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By slambert | Published: March 25, 2011

Thanks to the staff who took the time to read the eLearning stories and post comments. These have all been incorporated into the Business Requirements document for UOWs next set of “Academic eTools” to replace the functions of the current LMS. See the intranet site for latest information on where the project is up to.

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Access to eReadings and short loans Library lists

By slambert | Published: August 20, 2010

Just some feedback for the eLearning project regarding access to ereadings/short loans Library lists. The current eLearning site has the ability to powerlink to Library course reading lists dependent on the subject code. Using this code it will pick up all instances of course material regardless of location (Bega, Shoal etc) and format (@ereadings or Short Loans).
A new eLearning system would need to have this same powerlinking function.
Some science subjects are known to students as SBSC, but will still link to the ereadings subject called SCIE. I am not sure of the intricacies or reasons for these differences, but it impacts ereadings that the subject codes we input in the catalogue are automatically linked to in a subject eLearning site. Hope you can draw some sense from this, but let me know if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Rebecca Daly
Team Leader, Access Services
Library
(Note from the Project Manager: Rebecca submitted this comment via another feedback mechanism and gave me her approval to post here for others to view and comment on.)

Posted in resources and media | Tagged , | Comments closed

Practicum or Work-Integrated Learning

By slambert | Published: May 11, 2010

This course is an intensive 10 month program with about 350 students in each intake ie per year. It is taught across 4 different campus: Wollongong, Bateman’s Bay, Shoalhaven and Bega.

The students spend 55 days working out on prac – about 20% of the total learning time. This could be a regional business, school or medical practice.

Their program consists mainly of core subjects from Wollongong plus eduStream for large classes and some video conferencing (vcf). The program is however  moving away from co-ordinators in each location, and want to harness appropriate technologies for multi-location teaching, and ongoing professional development for interactive teaching ie 2-way approach even in the large classes.  As a result, they are looking to move from eduStream to interactive vcf even for the large classes.

New requirement: In addition, the course co-ordinator wants to offer scheduled syncronous staff/student consultations to facilitate feedback and reflection on the external/prac experience. This could be a general open-session -  staff to student,  or student to group of their peers. It  could also be optional sessions on key topics that students are struggling with, scheduled in response to feedback. It could also good for one-on-one student coaching and counselling for students struggling and under strees, to keep them in the program.

Who else wants this kind of facility?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Sharon Tindall-Ford, whose information on the Graduate Diploma of Education was the basis for this case.

Posted in external participants, large class, multi-location, postgraduate, undergraduate, videoconference to group, videoconference with teacher/advisor, work/study balance | Tagged , | Comments closed

Sequencing resources into modules or activities

By slambert | Published: May 11, 2010

The current eLearning Space has a tool called “Learning Module” which allows staff to cluster, sequence and organise individual resources in meaningful ways for students. The use of “Learning Modules” allows a more scaffolded and supported experience for students, where they start at the beginning of a topic and work their way through in an order than attempts to build on what has gone before. The “Learning Module” allows for not only documents and urls, but also discussion forums and quizzes to be part of the sequence. If designed well, it creates a kind of “online tutorial” that might take a student 45minutes or longer to work their way through, getting feedback on their progress and understanding from peers, teacher or automatic via quiz.

As a minimum we need an equivalent to this clustering/sequencing of resources capability. However, as more multimedia forms of resources become more readiiy available it might be timely to see what is available to allow for the clustering  of learning resources into more visually appealing packages such as webpages, photos, podcasts, videos as well as PDFs, quizzes, and discussion forums.

Comments?

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Quizzes

By slambert | Published: May 11, 2010

The 2008 eLearning Review did a survey of quiz usage and found that although there were only a small percentage of staff using online quizzes, those that did use relied on them heavily or used them substantially.

For example: 

  1. for many or most of their subjects
  2. for a series of quizzes over the session, often contributing to around 10% of the total mark for the subject
  3. for mid-session tests in labs, invigilates as per exam conditions
  4. for revision and exam practice, at a time and location of the students’ choosing
  5. for compulsory hurdle tasks such as pre-lab or pre-prac quizzes,
  6. for classes with very large numbers across numerous locations.

The functions that staff require from the tool that generates the quizzes include:

  1. multiple different question types including multiple choice, true/false, matching pairs, calculated answers, and short open-text answers.
  2. options for feedback per question or the ability to specific different feedback for each possible answer
  3. putting graphics, links, and html into both the question and the answer areas
  4. randomise the order of the possible answers and also randomise questions from a larger, defined pool or “bank” of questions
  5. present one question at a time, or all of them together
  6. flexible release conditions and quiz settings
  7. ability for students to save as draft and complete at a later time
  8. multiple marking, grading options
  9. be able to randomise for a particular student  and save as draft so they can print it out, work on it as homework, and come back at a later time to enter the answers, ensuring they get the exact same questions from the randomised pool.

It would be preferred if there was also an offline tool to generate the quiz questions and answers on the staff-member’s desktop or laptop, with an export/import or syncing function to upload all the quiz questions into the “quiz bank” in one bulk upload/sync  movement.  It would be ideal if this tool could also open/read/import quizzes developed by text-book publishers and allow staff to select and edit questions offlline, and import/sync back to the eLearning space.

Please add your comments. Do you have any other requirements for quizzes?

Posted in large class, multi-location, undergraduate | Comments closed

What gear do i need to access eLearning? Internet & Browser

By slambert | Published: May 5, 2010

We need a system that is easy to access by a wide range of users, who:

  1. have macs and/or PCs
  2. are accessing at UoW and at home or work via different internet connection speeds and browsers (which they may have no control over.)

If the system worked on the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer – as well as any versions released 18 months prior… would that work for you?

