Wednesday 21 July 2010

Custom Questions in Blackboard

Ever wanted to do custom questions in Blackboard but didn't know how... read on.

If you need to do a drag and drop question, balance sheet or have your own randomly generating questions then you can.  We have been looking into this for a migration project to convert from our current existing assessment system to another.

Using the HTML question box in the blackboard quiz creator your can insert a link to your externally hosted flash question file and then by using JavaScript pass the answer from the flash piece to standard Blackboard question.  For example

Question  >  Pass question answer  >  Blackboard text entry  >  Check Score > Auto Input to Gradebook

Any questions feel free to ask

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Skills For Life (21st Century Skills)

At the LTA forum I attended an event hosted by Elani.  Elani is an academic who is using PDP (Personal Development Plans) within her modules.  The reason being is Elani believes that by encouraging students to branch out into different areas of the field will allow for a better student learning experience.  Also at the course was an academic from ADT who is using similar methods within his module and is looking to support 21st century skills through it.  The exeption is that the academic from ADT changed the name from 'PDP' to 'Passport to Learning Certificate', this is more friendly on the ears to students and they seemed to engage more with this than the offical PDP.  Elani agreed with this and noted it was something to change in her modules.  Now since I am coming at this from a technologists point of view, I was thinking how can we support this process.
Something similar to what Adam has done with his SQM could be used as it take into account some of the Basic Structure, see below for a mockup of a system.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Portable Social Profile

t would be dab handy if there was a way of transferring a student socially to other applications and transferring their links, friends etc.

Please find below a mock up of the concept,

To be able to plug your own social network outside of facebook would be ideal.

XML


Example Piece


Tuesday 6 July 2010

Interactive E-Books

Ive been reading the Horizons Report on the up and coming technologies to watch.  One of the technologies they mention is e-books.  Now the benefit of e-books is that they save paper and are pretty mobile you can take them anywhere.

Now if you where to treat it as a e-learning course and have the text along with interactivity then user might receive a better learning experience.  The old books used to have mutliple choice questions at the end so lets make e-books more interactive.