BPP University College Virtual Learning News VLE related news and support for BPP University College staff

January and February are busy months for the Learning Technology team.  In no particular order, some notes are below on events:

UK Blackboard User Group meeting: ‘Opening the Door’

Click on the links for documents reflecting on the Durham conference [day 1; day 2], this covers the sessions I attended on topics such as:

• Openness in education
• Implications of HE competition on scholarship
• Training faculty
• Support for foundation students’ language skills
• Minimum standards for VLE courses
  • [and perhaps most interestingly for me] Moving VLE-related responsibilities away from the implementation team and toward the appropriate departments.

• The event was preceded by a Campus Pack user group meeting.
• Notes from Chris Dennis on the sessions he attended.
• Presentations and some other reflections are aggregated here.

BETT: British Educational Technology Trade-show

Whilst BETT’s focus is on the compulsory education sector and age groups it is a useful barometer for how things are developing.  As detailed by a presentation on the Microsoft stand, this is the first time in a number of decades where ICT does not have ring fenced government funding.  Instead schools are being expected to prioritise and this is inevitably leading to a focus on best practice, as well as shared services between new academies.  Personally, I would imagine that economies of scale will ultimately force academies, free schools, etc. to effectively form LEA-like consortia.

Perhaps because of the financial situation, it seemed to be a show of evolution not revolution with continuing improvements in technology but little ‘new’.  Unsurprisingly, there was lots on mobile but with a focus on the delivery of publisher content, accessing VLEs, etc. rather than ‘mobile learning’ (as would be expected due to the limitations of the 9-3 school classroom model).  However, anything that makes things easier for genuinely interesting and useful homework probably helps!

Things which jumped out at me in terms of other trends:

• Sophistication of response systems.  Some providers seem to have acknowledged that mobile phones should kill off traditional response systems, WordWall and other systems add quite a bit of extra functionality in an attempt to keep relevant.
• Interactive Whiteboards.  The limitations associated with Smart and other providers’ propriety formats seem to be getting recognised.  Smart are tackling this with more and more pre-built inter-activities to try and encourage buy-in to their approach whilst others are moving more towards making use of web content, including annotation of live video and screen recording inbuilt in the whiteboard to cut down on the need for separate lecture capture systems.  Teamboard particularly impressed with equation recognition in saving written math formula.
• Plug-ins to VLEs.  As always people are looking for niches where VLE software fails, WIRIS offer a better maths editor for Moodle and Sakai.  Their Blackboard release is apparently imminent and will be of interest to finance and other mathematical courses, we’ve expressed our interest!
• Communication tools.  Microsoft partners are considering if Lync will offer the full messaging service required (including via live@edu integrations with VLEs such as Blackboard and itslearning).  Meanwhile there are still a host of other systems for communicating with parents, teachers, etc.  Some of these systems could be leveraged for communicating with training partners but would ideally be better integrated with the VLE so performance triggers lead to communication, as Blackboard Connect is planning and Starfish (which we looked at before) does.
• Collaboration beyond the institution.  Many of the communication tools could be used to improve communication and widen students’ horizons.  There were also tools such as ReadingCloud which effectively offer social networking around extra-curricular activities.  Included in this were some cross-school programmes, including international MBAs for secondary age kids.
• Media, including hosting.  One problem with have with Blackboard is that it is not really built for the GBs of video we have on it – there are a number of providers offering either media authoring and/or management services.  Demand for this is coming from home where kids expect on demand high-quality media (such as iPlayer) and schools need to find a way to engage at that level – and universities are then left playing catch-up with schools in many cases.
• Improvement of thin-clients and device use.  As well as mobile, tablets and new devices the use of thin clients is developing nicely.  Microsoft’s multipoint server, 2011, seems to be the solution which will finally break the one machine-one monitor model with it allowing for green cost savings and the running of multiple sessions from a single PC.
• As always there was a whole lot of less learning orientated stuff too including payment systems and hardware vendors.  In the software world there were some new entrants into existing markets including Notecontrol citation software which I intend to trial for keeping track of research activity.  Not to mention some pretty cool stuff happening with robotics!

Learning Technologies Exhibition/Learning and Skills

The LTE is similar to BETT but with a focus on workplace staff training and other professional development.  Like BETT, it is interesting for seeing trends and mobile was clearly the buzz theme.  Like BETT there was a feeling of evolution, including the shifting of authoring from desktop software to web services (such as http://www.easygenerator.com/).

In terms of organisational issues it was an interesting event in that there is a clear continued rise of ‘corporate universities’ with more and more firms taking holistic approaches to staff development.  It was noticeable that the QAA were present advertising their validation services to in-house trainers alongside a number of Business Schools competing for delegates’ business, including the OU and Anglia Ruskin.

