Technology & Instruction for UNEX

It's a nice marketing idea -- putting previews of courses online so anyone can download them. Of course, anyone has to be able to sign up for the courses to make it worthwhile, and that is also the case here with Harvard Extension's use of iTunes U to offer video previews of selected courses. Not all online courses use video, but these do, so it's a nice use of the technology. Previews for 15 of the 50 courses are available. Check out the article at Playlist Magazine or visit the Harvard Extension iTunes U site . You'll need iTunes installed to view the videos.

Innovate is an online journal which covers online education and other technology-related topics. The current issue has a thorough summary and commentary by Stephen Downes about the Blackboard patent issue .

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an active discussion board related to Online Teaching . Many of the threads address the use of Blackboard. It's free to use the discussion board, unlike most of the rest of chronicle.com

We had our first informal class last night on Online Tools for Face to Face instructors. There were 7 instructors attending. Next week's repeat session on Wednesday may have a few more. I will be updating the materials for next week, so if anyone would like the updated CD, please let me know. I will also be putting the material online.

If you would like a two page handout on how to login to the UCR Extension Blackboard area, I have one PDF file for instructors and one for students . Each is 276K in size. Right click (Control Click on a Mac) on the links to save these files to your computer. Suggestions on improving these would be helpful. Please email me at breilly at ucx.ucr.edu or leave a comment.

UCR's Blackboard installation now provides access to the Teams LX plugin from Learning Objects . This plugin lets you add wikis to your course. A wiki is a relatively simple tool which lets people create web pages with text, links and images. They are useful for any kind of collaborative project. There are two kinds of wikis available -- a course wiki which can either be edited only by the instructor (not sure why you would do that) or by everyone in the course, and individual or group wikis which can be created in any course content area. For ideas about using a wiki in your course, check out Stewart Mader's blog, Using Wiki in Education , a 4 part video course about Wikis and Wikipedia (Flash) from UW Milwaukee, using Wikis in online education from WikEd at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Curriculum, Technology and Education Reform program, or Eliot Masie's Learning Wiki for some examples.

Lifehacker has an item today about learning a language using podcasts you can download for free from the iTunes Music Store. I've looked at a few of these language podcasts and some are very good. What might be equally useful for learning a new language is to have the students in the class make a podcast.