Posted in external participants, multi-location | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Virtual Tutors and subject co-ordinator meeting

By slambert | Published: May 3, 2010

Shari is a new Commerce lecturer, teaching accounting subjects. She is employed at the Bega local accounts and tax agent’s firm, and teaches at the Bega Education Centre 1 day and 2 evenings a week. She has been tutoring for years and knows the local students and centre very well, but is nervous about taking a role in dealing with the Wollongong campus staff and the processes for administering the subject and marking fairly.

Shari emails the Wollongong-based subject co-ordinator and asks for a regular fortnightly video-conference between all the tutors who teaching across the numerous locations. The subject co-ordinator agrees to try. She sets up a regular meeting in her Outlook Calendar and uses the Scheduling tool to invite the other tutors, and repeat the event every 2 weeks. Over the course of the next few days the various tutors respond, about two thirds can attend the first meeting or at least the first half.

On the appointed day each participant logs in via the link provided to them via email at the time of setting up the appointment. They login with their regular UoW username and password credentials and once in the “meeting space” they can see and hear each other and also the subject-coordinator can share documents such as subject outlines and assessment marking critera via the shared whiteboard.

Would this work for you? Please use the comments feature to let us know.

If you would prefer, here is a link to the Word document version of the case: UseCase4-_VirtualTutorsMeeting

Posted in external participants, multi-location, postgraduate, undergraduate, videoconference to group | Tagged , | Comments closed

Off campus practicum case, online assignments, and cohort progess tracking

By slambert | Published: April 22, 2010

Students are in a school or workplace for 4 weeks practicum, with no face-to-face contact with their classmates or teacher. They are required to keep a reflective blog of the entire experience, and they may choose to logon each night for support and debriefing after each day with their peers, with one evening per week scheduled to be online with the lecturer who logs in and holds a more formal reflective session helping them make connections from  the theory and readings to their experiences. This then enriches the quality of their reflective work in the blog, which leads to their  major  assignment task, a large essay analysing 2 particular theories and relating them to their prac experience.

Their assignments are submitted online. They upload a word document to the a workspace, using the assignment widget. This widget reads the assessment title, due date, mark value, and how to submit information input from the info input/checked and approved in the Subject Management. The widget displays this in a table with one row for each assessment, and columns for the due date, marks, submission, progress/result.

The progress column changes from “not submitted” which is the default, to “submitted on date/time”, then “marking in progress” as the assignment moves through the system workflow. After the marks have been submitted and approved, then the last column changes to  show 60% or whatever mark they got. If the assignment is not handed in by the due date, the column shows “LATE: not submitted” maybe in red bold. If it is still not submitted by the due date plus whatever the assessment policy is, it can go to 0.

Reporting options:  It would be ideal if the system could notify staff and students of the progress, so they know when they can download and mark them, and when they can login and get their results. Also, it would be wonderful if FEC chairs and Sub-deans ie whomever in the Faculty is responsible for student progress could go in and query the system and print out reports. For example, in Creative Arts the Sub-Dean might want a report emailed to him at the end of week 5 listing all first year students who have late/unsubmitted assignments, filtered by those with the most late/unsubmitted assignments. In other words he gets a report (on the webpage? Via  email?) that says:

Report: 1st year students, late/not submitted assignments

Student (first year) Number of late/not submitteds Subjects
Student X (links to email address) 4 JOUR101, 102, 103, 104
Student Y 3 JOUR101, 102, 103
Student Z 3 CREA101, 102, 103
Student P 3 JOUR101, 102, 103
Student Q 2 JOUR103, 104
Student R 2 JOUR103, 104
Student S 1 JOUR103, 104
Student W 1 CREA102
Student T 1 JOUR104

 

Then they could click on the student X’s name, and send them a personal email asking them to come in for a meeting urgently to review their progress, as they are at risk of failing. They could decide on handling Students Y, Z, and P in the same way. They might email Students with 2 or less late assignments a reminder only. In this way, individual and faculty preference for monitoring and managing student progress could be handled.

Posted in external participants, multi-location, undergraduate, videoconference to group, videoconference with teacher/advisor | Tagged , , | Comments closed

UoW off-campus students collaborating with students from another institution

By slambert | Published: April 22, 2010

In this case students in the later phases of their Medical course who are now studying remotely can communicate and collaborate  with Medical students at another university in online sessions.

For example GSM students in the regional areas around Bowral need to be able to video-conference to 16-20 diffrent remote locations such as Wilcannia, where their Uni of Sydney counterpart students are studying. These students need to dial in with a local phone number to keep costs down.

Modern Languages presents a similar case: where our French, Japanese or Spanish languate students can practice their skills and cultural understanding with native speaking students in France, Japan or Spain who are learning English.

Posted in external participants, multi-location, videoconference to group, videoconference with teacher/advisor | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Remote/virtual support consultations

By slambert | Published: April 22, 2010

Remote IT support, Library and Learning Development consultations: Users schedule a virtual meeting via their regular UoW calendar (ie Outlook client on PC, or a seperate website/webform for mac users).

The systems send an invite via email to all invited users, and it has a discrete URL for them to click on at the appointed time to go to the session. The virutal meeting has audio/video conferencing (small video window) and also you can share a whiteboard for drawing or writing or you can load PPT slides or other documents into the shared whiteboard. You can also share your whole desktop, so users can see you navigate through documents or systems, and you can even “pass the ball” and let another user control your desktop.

This will allow support staff (IT, Library, Learning Development, Staff developers etc) to work with individual staff or students at any UoW location to resolve IT problems, or academic problems such as working through a draft of an essay and identifiying and resolving grammatical and other problems.

See below for a screen shot of a similar product currently being trialled.

 WebEX_screenshot

Comments?

Posted in external participants, multi-location, postgraduate, undergraduate, videoconference with teacher/advisor | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed