Elluminate plugin for Moodle

We did a little testing with the Moodle plugin for Elluminate this week. The plugin doesn't do too much, but the two things it does should make it much more convenient to use Elluminate as part of a Moodle course. We currently use Elluminate for a small number of live online/webcast courses, but the plugin won't be used for those since they typically meet once a week for 10 weeks and are best scheduled all at once. The Moodle plugin allows you to schedule a single Elluminate session and creates a link which doesn't require students to login again. That makes it great for adding online office hours or live chats or presentations to a Moodle course. The instructor can set up the session at any time.

The next step will be helping instructors use Elluminate in ways that go beyond the lecture format and take advantage of some of the collaborative features –– the whiteboard and application sharing.

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Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

Podcast features in Blackboard 7.3

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .

Download Moodle courses from the Open University

I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this morning and they had an interesting segment about how a university in Brazil was making use of the resources from the OpenLearn project at the Open University in England. The project is similar to the Open CourseWare effort at MIT and elsewhere. In both cases, university courses are made available online and many include audio and video segments as well as the syllabus, assignments and so on. The big challenge is how to make use of these excellent materials. A persistent student might make their way through a cours e as a self-study, but I think they are more suited for modification by instructors who are teaching something similar. Maybe only a particular unit would fit into someone's course, but since these materials are offered under a Creative Commons license, they can be modified and re-used as you like. The big step (in my mind) with the OpenLearn materials is that many of them are available as Moodle courses. ...

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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