Talks I attended included presentations on the above themes and more:

1. http://www.gomolearning.com/site/ – a development from Epic which allows for browser-based authoring of mobile friendly content, effectively PowerPoint like authoring for mobile delivery.  Seemingly very cheap this was a popular presentation and probably offers the easy route into mobilising delivery for institutions.
2. http://www.thetestfactory.com/home.aspx – Test Factory presented on 10 ways to use assessment which delegates may not have thought of previously.  Most of these were actually fairly standard, for example a role for assessment in developing personalised learning plans, using displays of scores to encourage people to improve against their peers, entry assessments to predict future performance, etc.
3. http://www.lumesse.com/ – presenting on their acquisition of Edvantage and their learning portal which included some nice features within a friendly user interface.  Their solution highlighting some of the changes in recent years – such as an expectation to need no coding skills, drag-and-drop to reorder content, easy embed of YouTube, multiple CSS skins and the like.
4. http://harvardbusiness.org/ – Harvard were advertising the mobile availability of their business-support resources, ‘have a Harvard wherever you go’, including that it offers a response by the learning support department to staff who would rather bypass them and head straight to Google.  Argued for the quality and relevancy of Harvard’s case-based approach with a learn, practice and apply pedagogy.
5. http://www.russell.com/uk/ – Russell Investments discussed their in-house staff training and creation of an online portal for worldwide staff development (‘Russell University’).  Six internal academies focus on ensuring safe succession planning with 12 min long resources alongside six hours of face-to-face time.  The talk also focused on why they used Cornerstone’s software including the ease of creating personal learning plans.  Their next steps include planning on having external university validation for their courses.
6. http://www.skills2learn.com/ – I normally try to attend at least one virtual reality elearning session every year at Learning Technologies and S2L have a well developed product which has been put to use for a wide arrange of purposes, including FE-level construction courses.  Virtual reality continues to evolve and clearly has uses where the ‘real’ environment is hazardous, expensive to create or plain impossible to get learners access to.  Their other resources include what they call ‘blended books’ which seemed to basically be normal print publications backed up with ‘look at the website for more info’ type activities, which presumably are fairly standard fare these days considering many publishers are now going for complete integrations with Blackboard and other systems via standards such as LTI.  For their e-learning materials they take a train (lectures, etc), self test, e-practical (virtual reality) approach.

Learning without Frontiers

This year LWF took place in parallel to Learning Technologies.  LWF had an impressive array of presenters for those who paid for the conference, the presentations being posted to their YouTube page.  In the, free to attend, exhibition space there were a real mix of stalls from Pearson, Nintendo and Lego to pods where discussions/presentations took place throughout (and beyond) the main event.

Sessions I sat in on included the Open University of Catalonia’s online learning developments, where they have built their own VLE and mobile version.  Interestingly they worked with Orange Spain on the original project and research/feedback has shown that students want mobile for consumption but for contributing (via typing at least) they still switch away from their tablets to more traditional devices.

After the main event was a session to discuss the future of education picking up themes (including those discussed by the http://purposed.org.uk/ debate) in Keri Facer’s session in the paid event.  It was a really interesting discussion and crossed a number of boundaries but conversation tended to consider what secondary education might look like in a few years.  Personally I would like to see the globalised world recognised by cross-boundary virtual schools but Keri’s research (including http://edfuturesresearch.org/) seemed very closely tied to the sense of community and a certain amount of locality.  The ideas of education in the future were split in the room, often by the uncertainty of what our futures will look like – will biotech make us all at one with machines and have the Internet’s information available to us in a nano-second or will tomorrow’s children need to be educated to survive in a world of scarcity and conflict?  Alternative viewpoints were that actually the world has not changed that much in recent years and the world of the future will need the same as what the past has needed, people able to learn quickly and move between changing job roles.  Fascinating, if somewhat scary, stuff.

CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) writing workshops

An event run jointly by CILIP’s Library and Information Research Group and CILIP in London (the London branch of CILIP) which considered the implications of writing for audiences beyond your team/organisation.  The focus was on moving towards preparing a submission to an academic journal.  However, this introductory session recognised the range of writing one may undertake (such as blogs, newsletter articles and chartership submissions), barriers (time, lack of support, etc) and benefits (including credibility, self-promotion, networking and personal development).  There were tips for dealing with some of the challenges, including finding a time/place that is productive for your writing, using mind maps or other productivity tools and finding a mentor/buddy to bounce ideas off.

There was consideration of what a good article is, the key element being that the author needs to present their interest in the subject by being thorough, aiming their work appropriately for the audience, using clear language, structure and the like.  Related to these points was the importance of identifying your channel (such as a specific journal) early so that the writing is appropriate and meets the needs of the submission requirements.

- IG