No, nothing to do with the National Lottery and mega jackpots – just a final reminder that the annual ‘rollover’ of Learn from one academic year to the next takes place on Monday 19th – Tuesday 20th July, during which time Learn will not be accessible. If you haven’t done so already, please notify usRead more
Received the following e-newsletter last night from Elluminate: Today, we’ve announced that Elluminate, Wimba, and Blackboard will join forces to bring together the leading technology products for synchronous learning and collaboration – and the minds that created them – in what we hope will be a major step forward to pursue new innovation. We’veRead more
OER is the most recent initiative built upon hundreds of years of practice of sharing of teaching materials since organised teaching began. We can conclude that OER is useful because of this rich history of practice, but it is a pragmatic, updated approach to cater for the world of the 21st century.Read more
On Friday 25th I represented Loughborough at the Online Learning Task Force event hosted at the British Library. Chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the BL, the session was an opportunity for universities to engage with the high-level government-appointed task force as it approaches the conclusion of its year-long project. Some of theRead more
Here’s a quick stat to make academic colleagues think as they finish marking: Total questions marked automatically by Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) during Semester 2 exams: 296,963 If you could mark a question in 5 seconds (!) and could continuously mark for 6 hours a day, it would take 69 days. That’s almost 14 weeks ofRead more
On the 19th and 20th of July, Learn will be “rolled over” to the new academic year. On these 2 days, Learn will not be accessible to staff and students. The dates were chosen on the basis of feedback from departments in order to minimise disruption. Most of you will not notice the rollover –Read more
At Loughborough we went live with Google Apps for our students last Christmas. This was very well received, and we are currently in the throes of launching Google for Alumni. We have been liaising closely with Google’s developer team for several months to create a system that will allow students leaving this Summer to keepRead more
Colleagues interested in recording lectures, whether live or pre-prepared, now have a range of options: – Echo 360 fixed installations: we now have the Echo 360 system for automated video lecture capture installed in CC011 (James France), T003 (Wolfson) and HE010 (HEBS), with another 5 rooms due for installation before the start of next academicRead more
The Library, E-learning Team and Students’ Union have just completed a study to find out more about how students are using Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and YouTube for both their social lives and their studies. An on-line survey was completed by 178 students. The results show that most students use Web 2.0 sites for bothRead more
(Translation: why not consider sending a mobile phone text message to your Distance Learning students?) As part of the current Distance Learning Fund programme, we now have an institutional licence for the TxTtools service and their MoodleTxT ‘plug-in’ which allows text (SMS) messages to be composed and sent to students from within Learn module pages.Read more