See also: Archives
This is the second exploration of an idea for enhancing Moodle to enable curriculum mapping. It carries on from the first step and is part of a broader project....more...
This documents a problem, and hopefully an initial solution, around the combination of technologies that is Moodle, an Oracle database, and content that is copy and pasted from Word....more...
The following draws on principles/theory from psychology to guide thinking about how to incorporate "data" from "academic analytics" into an LMS in a way that encourages and enables academic staff to improve their learning and teaching. It's based on some of the ideas that underpin similar approaches that have been used for students such as this Moodle dashboard and the signals work at University of Purdue....more...
The following is a presentation abstract that I've submitted to MoodleMoot AU'2010. It's based on some ideas and thoughts expressed here previously. In particular, the main focus on the paper will be showing that the reason most university e-learning/teaching is not that great, is not really the fault of the academics. Instead it will argue that there are a range of limits within the higher education environment that are mostly to blame....more...
Doing some reading and came across the following quote which I had to store for further use. It is quote in Chua (1986) and is ascribed to Berlin (1962, p 19)...more...
This is perhaps the first concrete step in a project that is aiming to look at how the act of curriculum mapping can be embedded into the, increasingly, most common task and tool used by academics. That is, how can an LMS (like Moodle) be used/modified to make curriculum mapping a part of what academics do, both in terms of maintaining the mapping, but more importantly using the mapping in interesting and useful ways....more...
Yesterday, Derek Moore tweeted...more...
The following is the extended presentation abstract I plan to submit to MoodleMoot AU 2010. The idea was to submit a paper, but time has run out. The recent blog posts (starting with this one) about the story of BIM provide some of the early reflection that will form the basis of the presentation. The challenges mentioned in those posts will be abstracted somewhat to generate a series of limitations....more...
The following is the first part of chapter 3 of my thesis. The aim of this part is to explain the broad view of research that informs the work. The second part will give more specific details about the specific method used. Over the next week, I'm re-reading this chapter, when the fixes are done, I will upload a completed version....more...
A growing interest of mine is an investigation of how the design of the environment and information systems to support university learning and teaching can be improved with a greater consideration given to factors which can help encourage improvement and change. i.e. not just building systems that do a task (e.g. manage a discussion forum) but design a discussion forum that encourages and enables an academic to adopt strategies and tactics that are known to be good. If they choose to....more...
Episode 3 of the story of BIM...more...
Just floating another idea for a research project around the Indicators project....more...
This is the second episode in the continuing story of BIM. This episode picks up the story late in the first half of 2006. The initial foray into using individual student blogs to encourage reflection and make student learning more visible was bumbling along. It was now time to think about what I'd be teaching the following term....more...
The following is a start of trying to capture the story of BAM and BIM. The aim is to use this as part of a case study for a paper for MoodleMoot'AU 2010....more...
The following comes from a place of frustration. The approaches universities are using to improve learning and teaching don't work. But they continue to be held in reverence because they have become a purpose proxy. The people within universities charged with improving learning and teaching are no longer focused on or measured by improving learning and teaching. They are focused on and measured by the purpose proxy. i.e. how many L&T seminars they have run, how many teaching awards they've given out etc....more...
The following outlines the conditions for Anna's phone....more...
The question of the value of lurking is a common one for learning and teaching. Is it okay for students to simply sit quietly and listen, especially in an online forum? Should we "force" them to participate?...more...
Antonio Vantaggiato gives one response to a post from Donald Clark titled "Moodle: e-learning's frankenstein". Clark's post is getting a bit of traction because it is being seen as a negative critique of Moodle....more...
I think that the quality of most university learning and teaching is somewhat less than it could be. There are some really good examples and really engaged teaching academics. However, they are in the minority. This problem is made worse when the context of a particular university is extremely complex. For example, a number of Australian public universities, in response to reductions in government funding, have developed a collection of partnerships with commercial and overseas organisations to offer their courses in various modes. Some of these universities also have traditional on-campus students as well as distance education student spread throughout the globe....more...
Since about 1996 much of my research and development around e-learning has found "concrete" form in a system call Webfuse. First described in Jones and Buchanan (1996) Webfuse became an essential part of CQU's operations. The unkindest (and basically wrong) description of Webfuse is that it was a proprietary, single institution learning management system....more...
This summarises some continued investigation of Moodle support for outcomes as part of preparing for the curriculum mapping project....more...
It's time to think about the reality of the curriculum mapping idea that's been kicking around. i.e. how hard/impossible would it be to implement this idea in Moodle....more...
BIM is into it's 2nd week of being used at CQU (about 3/4 courses approaching 500 students) and there's also talk of it being used at another Australian university. It's time for a couple of reflections on early experience and also time to identify the source of a common problem....more...
Last year I gave a a couple of presentations titled "Alternatives for the institutional implementation of e-learning". In those presentations I essentially argued that what passes for current practice of e-learning in universities - what I now call "industrial e-learning" - suffers from a significant mismatch which, I believe, contributes to most of its limitations. My argument is that the nature of the product (the LMS) and the process (teleological) adopted in industrial e-learning to be completely unsuited to the nature of the people involved in e-learning, the nature of learning and teaching and the nature of universities and the context in which they operate....more...
I've been back working at the PhD thesis, hopefully down to months before submission. At this stage, I need to work on the 2 chapters that are reflecting on the usage of Webfuse during two periods: 1996 through 1999 and 1999 through 2004 (and a bit later). In doing some, the main tasks I need to achieve are:...more...
The following is a first draft of a section from my thesis. It will form part of the newly cut down section on Process within chapter 2 (170 pages down to 50). The following tries to say something about the design processes used for teaching within universities. It starts with a characterisation of instructional design, looks at the limitations (referring to some earlier work about teleological and ateleological processes) and seeks to describe what the literature has to say about how teaching academics actually design/plan their courses....more...