The two-headed lecture on the topic Is the Art School Dead?, at the RSA this week, was a bit of a curate’s egg. Neither of the speakers — Professor Roger Wilson and Brian Eno — presented a very coherent argument, but they strung suggestions on loose scaffolding. (Eno appeared to be recording himself on mini-disc: […]
Teaching
Course in Supporting Learning Relationships Online
Sometimes I miss the most obvious things to record here. For example, the one-day course Supporting Learning Relationships Online that I devised and deliver with Julia Duggleby, author of How to be an Online Tutor (among many other roles). The course is marketed and sold through the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
What’s wrong with e-learning: product and process
My posting yesterday turned into a bit of a rant in places, particularly on the subject of educational games. Today’s is part spill-over of that rant, and part explanation of it. Leaving aside the disingenuous and diffident aspects of smuggling learning under the cloak of ‘fun’, what I really want to say is that e-learning […]
Usability of museum web sites
Paul Marty and Michael Twidale’s article A conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum web sites is very clearly written and pretty much delivers what its title promises. It reports evaluations of 36 museum web sites (I’m guessing that most, if not all, were for US museums), on the basis of which usability […]
‘Innovative practice’ e-learning article published
There’s an article Innovative practice in the use of ICT in education and training: learning from the winners published in the current issue (Volume 6, Issue 5, 2004) of the journal Education + Training from Emerald. It’s based in part on the successful bid for a National Training Award by the Learning to Teach On-Line […]
Online tutor workload and poor research publishing
The paper Faculty self-study research project: examining the online workload ought to tell us more about the pressures on online tutors than it does. The gist is that, based on six university staff keeping records of their online teaching time, they found that the total time taken was marginally less than the offline equivalent, but […]
Classifications for tutor support in e-learning
The different pieces of work I’ve done on supporting learners in e-learning over the last year have required different classifications of the tasks and activities involved. Partly the differences are down to the context of learning, and partly they’re down to the purpose of the classification. I’m not aware of much research that analyses tutors’ […]
Managing tutor support for e-learning
Prompted in part by the discussions of supporting learners at the Future of UK E-learning Market event, and partly by some work that Seb Schmoller and I have recently completed for an e-learning provider, here are some boiled-down recommendations for managing e-learning tutors. The term ‘tutor support’ covers a range of practices. In a lot […]
Skills for Online Teaching
Why do resources become more reference-worthy when other people refer to them? I suppose it’s another of those success-breeds-success network effects. So it’s only now that Stephen Downes has seen fit to comment on it, that I get round to referencing a document that Seb Schmoller compiled of contributions from me and other e-learning professionals. […]
LeTTOL wins National Training Award
Congratulations to the Learning to Teach On-Line team for winning a National Training Award last night for the LeTTOL course. I believe this may be the first e-learning course to be awarded an NTA. Having done the course myself in 1998, and worked with some of its main architects since before then, the LeTTOL team […]