Big thanks to the crew from GeekFest Dubai for the chance to speak last week. The crowd is super-switched-on and made for a great – and intimidating – group to present to that night. With so many people who really ‘get’ stuff you know that you have a great chance to really spark some interesting discussion and get some amazing input on your ideas. That said, the flip side is that this is also the group that will quickly see through your crap if you don’t bring your A-preso.
A new online course portal has launched in the United Kingdom. XCourse is an education portal selling online courses that customers can purchase to learn on their own time. XCourse is initially offering courses in Microsoft Office, Web Programming, Databases, Business and People Management, HR, Marketing, and Negotiation skills.
To solve real problems requires using real scenarios, and this is as important in elearning as in classroom learning.
Cathy Moore has a great presentation in using scenarios in elearning to teach effective problem solving with real-world benefit.
One of the challenges with using the approach described in the presentation is that it usually requires more design time. Since many clients don’t actually measure the effectiveness of their materials and just want information put online quickly, it can be hard to argue for immersive scenarios. Have you successfully used scenarios? Did you have to convince stakeholders to let you use them?
Dr. Helen Barrett maintains an interesting site focusing on the use of electronic portfolios and digital storytelling.
Apart from the highly useful information on there are two sections regarding the specific use of tools to support electronic portfolios that educators can use to implement portfolios using cutting edge tools that provide a great vehicle to learn and use important tools and build a meaningful electronic portfolio at the same time.
Ambient Insight Research have released their report on the US Market for Self-Paced eLearning Products.
They estimate the market at $16.7 billion for 2009 with demand growing by a 5-year compound annual growth rate of 7.4%. This would take the market to over $23 billion by in 5 years.
Like I said above, personal learning environments combined with open courseware, new empowerment for educators-as-entrepreneurs, and innovation in technology for delivery and interactivity mean that traditional institutions that cater to the average level of those in the room and which are dependent on the constraints of building, maintaining and managing physical spaces will not have the agility of web native education.
For those learning online, they are gaining valuable contextual experience that they can use in their careers. It only the beginning… Employer Brand Building 2.0
We then got into….once you start with a blog, (Hello WordPress/Blogger) your learning starts to take off. You start to get motivated to want to find a tool that helps make your space more conversational and co-creative/crowsourced in terms of production/interpretation of content/ideas (Hello Wiki). You then want to throw in some pictures (Hello Flickr/OFoto)…
Lisa Neal is writing about how travel is a haven for busy adults to actually get some time to spend learning. Given that I have lived this – spending time in hotels and on planes going over coursework- I agree that this time is not available when involved in the busy days and nights of…