Minted Cubism

As a new round of training comes along, I start to think about how well my training sessions have run in the past ,and to what extent they have achieved their desired effect. A particular request for training that I felt had been covered by timetabled delivery plus the availability of instructional videos caused me to get thinking though. One of the reporting options I have is being able to see utilisation, and in this particular case this did not appear to be so good, so why? Not an easy question, or one that I suspect has a single answer, but from my web design knowledge I am aware of the issues surrounding click-depth, and in this case it was 4. If it turns on depth, then I perceive further accessibility issues developing as the click-depth to our new toolkit resource bank is also 4. So is the solution to raise the level of materials on the site, as with Google, everyone would like to be on the front page. At this point I decide to consider what I would actually like to happen here. Well basically, the materials having a highly persistent visibility. And it was thinking about this last point that led me to consider that maybe I need to have a physical presence, and from that came the idea of what I discovered are called Minted Cubes. Minted cubes are small plastic boxes, filled with mints (the clue is in the name I found), and how does this help me, it helps because each of the six surfaces of the cube has an image, in my case, an image of a resource, please see accompanying image, plus some links below.

Total Merchanise

Probospromotions

Sweetconcepts

So the plan is I hand these out at training sessions and they find their way onto desktops, shelves, computer tops, filing cabinet tops and window ledges, in fact any flat surface hopefully in arms reach. First off I downloaded a cube cut-out template and constructed a model, then copied a random sample of six images from our toolkit pages; see accompanying screenshot. My wider plan is to create cubes for combinations of toolkit resource such as media, presentation tools, gamification etc, in the hope that this may further buy into the psychology of collecting, though I may be a little to ambitious on that one. Anyway, the good news is that following a short presentation, the idea has the green light, and this week we will be putting together the proposals for the first batch. If you have any ideas or experience in supplementing training with merchandise then please feel free to comment or tell us about it.

Bye for now Skipper

Blended Learning

 

Maybe its just coincidence, well of course it is, but this week seems to have been full of requests and postings coming my way on blended online learning. 

It all seemed to start off with a request to convert some course options for one of the professional programmes to being fully online, in fact students could in theory even take just the online course as part of professional development anyway, and it was that possibility that raised a whole raft of other considerations. So first off, what are the considerations for moving from class based to online delivery, well I have talked about that a lot over the years on this blog, particular the move away from class support materials written in Word to something more eLearning compliant and for that we have been making very successful use of Wimba Create for some time now, I can recommend it. We soon realised however that an online course should have online payment, online enrolment and of course following that, seamless access to the actual Moodle course itself, all through a new web page on our college website. As you will I am sure know, if you have been through this one yourselves, it very soon gets complicated. However it seems not beyond realisation, as online payment and registration has already been successfully tested, and it appears is in need of an early trial, well here it is then, and we move on, great. So this was not so much actually doing from my perspective, but connecting.

 

Getting back to those blended learning postings that I mentioned earlier, the first was headed ‘Navigating the Digital Shift:Implementation Strategies For Blended And Online Learning’ by John Bailey, Carri Schneider, Tom Vander Ark.

While written around the Common Core standard, this little eBook is well worth downloading , though I confess that I am yet to read through all 270 pages of it, so I will be including my usual chapter breakdown. The clear and  central role of enduring commitment required to get these processes in place in order to realise the potential benefits makes for a refreshing read,  rather than the all to often throwing of technology at a very long term need and the inevitable consequences I seem to come across in postings. Please free to reply on this one.

 

 

Finally, if you find yourself being pushed for justify a blended learning option, then this posting

‘7 Top Blended Learning Benefits For Corporate Training’ from Litmos.com and by Christopher Pappas may be just what you are looking for,  providing as is does a brief and concise outline under the following heading:-

1. It offers the best of both worlds. 

2. It enhances corporate training effectiveness.

3. It simplifies corporate training logistics.

4. It is cost-effective.

5. It allows your employees to have control over their training.

6. It enhances employees soft skills.

7. It facilitates corporate training feedback.

 

hope you find it useful , and that’s all for now, but please feel free to comment and you may like to follow my Twitter feed Hash Tag SkipperAbel.

Internet Report

Interested as you clearly must in eLearning and so to some greater or lesser extent what is going on re the Internet, then if you have yet to get site of it, the “State of the Internet” presentation running to some 196 slides is going to be a slide turner for you. Delivered by Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers in May this year, the report brings out a whole raft of key data points that I feel certain you will be grabbing for reference. I found the timeline showing the “Evolution of Content discovery” particularly relevant to any ideas I may be forming on the way forward for design and distributing of content particularly with regard to trending on horizontal / vertical  screen orientation views; that all starts from slide 24 by the way. And if you are of the view that students are always going to be students, then please take a look at the qualities for Generation X and Millennials hiring managers feel they are most likely to posses; this must surely also say something not insignificant about our cohorts (slide 113). In fact you may to look at the the lazy  ‘Generation Y myth ’ of playful, collaboration producing nervousness  of how this 80% of the coming workforce presents challenges to accepted practice and process. Their focus on short term success link to poor commitment is unjustified, they feel there are better ways to work and this should be our driver toward a constructivist pedagogical shift to leverage the affordances of story and online technologies.

Moving forward to the section headed “Connectivity has Changed” (slide 115), makes it start to come real that if we are still living in the world of being defined by location, alluding to the classroom, then it seems to me we should be thinking more in terms of being defined by who we are connected to, and that last point, before you even get to slide 169, take a guess at which country has the highest percentage of mobile Internet traffic, I was surprised; will this and similar trends affect your decisions on eLearning design? let me know please post a reply. Anyway great report, thoroughly enjoyed the read and will most certainly read again, and again.

Please follow hashtag SkipperAbel for more frequent updates on eLearning trends, software and practices.

Bye for now

Multi-Tenancy in Moodle

Have I considered Multi-tenancy for our Moodle, my quick response to that question was no, actually a new one on me, though I ask  are you already a Moodle mutli-tenancy site? If like myself this was a new, then it seems that multi-tenancy is when the same data / information and content infrastructure is used by different groups or organizations. Which I guess in our case may be applied to the areas of 14 to 16 provision, FE, HE and then Professional Studies, not a particularly unusual combination for a college I would suspect these days. Anyway each of these would become an LMS tenant, each having their own courses, materials and requirements. Without the multi-tenancy concept this would have to be implemented through separate LMS, and I do recall one college not so long ago having five! And the shed load of admin work that with it.

Apparently though Moodle unlike Totara while not being able to fully support the concept, does have a pseudo-multi-tenancy capability by combining the front-page settings with the use of Course Categories, which according to the posting and I quote - can be done by configuring the “Front page items when logged in” setting to Enrolled Courses. With regard to branding courses to specific departments or business units, the Course Categories can be named after the department, and Subcategories can be labelled as Course Topics. Each Category and Subcategory can then be themed separately from the Corporate/Organizational theme. Roles and capabilities can be assigned to specific categories to allow access to edit courses. Additionally, this can be done by inheritance to the Subcategories and courses.

If all this grabs your interest then follow this link From Lambda Solutions and read some more, there is even a free white paper on the subject.

 

 

 

 Finally, I know I have mention Twitter before in my postings, but when I came across this little info-graphic I just had to include it in this weeks roundup. While my own postings to Twitter these days seem be almost exclusively from other social networks, that still leaves me feeling a regular education user of the micro blogger, just hash tag SkipperAbel  my avatar name from SecondLife