Technology & Instruction for UNEX

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a short article discussing a recent report on online learning done by Eduventures . Despite all the excitement about new technologies, most classes lag behind in terms of innovation. That should surprise no one, especially not anyone who has used Blackboard, Moodle or any other CMS. But when it came to technology, the Eduventures survey found that the widely used tools are email, text discussions that don't happen in real time, physical textbooks, and word and pdf documents. We've got plenty of courses where these are the only tools being used, and some courses where it's the textbook email, and text discussions only.

Creating PDFs is easy if you are using a Mac since it's part of the operating system, but on Windows you have a few more options. Robin Good's Master New Media site has a summary of free PDF conversion tools -- Convert To PDF: Guide To The Best Free Online PDF Conversion Tools .

We recently added the Elluminate plugin to our Moodle installation at UCR Extension. This makes it easy to schedule a live session in Elluminate inside your Moodle course with the benefit that your students don't have to login again once they click the link to go to Elluminate. Step by step instructions on using the Elluminate plugin (PDF) .

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has a series of articles about Open Courseware and online learning. They point out that while f ree access to quality learning materials is a great idea , few people are going to go through these materials just for the joy of learning. Most people need some kind of credentials. The bigger issue is cost -- open courses cost money to develop and put online, and in bad economic times, that money has dried up. The future of open courseware using the current model doesn't look good. Personally, while I like the idea of being able to find quality course materials and use them freely, much of the stuff I've seen from Open Courseware sites has not been very usable. Sure, it's free, but I am not clear on who really benefits from these efforts. Putting your courses online may serve as a recruiting tool or generate good publicity, but do these materials really get used by others? That's what's unclear to me. The UK Open University...