Archive for the ‘e-learning’ Category


October 14th, 2009

World Digital Library – Potentially the most exciting e-learning resource

Publically launched in April 2009, the World Digital Library (WDL) is easily the most exciting e-learning tool on the web. It exemplifies what Web 3.0 is about and its power to transcend geographical boundaries and reach global audiences promoting cross-cultural awareness and understanding.

Developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress in partnership with UNESCO, WDL makes available on the Internet significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. The digital library contains materials from over two-dozen libraries around the world, searchable in 7 different languages. The library will continue to add content and will be the largest collection of the world’s cultural riches that would tell the stories and highlight the achievements of all countries and cultures.

The digital library makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site. One of its many exciting features includes multiple forms of search and browsing capabilities that allows items to be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities.

wdl
Home Page – Interactive Search Browser

The library’s cultural treasures include manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings and more. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Even with its current limited range of resources, it can easily be seen that the library has the potential to transform teaching – learning in a classroom. The variety of literary resources that will be available to seekers of information can have wide implications for collaborative learning (including international collaborative learning between grades) and in bringing multiculturalism and the real world into the classroom.

Thank you Nancy, for bringing this to our attention.

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Posted in Education, Internationalism, Learner centric teaching, Web 3.0, e-learning | 1 Comment »

September 16th, 2009

Innovation in educational technology. Why not?

The size of the global education industry, defined as all the money spent by governments, individuals, and corporations on education and training, is almost three times the size of the global entertainment industry, and double the size of the global telecommunications industry.

So why do technical innovations in education feel like hand-me-downs? What is it about education, or educators, that make this industry so relatively sparse of innovation? Some of the obvious answers are it’s hard to sell new technologies when they’re being bought by non-profits and government entities. Or, educators’ grip on traditional methods is too tight. Or, investors don’t like the education market because they don’t understand it.

However, the real answers may lie elsewhere.

One of the reasons for the adoption of technology in education being low is because education is more complex than either entertainment or communications. If you’re educating well, you are both communicating and entertaining as you go. So it follows that education technology should borrow heavily from both these fields and should essentially be an integration of components that both communicate and entertain.

However, the integration of technologies into education requires the developer of education technology systems to understand the learning process and the teaching process inside out. People who know what makes learning work and why? What makes learning exciting, interesting, rewarding? People who by their training in education and interest in curriculum, understand the theoretical underpinnings of how education carried by technology should be framed and delivered.

Experts with these qualities are hard to find as education as an industry is full of people who are content experts, and severely lacks people who are learning experts or more specifically, learner experts who really get the whole process, and are passionate about it, from the learner’s perspective. The technical sector too is dominated by people who are technical experts but understand little about the teaching learning process.

One of the implications of this is that for technology to start playing a bigger role in education, it would have to move beyond the bits and pieces role that it currently plays and create products that reflect how learning is achieved instead of just the delivery aspect of education/curriculum.

This blog borrows from the views given here.

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Posted in Education, Learner centric teaching, Technology in Education, e-learning | No Comments »

August 27th, 2009

Online education – Will it revolutionise delivery of education?

A recent study on online education for the US Department of Education has concluded that “On average, students in online learning conditions perform better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The study was based on comparative research from 1996 – 2008; some of which was in the K-12 settings. The analysts found that, on average, students doing some or all of their courses online ranked in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile.

The difference in performance although modest is statistically significant. As per Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist “The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction”.

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line long-distance courses. In the more recent past, universities (especially in the developed countries) have adapted their in-class teaching material and made it available in online format (some of it for free or nominal cost). Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, but that is mostly used for posting assignments, reading lists, class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.

While initial attempts in e-learning were not inspiring, the pace of progress has been rapid and encouraging. Enhancements in digital software, e-learning tools and learning management platforms have changed the quality and utility of online education. The arrival of social media, Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools have radically altered the way participants of the online education environment interact with and learn from each other. The absence of collaboration and interaction, which had traditionally been the main drawback of online education is in-fact now posed to be its fundamental source of strength; as online education has the potential of providing an enriching collaborative environment by bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

So, what are the implications of this for in-class education?

The development of online education is expected to evolve fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology which will create new and innovative learning communities among students. The real promise of online education is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms and enabling more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.

