February 27, 2005

COURSES: Free Course Content

The Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) initiative, launched in March of 2004 under the leadership of Foothill Community College, has the goal of publishing community college-level course content and making it freely accessible on the web.

Sofia is modeled after MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, but at the community college level. Courses submitted by faculty members on a voluntary basis go through peer-review, repurposing, and QA before being posted to the site.

Content for eight courses is now available online through their course gallery: Creative Typography, Elementary Statistics, Physical Geography, Enterprise Network Security, Introduction to Java Programming, Introduction to Macromedia Flash, Musicianship II, Webpage Authoring

Each course includes readings, assignments, exams/quizzes, discussion area, etc., as well as a course syllabus, including suggested grading and a suggested schedule for course delivery.

(link via cogdogblog)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

RESOURCES: Teachers' Domain

teachersdomain.gifIt's so frustrating to come across a resource where the designers have spent a lot of time and thought on content and organization and not enough time on usability.

Teacher's Domain, which presents a digital library of multimedia resources, standards, and lesson plans for K-12 on a small range of topics in life science, physical science, engineering, and the civil rights movement, is a good example. I was interested enough by the tour (no registration required) to check it out further but was soon disappointed.

While the library resources themselves are useful and well organized, the registration and login process can be frustrating, and the process of creating resource folders and sharing them with students and colleagues is unnecessarily complex. Navigation through these folders and groups is not very intuitive, and the "help" function is something less than helpful. To make matters worse, the server is sluggish and tends to serve up lots of error pages.

While this might be a useful resource for those who want to organize materials for themselves for classroom use, I wouldn't suggest sending students to this site for independent online work.
(link via Educational Technology)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

September 23, 2004

RESOURCES: User Experience

This User Experience Resource Collection is a great collection of annotated links on a wide range of subtopics from user experience design specialist Dey Alexander.
(link via elearningpost)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 06:23 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2004

WRITING: Guidelines and Resources

To supplement my writing workshops, I've beefed up my student resources links to include some great sites on:
  • Writing - particularly focusing on sites that offer guidance on planning and structuring writing
  • Style guidelines - guidance for writers, editors, and proofreaders on the details of writing style
  • Editing/proofreading - including dictionaries, proofreading marks, and style sheets
Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2004

RESOURCES: Research on Distance Education

From the Spring 2004 issue of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, the article Ten Efficient Research Strategies for Distance Learning is a good resource for anyone who's new to distance education and is looking for a way to get up to speed/keep up with important developments in the field.

Most useful are the listings of academic journals and Web portals, but those new to online research may also benefit from the basic information on how to search library catalogs and online databases. There are some obvious omissions, however... for example, I wish the authors had added a list of key online education blogs and a description of how to use news aggregators.
(link via Great Links!)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

BLOGS: ArtsBlogging

A shout out to the husband ... in addition to his regular theater-and-culture blog Superfluities, George has now started ArtsBlogging, an experiment in collaborative blogging where arts bloggers can connect on cross-discipline issues and share resources on technology and culture tailored to their needs.

As George writes:

"Romantic tradition has it that artists are alienated not only from our culture but from each other, and despite the explosion of information technology in the past twenty years I can’t say that personally I feel any less alienated than I did in 1984. Blogs have the potential to provide the communication and communion missing from the fragmented cultural milieux in which we’re all participating. Now, at least, we can be alienated together."

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2004

RESOURCES: Free On-line Resources for Teachers

From TechLearning, here is an interesting list of free resources for teachers. Highlights include links to the Hot Potatoes suite of programs for building simple interactive tests and Mark Damon's modifiable PowerPoint games (Jeopardy, Who wants to be a millionaire, Hollywood Squares, and the Weakest link).
(link via Educational Technology)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2004

RESOURCES: Other Places

samplecourses.gifSample courses. The Open Learning Initiative is an interesting project from Cargnegie Mellon to provide online courses and to build a community of use. Check out the first courses available - introductory courses in Economics, Statistics, Causal Reasoning, and Logic - which include simulations and other interactive components (the logic course was unavailable when I looked at this).
(link via OLDaily)

Wiki. Creative Commons is building a democratically maintained Wikipedia of Free Culture, and everyone's invited.
(link via Boing Boing)

Using Flash. A good introductory article from Learning Circuits on using Flash animations to author e-learning.

Plagiarism. The CBB Plagiarism Resource Site is a collaborative project by Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Colleges to build a clearinghouse for resources and news on this topic, including an online quiz to test your plagiarism IQ.
(link via Kairosnews)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2004

RESOURCES: Course Design & Development

Design Principles
These Web design guidelines from IBM provide a basic introduction to the topics of site structure, navigation, text design, and visual layout. On the same site, the section on Design concepts gives a basic introduction to the topics of user-interface and user-experience design, as well as some basic principles of good site design.

