I was lucky enough to get to travel to the eLearning 2008 conference last week with Phill and Rochelle. Along with hanging out at the beach, we gave a presentation about distance learning at NWIC, and learned a lot about what other school’s all over the country are doing with their e-learning programs.
Here is a link to the audio recording from our presentation, along with links to our notes and slides, for anyone who is interested in taking a look at what we did.
http://nwic-elearning-presentation.pbwiki.com
I didn’t take detailed notes in all of the sessions like Rochelle, but I thought I would share a summary of some of the basic themes and ideas that seemed to expressed throughout the conference.
Shareable Online Content Creation
It looks like people are starting to get away from creating Word and pdf documents for their courses and are moving towards online tools instead. Google docs and Google notebook were the most popular tools being used. The advantage of using these is that they are free, can be easily shared and viewed online, and they allow multiple people to edit the same document. A number of schools were doing some great classroom collaboration exercises with these tools, such as have students co-author documents or edit each others work. Wikis were also being used quite a bit for creating content and as collaborative spaces. Wikispaces and PBWiki were two of the sites which allow free wiki sites to be set up.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 was probably the biggest buzzword at the conference this year. Basically it means the shift away from a web where students simply consume information to a web where students participate in the creation of information. It is a shift towards a web that is collaborative and social as opposed to a static repository. It is becoming less a library and more a conversation. What this means for learning is that the web is not just a place for teachers to post content and students to read it. There is a growing movement towards teaching methods where the web is used as a platform for student interaction and collaboration and where students are encouraged to post content for sharing with each other. Popular tools for doing this are wikis, blogs, podcasts, Flickr and social video sites such as YouTube. Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, is also being used as a way for students to save and share web sites they find useful.
Blogs as more than Blogs
Everyone is used to seeing blogs used as online journals, but now people are starting to explore new uses for blogs in education. Blogs are being used as a way for students to create learning portfolios. They are also being used by faculty as a content management system to create and share course materials (kind of like an online text book). These are just some of the possibilities people are exploring.
Open Educational Resources
Everyone knows that students are sick of paying extraordinary amounts of money for textbooks and many people are now exploring how the web can be used to help create an alternative. There are a number of open repositories such as Hippocampus and MERLOT where you can share and search for educational materials. In addition, there are a growing number of universities making course materials available online for free (Open Courseware Consortium). One of my favorite sites I learned about was freedocumentaries.org, a site that has a growing library of free to view documentaries online.
List of open education resource sites:
- MERLOT
- Connexions
- Hippocampus
- freedocumentaries.org
- Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon)
- MIT Open Courseware
- Utah State Open Courseware
Future of E-Learning
In the closing keynote address, Elliott Masie talked about his visions for e-learning in the future. One of his predictions was that e-learning would move more towards mobile devices (ie. phones & iPods) and information will be able to be accessed anytime, anywhere. Imagine a biology lab where students go out in the field and then use a mobile web device to research a plant they are looking at. Another trend he saw was the movement away from the traditional college model where students go to class for four years and then graduate from school. He envisioned a model where the goal of the college is not to graduate students, but to keep them learning throughout their careers. He also mentioned a growing trend of students taking classes from multiple institutions to obtain their degrees, instead of being place based at one a students have done in the past.
These are just some of the ideas we learned about at the conference. If you have questions about how you can implement any of these in your classes, come and talk to me.