WebCT Faculty Resource

The University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada has an excellent e-learning newsletter for faculty. It's geared to their university but the content is universal and a resource for anyone creating courses using WebCT.

In the April edition Laura Proctor offers information on how to wind down as the Spring 2005 semester comes to a close. End-of-semester tips:

** Create and download a backup copy of all course content.

** If you are planning to use WebCT for courses in the next academic year create them now and avoid last minute preparation.

** Take any WebCT workshops your university offers.



Submitted by: Laura Proctor, E-learning Systems Group
More information: http://webct.uvic.ca/

30+ and Still Thinking of Medical School?

That thought could be interpreted as folly or inspiring. I like the former. For inspiration on courses and real life experiences check out The Non-Traditional MedJournals a compendium of thoughts and advice.

Knowledge@Wharton - March 23 to April 5

Check out the recently launched chinese edition of Knowledge@Wharton. It features regular Knowledge@Wharton content as well as articles uniquely created for management leaders in Chinese-reading populations. Click here for the Chinese translation to English.

Knowledge@Wharton offers the latest business insights, information and research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Free Courseware

UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the teaching/learning arm of the UN. Their website serves as a clearinghouse for the dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge. Here is a partial list of free courseware to support course/content managment.

Dokeos Open Source Learning and Knowledge Management is free software translated in 31 languages. The technology is being used by 1000+ organisations.

Moodle is an open source learning management system for producing Internet-based educational courses and Web sites on any major platform (Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X). Courses are easily built up using modules such as forums, chats, journals, quizzes, surveys, and assignments.

OLAT - Online Learning And Training is a web-based Learning Management System (LMS) used in Switzerland's public sector and developed at the University of Zuerich. OLAT is open source and completely free of charge.

Ganesha
is a French Open Source LMS. The developer is currently working on AICC SCORM and XML features and will release Ganesha in other langauges in the near future.

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) allows MIT course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects to be available on the web, FREE OF CHARGE. The purpose of MIT OCW is to serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.

Coursework is an open source course management system based at Stanford University. The CourseWork source code is free and open, and can be downloaded for any organization to use and modify to their own needs. You will need your own staff to install and manage the system, but the code is free and open.

Review additonal freeware on the UNESCO website.

Grants from the NSF National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program

The National Science Digital Library seeks to serve as a resource for informal and lifelong learning. Proposals for the FY05 funding cycle are due April 11, 2005, and the full solicitation is available at their website.

GEM - The Gateway to Educational Materials

The Gateway to Educational Materials is the joint effort of several groups including The US Department of Education, The National Library of Education, and a team from Syracuse University. The site is geared to educators but anyone can access the materials which include thousands of educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites,

Resources and tools are in a variety of formats, including lesson plans, educational Web pages, books for sale, and web pages for national museums by subject, keyword or grade level. Great news: the majority of these resources are FREE.

Ivory Tower Blogging

University of Pennsylvania English Professor Erin O'Conner has been described as one of the first scholars who staked a claim in the blogosphere. Some two years ago an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described her blog Critical Mass as advancing a conservative critique of "grade inflation, sensitivity training, and speech codes."

So says Professor O'Connor "... the blog tracks moments of monumental malfeasance on campus--whether administrative, pedagogical, or scholarly; practical or ideological; individual or collective--and to reflect on what they mean for the future of education, intellect, free inquiry, and philosophical diversity in the U.S."

Lofty stuff.

Medical eLearning @ OpenClinical.org

OpenClinical.org is an e-learning community of individuals, organisations and companies collaborating on the development and dissemination of knowledge management technologies for patient care. The site is full of useful information and a wide range of knowledge management technologies which contribute to the definition and adoption of open technical standards for medical applications.

Registration is free and open to physicians as well as non-health professionals. The site provides:

• Introductory articles and technical briefings on medical knowledge
management methods, technologies and products.

• Demonstrations of technologies and applications which can be run on or accessed through the site.

• Presentations of clinical knowledge-management projects, discussion papers,etc.

• Links to sites maintained by OpenClinical partners and sponsors.

• Access to knowledge management software which can be downloaded from the OpenClinical site or from partner sites.

Several researchers in the knowledge management field collaborated on the project with the support of medical organisations and sponsors.

OpenClinical’s fundamental position is that knowledge management technologies are the same as any medical technology – the primary aim is efficacy and improving patient care. For more information read their white paper.

Speedy Delivery: Finding the Best Platform for Rapid E-Learning

The concept of rapid e-learning is being increasingly adopted among training practitioners notes Chris Howard in a white paper by Bersin & Associates. Howard's paper, entitled Collaborative E-Learning Systems describes a case study analysis of Norfolk Southern's decision to purchase CourseAvenue, an integrated courseware development platform. The company's managers were looking for ways to increase productivity and reduce the time-to-learn criteria and found that CourseAvenue's platform was able to provide a template-based authoring system that significantly improved the speed with which courses were created and offered to employees.

For additional information on e-learning research you can subscribe to B & A's E-Learning Research Center which offers research, product selection guides, whitepapers, and access to other experts
online.