Do you have a passion for mobile learning?
Come and join educators from across the county to raise awareness, share practice and build a community
Educators at all levels are taking advantage of the increasing ubiquity and capabilities of mobile devices and the opportunities they can create for student engagement and flexible, personalised and contextual learning. Devices like smartphones, tablets and handheld video cameras are being used in creative ways to open up the classroom and lecture theatre, as well as enabling staff development and research.
The Northants Mobile Conference is being hosted by the University, in partnership with Northampton College, MoleNET and the Northants Better Learning using Technologies (BLT) network. The event will include contributions from staff implementing mobile learning at all levels, from primary to higher education. If you have experience of using mobile technology for learning and teaching and you’d like to share your ideas, let us know on the sign-up form.
- When: 26 May 2011, 2-6 pm
- Where: The University of Northampton, Boughton Green Road
The E4L Project (e-Learning for Learners) gathered a series of themed and categorised video clips of learners talking about their experiences of using technology when they learn.
The case studies represent learners from adult and community learning, further and higher education undertaking a variety of different courses from various subjects. These clips last anything from 20 seconds to 3 minutes and provide short, sharp and sweet experiences and opinions from the learners that can be used educate and inspire other learners, tutors, developers, management, etc. For each of the clips there is the opportunity to leave comments and reflections and read those left by others.
The TIGER project (Transforming Interprofessional Groups through Educational Resources) will innovate by collecting, developing and sharing reusable, customisable Open Educational Resources (OERs) designed for Interprofessional Education (IPE) in Health and Social Care between the three institutions, academics, their existing communities of practice, employers and the wider community in line with expressed sector requirements.
Keep up to date with TIGER by following the blog at : http://tigeroer.wordpress.com
The Learning Future Festival will be taking place from the 13-15 April. This will be a 48 hour non-stop conference over three time zones. The TIGER project will be contributing on Thursday 14th April.
You may or may not be aware that there were issues with pasting text directly from Microsoft Word into text areas within NILE (including Announcements, and Items). Generally most formatting and font sizes were transferred over incorrectly, resulting in your content looking messy.
You can now paste directly from Word using the MashUp feature within any text editor in NILE!
Rather than using the usual button from the tool bar to paste text, click on the MashUps button and select ‘Paste from Word’.
On the next screen press Ctrl + V on your keyboard to paste the text. You may still need to adjust line spacing, but font sizes and types will be consistent throughout the text.
Click ‘Submit’ once you are happy with the text. You can then choose all the usual options for the Announcement or Item and Submit that too.
There have also been issues with embedding YouTube clips into your modules on NILE. These have now been resolved: the procedure has not changed. If you think this would be useful and want to know how, have a look at the Embedding External Content into NILE guide.
On 11th March, 2011, Rob Howe attended Institutional Strategies for OERs hosted by SCORE. [A video review of the day should be available in a few weeks]. The notes below represent some of the key ideas I picked up from presenters during the day.
Tom Browne (Exeter) suggested that re-engineering material for OERs was not scalable and that designing for openness should be integral to design and delivery. Development of OERs at present are focused on the supply side (i.e. releasing what we have available) – this is understandable. He contrasts this with OER Africa which is being demand driven (i.e. producing material which is needed). Mention was made of the Open Exeter repository and of the tension between developing OERs for marketing and those which are produced for use on the course. (It was noted the amount of material which was used from the web without permission).
Melissa Highton (Oxford)indicated that successful development of OERs should build on existing workflows and not take significant extra staff time. She mentioned that the recording of lectures (video or audio) was very popular and assisted the adoption of iTunesU. It was noted that audio downloads were 3 times more popular than video. Building of capacity should be achieved through staff development, understanding and cultural change. Melissa questioned whether the Non commercial side of Creative Commons was too restrictive and prevented some academic staff from contributing material. Understanding of Creative Commons was seen as an essential part of OER education and development.
Stephen Stapleton (Nottingham) was involved in the setting up of U-Now in 2007, the Berlin project and the current Open Nottingham project. He mentioned the value of podcasts from senior management to encourage the take up of the service. Various reasons were given for OER release:
- Social responsibility
- Excellence in education
- Promotional opportunities
- Internationalisation
- Cost effectiveness
He stated the success of encouraging the release of module handbooks and of flash lectures (e.g. Politics in 60 seconds).
Particular mention was made of Xpert which is an OER search tool.
Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (Cape Town) reported on the development of the Cape Town OpenContent initiative. There was a discussion of the need for quality / reputation and the fact that tutors were given permission to upload directly to the repository.
Willem van Valkenburg (Delft University) discussed their repository ocw.tudelft.nl and the development of flash lectures. He suggested that iTuneU was more marketing focused. He stated similar values of OER development as heard previously (eg quality, new students, reputation).
Various sites were mentioned during the day which may be useful resources:
