eLearning Ecosystem

Page history last edited by ~julz 3 months ago

OTL Ecosystem: Information, Content, and Tools

Online teaching transcends the use of a singular tool and emerges as an ecosystem of multiple touch points for learning. A professional development ecosystem utilizes blogs, wikis, web-conferencing, and course management tools. Balanced ecosystems foster experiential learning for educators and model how educators can teach across networks and channels of communication.

Find out about the architecture and assessment of this type of professional learning and engage in an interactive conversation about creating and balancing your own learning ecosystem.

Let's start with the core toolkit:

LCMS Tool (WebCT) - WebCT is the Learning/Content Management System (LCMS) used by NMSU. It connects to the university-wide management system known as Banner. WebCT helps us manage student enrollment, student grades, course content, and class specific email, discussions, and chats. It provides a secure one-stop shop for your individual classes
Web-Conferencing Tool (Adobe Connect) - Adobe Connect is the web-conferencing tool we prefer in the College of Extended Learning for small group and large group meetings and activities. It is the tool that we will use to provide our hybrid meetings and our synchronous class meeting. These activities are important to foster online learning community and ensure individual student success.Wiki Tool (Pbwiki) - Wikis are one of the most powerful online learning, collaboration, and communication tools available. As you've already noted, we use the wiki tool Pbwiki. The wiki is a place that will always be available. This relates to the weakness noted above in WebCT where when a class is over you are kicked out. You are not kicked out of the wiki unless you drop the program or your class. Our wiki hosts programmatic information, class resources and collaborations, etc. A wiki is also a great place to develop course/workshop/program content. We have plenty examples. If you are interested, send Julia an email requesting wiki examples and she'll send you some.
Instant Messaging Tool (Skype) - We love Skype. It is the most powerful instant messaging tool as well as voice and videoconferencing tool for one-to-one or small group activities. We will use it for office hours, student-teacher meetings, and we encourage that you use it to make connections with your classmates. For example, we recommend that you add your classmates to your contacts and when you are online doing classwork that you have Skype up and running. You will start to see who is online when you are and this can be supportive of developing collaborations and supporting you as an online learner.

Next, we have our peripherals:

We will be using many other tools in our activities and interactions in order to promote your understanding of what's available, increase teacher and social presence, and provide opportunities for engaging interactive activities. Some of these tools include:

Voice Discussion Tool (Voicethread) - Voicethread is a content presentation tool that allows for text, voice, and video discussions about the content. It is a highly populur tool with online teachers. We'll be using this to supplement WebCT's discussion tool as it lacks in voice and video to support community and presence.
Blog Tool (Blogger) - We provide a blog presence for the program. We use Blogger which is under the Google umbrella of tools. It's fun. You can contribute. It's a public representation for us. And we consider an indepth understanding of blogs to be of importance in your experience with us. There are many blog tools and we highly recommend that you start yourself a blog. For programs, Blogger is really nice. For the sophisticated blogger (person who blogs), WordPress is an excellent option. Check out Bethany's wordpress blog as an example. For the surfer blogger, Tumblr is really fun. Check out Julia's Tumblr for an example. For the email blogger, Posterous is ideal.
Audio/Video Tools - We use YouTube, Viddler, and more.
Media Creation Tools - We experiment with everything of quality that we come across. Currently, you may see Animoto, Moblyng, Slideshare...
Social Bookmarking Tools - social bookmarking allows you to share favorite links with others and preserve and organize them for yourself. We use delicious, Google, Firefox...
And more. The tools available to support online learners seem endless. There's no way to cover them all. A cool place to check out what's new in cool online tools is Go2Web20. Here are a couple of cool graphics that try to diagram or describe the main categories for these tools: