Expanding the Team – a new ELF
I’d like to introduce myself, I’m Kimberley Johnston the new eLearning Facilitator working in the Centre for Early Learning in Medicine based in Dunedin. I’ve spent at least the last 8 years working in the eLearning team in ITS supporting the wider University of Otago community with all their eLearning needs. Before working at Otago I had left my once little home town of Orewa to move to Dunedin to become a doctor. Long story short I ended up completing degrees in statistics and computer science.
I’m still working out how my new role fits within CELM but if you have any questions at all related to eLearning come and find me and we can have a chat. Currently I’m a bit of a nomad within the Sayers Building but you can always email me if you can’t find me.
University Supported eLearning Tools
The University of Otago includes a team of staff who you may not have heard about. They are the ITS Teaching and Learning team. This team supports teaching and learning tools for the university and is an excellent source of information about tools that can be linked to from within Moodle or Blackboard.
If you are interested in learning about the tools they support, check out their eLearning Toolbox. This toolbox lists all the tools they currently support and gives you the ability to filter the list by your requirements.
For example, do you want to collaborate with others? Choose that requirement from the dropdown list and you can see that there are six options from the list that are recommended for collaboration.
How about collecting data and feedback? Well, with that requirement chosen, a list of five tools appears.
The wiki description
To learn more about any of the tools, just click on its icon. A window will open with a brief description of the tool and the option to see an example at work or register to use the tool.
They are also open to suggestions for new tools that might be useful to the university. So, if you have a great eLearning tool that you think others might be interested in, drop them a line.
Oh, and they have a toolbox for researchers too. You can visit the eResearch Toolbox to learn more.
Learning Analytics
Technology Enhanced Learning. eLearning. Educational Technology – this is a field that is so filled with buzzwords we have trouble deciding what to call ourselves.
One emerging field that some might consider a buzzword is Learning Analytics. Simply put, learning analytics is the practice of analysing data from student interactions with online learning material in order to infer information about student learning. A simple example might be looking at the number of times students click on a link to a particular learning activity as a measure of student engagement. Another example might be looking at proportion of students in a cohort who engage in a series of weekly activities – a decrease over time might be inferred to be a decrease in engagement with learning. Continue reading
