Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tweeting about our training courses for online instructors. I can't say the response has been overwhelming, but I have gotten a few clicks and at least one student so far. I'm sticking with it, but here's the information about our classes -- all of them are free: Our Spring quarter Moodle classes for instructors are now available: 104MSCC79 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, face-to-face, 3 meetings, starts April 12; 6-8 PM – covers everything needed by an online instructor to get their course ready for the first time. 104MSCC80 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, online, 3 weeks, starts April 13 – same as above, but online. 104MSCC77 - Teaching Online with Moodle, online, 4 weeks, starts May 5 – this class is open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required and you don't need to be scheduled to teach. The goal for this class...

If I had an iPad, I would give mTouch+ a try. It's a Moodle app for students and it looks like it has enough features that you can do pretty much all your work in most courses using an iPad. $2.99

Last week's New York Times Room for Debate - Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes? - had some interesting perspectives on online learning, particularly for middle and high school students.  I think one of the perspectives was not based on any experience with online learning, but the rest added to the conversation. As with many such online articles, the discussion is as interesting as the main articles. Maybe they'll do one on "Can young children learn in overcrowded classes?" which I think might be a more relevant topic than this one. As a parent of a child who completed one semester of 8th grade online through Kaplan, I know there can be challenges with online classes for young students. He suffered through 30 different teachers in 5 weeks for the 6 courses he was in! Imagine starting each week with a new teacher and sitting through a different live presentation about how each class would work every week for 5 weeks. Not a good thing. He also had to deal w...

iSpring free lets you convert a Powerpoint presentation into a Flash video which can be viewed online. Similar to what you can do with authorstream.com but since it's available on your PC (Windows only), you have more control. I can't test it because I don't have a PC, but it sounds like a good deal. I don't know if it retains any audio that has been added to the Powerpoint file. That would be a nice feature. The latest version, 5.7, is free for anyone to use with no licensing restrictions. It looks like iSpring does handle the audio in Powerpoint. Here's a nice explanation of how the software works .