Catching the information Bus

http://www.intuitivebusinessintelligence.com/Harper_Adams_University_College_Improves_Student_Experience

Came across this recently in one of my searches.  My old colleague Roger Greenhalgh had an idea to create an information bus, that sits on top of all the databases, that would allow for easy data reporting and manipulation.

The idea was that data depending on user rights could be accessible to staff, students, service providers and management.  You could cross tally results for research, for example how many students from a certain demographic scored  50% and higher on their exams. Or an easy method for managers to pull up information on student intake etc without having to higher in specialists or task others to develop reports.  It seems the company he has went with provides this service and allows you to create a 'dashboard' where you can easily see the reports that concern you.

Definatly something to think about if  you want to improve services, and not wholly unattainable.

Whats in a VLE...

Mobile can be added to the list,

With Stanford University and a lot of other Universities using the MobileEDU (Now Mobile Central) iphone app from Blackboard the world of the student has opened up, now they can easily check module information, assignement information, sports info etc on the go.  The app is even 'fashionable' in the sense it looks up to date.

Now Moodle have stepped into the arena with their own app Moodle4iPhones though this is still in development it would be interesting to see what it can offer students, especially since the project is open source.



I will run a comparison on the two once the moodle one has been released, in the meantime I am going to be looking into the Iphone app from Blackboard and will report back here

E-Learning in the snow

First blog of the year so I thought I would talk about the weather.

Theres been a lot of talk on the telly about students missing exams due to the weather etc, Isnt this the time when e-learning comes into its own!  The ability to sit tests and still study when you are stuck at home is one of the fundamental properties of e-learning.  All this talk about students not being able to drive in etc, we should by now be able to accommodate them somehow.

I am just waiting on the amount of ECF's that will be piling into the University.

Social Networking Games

Competition can be healthy....especially with regards to education.

While looking at supporting Social Networking capabilities and other programs within Institutions I wonder how much is geared towards the student. We seem to be heading to a very business like venture, forgetting that students are generally in their teens. As with health and safety spoiling alot of fun we could be to blame for that as well.

My point is that when implementing something like a social network for the classes/modules students we should bear in mind that fun also comes into play. For example if you dont know someone on your course and you give them a game of poker its one way to strike up a comradship and banter between the students.

So when your thinking of employing a social networking facility, why not drop in a few games there as well.

Using Second life to replicate real life enivronments

The Institute of Quarrying in conjunction with the University of Derby has been working on a project called the Virtual Quarry. This project has been designed to showcase the capabilities of using a virtual environment to simulate real world scenarios and without doubt the project has shown what is possible.

With the help of SME's and second life developers we were able to sit down and work out different hazards which could come into play in a real life quarry, this ranged from fawlty traffic lights, to full on torrential rain and also included things like unsafe roads and blast sites. In reality in my own opinion I did not see the second life having chance of being able to complete this as I saw Second Life as a play area for novelty, but I must admit my eyes were opened.

From what I gather what you can do in second life mainly depends on the quality of SL developers at your disposal and your own imagination.

Changes within our Educational Development Unit

Well I thought I better blog on some changes going on within the department and how that is going to influence the University.  The department now sits at a healthy 7 developers two co-ordinators and one manager, for us this is a big step up with regards to the services that we can offer.  

Without going into to much detail the teams where split with 4 in one department and 4 in another.  This caused direction problems which we are no trying to fix.  

We have setup several roles within the team which will focus on certain aspects of the development.

Software / System / Application developer

Courseware / Interaction / Graphics developer

Server / Database administrator

Project / Service / Resource Manager

Business Analyst / Customer Advisor / Solution architect

and

Split these roles into 

Bespoke Content Development

LMS

END User Tools

Assessment

All developers where allowed to choose where they wanted to place their skills and were most evenly distributed, this resulted in an empowerment of the developer and refreshes the interest and focus of the team.

Automatic Classifying Personality Traits based on Writing styles

In one of my feeds today from http://www.readwriteweb.com/ I came across a very useful and quirky tool that is available from http://www.uclassify.com/browse/.

These guys seem to have created an api to classify traits on written text, it is quite fun to have a play with and since they created an api, it could also be useful in adding this to our peer review/essay marking programs, as another benefit to the student.

With regards to this post I am

1. happy (99.6 %)
2. upset (0.4 %)

Heh

Prejudice in the learning community

Having worked in the e-learning trade for a long time, I know the sort of things to expect to sell and advise lecturers.  Generally that involves something electronic....  

Now if I only offer electronic services, do lecturers only expect to use electronic methods.  My conundrum is this, if we are advocating and shouting off the roof tops to use e-tools why are we not shouting off the rooftops for methodology/practical etc.

Why are we not investing in real time simulations etc, sure the marking is a lot more, but students do get a lot more out of realtime simulations experience etc.... Sure use e-simulations that cannot be done outside like disease sims and chatbots for language. 

There are no departments for that yet there are e-learning departments.  There are no learning experts yet there are learning technologists.  All other information is hand me down with usually no drive.

There are a lot of lecturers who are new and afraid to try stuff, why only point them in the direction of e.  I think we are still missing an important aspect of learning specialist's.

Using Data visualization within Education

With the high end graphics and data manipulation the internet/ computers today can handle and process a lot of data. What has been progressing over time, is an increase in the knowledge and easiness to create data sets and visualize the data in an easy to understand format. The most common of which and is dying slowly is the tag cloud.

The tag cloud is just one example, others include the advanced communication world map which was released recently. Imagine if you could create that on a small scale see, use it to see which departments communicate with others, which student access materials the most etc the list goes on. I feel that does not happen enough within the University and would help in the change that technology gives us.

Biometrics

Recently I viewed a blog post by Alex Iskold which highlighted the fact of security within e-learning in which he mentioned biometrics.

I think it is a great way to securly link a profile (account) to an individual. For one it would at least get rid of a few cards. On searching the web I came across this site.

http://www.eyenetwatch.com/biosecurity/biometric-security-buy-hardware.htm

I had not relised that this technology was at production stage. The technology could make it so much easier to take out library books, code bespoke programs tailored to the student and generally make the students life easier.