Information Architecturearchitecture.gif

  • This brief article by Stephen Downes provides a good definition and overview
  • This tutorial from Webmonkey is a good place to start if you're new to IA, particularly the lessons on Site structure and Visual design.
  • AIfIA (The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture) provides a host of resources, including a Design tools section that includes sample process maps, content development spreadsheets, wireframe templates, and other development tools.

    Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2004

RESOURCES: Articles of Interest

Some articles of interest from the June issue of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks:

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)

RESOURCES: Costs of Course Development

Online Course Development: What Does It Cost? An article from Syllabus Magazine that presents guidelines for predicting the costs of course design and development.
(Link via Online Learning Update)

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2004

RESOURCES: Assessing Readiness for Online Courses

A few people in the class have mentioned that they'd like to have some guidelines for how to prepare learners for the work involved in taking courses online. The following resource provide some helpful tips and student self-assessments:

RESOURCES: Blog Essays

Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs
This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. The collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2004

RESOURCES: Instructional Strategies

The following resources may be helpful in thinking about issues related to strategy and media selection

June 30, 2004

RESOURCES: Ed-Tech News Reading List

Chris asked about the news sources I rely on for information about education and technology...In addition to the sources listed here, I also review some subscription and "old media" resources, and I periodically conduct Lexis-Nexis and other database searches on select topics as time permits (if you're enrolled at NYU in a degree program, as opposed to taking classes as a nondegree student, you have access to a variety of online resources of this type through the "Research" link on NYUHome).

You can view my blog subscriptions for Online Ed through Bloglines at http://www.bloglines.com/public/joanne

Other resources I generally check out through RSS feed include (in no particular order):

Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2004

RESOURCES: Bloom's Taxonomy

When writing objectives, teachers and trainers too often focus on measuring only low-level cognitive skills (listing, memorizing, restating, etc.).

These resources, compiled by a former course participant (thanks, Kathy!), focus on providing tools to help craft objectives on each of the six levels within the cognitive domain (from simple recall to complex analysis and evaluation) identified by Bloom.

June 27, 2004

RESOURCES: Interface Design

User Experience Design.
Semantic Studios's Peter Morville describes a "user experience honeycomb" to help define priorities and move beyond simply designing for accessibility.

Information Architecture.
On Sitepoint, Subha Subramanian does a nice job of giving an easy-to-read introduction to this key interface design topic.

Syntactic vs. Visual Knowledge.
As a followup to the Forum question about WIMP, I found this article from Juan C. Dürsteler of Inf@Vis! comparing the different types of knowledge a user needs to interact with a graphical vs. a command-line interface.

Posted by jotz at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2004

RESOURCES: Course Analysis

In addition to the excellent site from Big Dog's Bowl of Biscuits, you might find the following resources useful:
    calculator.gif
  • How much will this all cost? This interactive web estimate generator from EEI Communications is a fun (!) way to get a ballpark estimate of the cost of a site at the very earliest stages of course development.
  • Process overview. While you're at it, check out some of EEI's excellent content on their multimedia process and web-development process. These are short, simple and graphically interesting...each is a good tool for describing the steps of the process to others in your organization.
  • "Human obstacles." This article from a past issue of ASTD's Learning Circuits describes some of the perceptions and obstacles to overcome when instituting elearning.
Posted by jotz at 06:23 PM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2004

RESOURCES

Quick interactivity. Adding a user poll is one way to add quick interactivity to a Web site.
Pollhost is one such free hosted service that allows you to add up to 30 polls at a time to your site. I've now added a poll to the left-hand column of this blog so you can test out the service.

Posted by jotz at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2004

RESOURCES

Ever ask, "What's a Wiki?" The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning defines Educational Wikis in this paper.

Here's an interactive, flash-based learning style assessment from EnactCorp.

ASTD Learning Circuits presents an article on how to use collaboration to help learners feel more "connected" to elearning

In the June issue of DEOS News (in PDF format), James Tyler describes a California State University study to assess the level of acceptance by campus students of online course packets in support of a blended (classroom/online) course.

Posted by jotz at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2004

RESOURCES

MIT's OpenCourseWare: This is a free and open educational resource that allows you to view more than 700 available courses from 33 disciplines and all 5 MIT schools.

Posted by jotz at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2004

RESOURCES

Free e-learning resources from the June 8 Online Learning News and Reviews newsletter: Additional resources from the Penn State DEOS-L list:
Posted by jtzanis at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2004

RESOURCES

Here are some resources for those of you who want to check out some other blogs...

  • "Edublogs" (http://webtools.cityu.edu.hk/news/newslett/edublogs.htm), on the educational applications of Weblogs

  • Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/), billed as "News for Nerds," is one of the best known

  • Schoolblogs (http://www.schoolblogs.com/) focuses on using blogs in schools (be sure to check out the links to students sites under "class weblogs")

  • Globe of Blogs (http://www.globeofblogs.com/) provides links to blogs grouped by topic, author or area of interest

  • The Weblog of the New York City Writing Project is another good example

    Posted by jotz at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)