelmed them with a flood of information. I did send a mail afterwards with some links that might be of interest to them:

• A good book on eLearning:
  

  Theory and Practice of Online Learning:
  
  http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/index.html

• An interesting Dutch website about eLearning:
  

  http://www.e-learningplaza.nl/

• The website of the Flemish government's program for online learning: http://www.bisonline.be/
  
  

Hope they can find an interesting focus for their workshop.

Stievie

Opening blog message

Dear reader,

This is the first post to my weblog.
I want to briefly explain what the point of this blog is.
I am a researcher in eLearning at




I have worked in other areas of research before, but e-Learning is a new field for me. That is why I decided to take a course, and I stumbled on Elise, a European project testing eLearning for in-service training of teachers.
One of the courses that was developed in Elise was an online course on e-learning offered by the post-graduate teacher training centre at our University.

During this course, I learned about the existence of Weblogs, and decided that
"I needed to get one of those for myself too."

Why did I set up a weblog for myself - you may ask?

Well, my memory has not been very good of late, and I meet with incredibly many new ideas and concepts in the course of this job, that I need a tool to support "ze little grrey cells".

My intention with this blog is therefore to
Attempt to record my experiences with and new knowledge of eLearning.