Training starts for 2013

Following my rounds of staff meetings before the end of summer term last, I have this week started to get the training for elearning underway. I have managed to get a good number if staff from just all curriculum area’s to sign up for a session, the first of which ran this week. If you have been following this blog then you will know that the strategy focuses upon three principle ingredients of delivery framework, content and assessment. This first round of training focuses upon content and introduces the idea of assessment. The idea that you are going to require staff to carryout  major changes to their existing materials is always likely to induce an expected and to be frank understandable level of reticence, however by using Wimba Create, which will convert materials produced in MS Word into Scorm compliant packages, can pretty much neutralise that.

Activities in the session cover the following exercises

• Word document to learning package conversion
• Using Metadata
• Managing Course Settings
• Basic Styling
• Embedding Web and stored Media
• Embedding websites
• Questions and Feedback
• Publishing a Wimba SCORM Document
• Publishing to DSpace

General speaking providing we have no technical glitches the 1.5 – 2 hour has proven to be realistic.

You will notice from the list of items, I include publishing to DSpace. Because Dspace is a preservation repository, and given the fact that we are harvested regularly, this activity seemed to make sense.

Having mentioned technical glitches we did experience one. When embedding a YouTube video into a package I have always made use of the 'Share/ Embed and Use old embed code' option. On this occasion though I hit a problem. First off the  ‘Use old embed code’ simply was not there, so OK find another example and use that. When I did, the generated package would not play the content, we only had a white screen, ouch; have you experienced similar? I found a way around this though. If you go to this site  

http://www.gorissen.info/Pierre/files/YouTube_code.htm

and copy the video url and hit the generate but, a number of embed code outputs appear. I found that taking the first one at the top ‘Standard definition embed’, actually worked just fine, phew.

 
After each training session I am going to provide coaching for everybody on a one-2-one basis, which I think is going to prove valuable for us all including myself, so I will be blogging on just that as we move through the Winter Term, so please stay in touch