Online education is already showing healthy trends in freeing education from the four walls of the classroom; and can be expected to increasingly take things out of the classroom. It is not entirely inconceivable that, in the not so very distant future, technology will be able to simulate a classroom environment – while contributing significant benefits of its own – which would make the physical presence of a school a thing of past. If this were to happen, the first casualties would be the less than “A” grade teachers and educational institutions.

For another perspective on this topic, see my blog dated June 12, 2009

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Posted in Education, News, Technology in Education, e-learning | No Comments »

July 16th, 2009

Timelines: A powerful educational tool

A timeline is a representation of a sequence of events, also referred to as a chronology. In general, it is a graphical data visualization of events over time, with events displayed according to when they occurred.

Timelines are an important educational tool that is often used by students to graphically plot events and trends in various subjects. A few examples where timelines play an important role in learning are:

  • history (significant events over time)
  • biology (evolution of the human race)
  • geology (timing and relationships between events during the evolution of Earth)
  • biographies (milestones in a person’s life)

In addition to being a useful tool for analysing historical chronological events, timelines have equally important forward looking applications. In this Avatar, timelines are a planning tool. In education, they can take the following form:

  • Timetables (prepared by students, teachers and schools)
  • Study plans (prepared by students)
  • Lesson plan (prepared by teachers)
  • Project plan (prepared by project team)
  • School action plan (prepared by administrators)

Computers and Internet have made available a number of simple, easy to use tools that can be used for preparing timelines. These range from day to day suite applications like Excel and PowerPoint to customised softwares’ which are capable of producing very appealing and specific representations. Excel in particular is a handy tool for performing date calculations and has drawing and graphical tools that make timelines a breeze. An example of how Excel can be used to prepare a timeline is given here.

The web also has some free to use applications that are capable of making utility timelines with relative ease. One such web based application is `xtimeline` that allows pictures and videos to be uploaded onto the timeline. The programme also permits additional detail to be added to each of the plotted dates, which can be reviewed by clicking on the date (and which takes the user to a separate screen). One neat feature of this programme, that I find very useful, is that the graphical timeline can be embedded onto a website or a blog.

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Posted in Learner centric teaching, Technology in Education, e-learning | No Comments »

May 26th, 2009

e-learning: Key findings of a UK study

IMC (UK) Learning Ltd, in its recently released  (June 2009) study into the attitudes of university academic and operational staff to e-learning, has reported the following findings (the full report can be downloaded here).  

• Nearly eight in ten (79%) respondents agree that e-learning increases flexible and repeated access to learning content, whereas only 27% agree e-learning saves money and 18% agree it saves time for teaching staff

• For those who use e-learning, the figures increase significantly with nearly nine in ten (88%) agreeing that e-learning increases flexible and repeated access to learning content, 40% agreeing it saves money and just over a quarter (27%) agreeing it saves time for teaching staff

• When asked which e-learning tools, if any, respondents’ universities use, 35% stated off-the-shelf e-learning content compared with 53% who use bespoke e-learning content. Three quarters (74%) use a virtual learning environment and four in ten (39%) use an e-learning ‘lecture/presentation capture tool’

• Less than one in five (16%) respondents currently record their lectures, with only 14% publishing these to a virtual learning environment

• For those who recorded lectures, 21% used video, audio and screen capture, 13% audio only and 4% video only

• Of those who use e-learning, three in ten (31%) found automatic synchronisation of recorded data and a combination of video, audio and annotation useful. Other useful features included different output formats (29%), editing content without data loss (21%) and ‘one-click’ publishing to a virtual learning environment (19%)

• Less than one in ten (9%) respondents always/frequently post-edit recorded lectures while just over one in five (22%) always/frequently add questions or documents to recorded lectures

• When it comes to ease of use, only 15% of respondents agreed that their lecture recording system was very/quite easy to use (77% responded as not applicable / dont know)

• Nearly half (48%) of respondents who use e-learning agreed that it is very/quite popular amongst students compared to just 37% of the whole sample.

Source: Study by IMC Advanced Learning Solutions – ‘Examining e-learning in higher education: perceptions and reality’. 

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Posted in Education, e-learning | 1 Comment »

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