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Showing posts from September, 2017

Florida Virtual School

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Mark & I worked with Florida Virtual School (FLVS) over 3 days of intensive PL.  We gained a good overview of their operations and what it takes to produce and facilitate successful online courses. Mark & Josh with FLVS staff Carrie Alexander and Crystal Howard.  I really liked the glass prints and mottos. An interesting thing to note was that FLVS use something known as Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) to develop their own proprietary courses (using additional software) to make them Learning Mangement System (LMS) 'agnostic'.  They can then provide their courses to organisations regardless of which LMS they use, whether it is Canvas, Moodle, etc, and are also future-proofing their work. Josh at the FLVS front desk. The pedagogical approach and administration at FLVS was far more structured than with any other online courses that we had seen.  For example, there were weekly target quotas for student contact and 'evidence of engagement' for the tea

Learning & Human Development with Educational Technology

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A second course that I have been involved in over the last few weeks is 'Learning & Human Development with Educational Technology' with Prof. Bill Cope at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. This is normally a 16-week Masters-level unit, condensed into an 8-week structure, delivered in 6-weeks, so it was quite intense! (in fact, I am still finishing bits and pieces). Activation of the student participants as learning resources for each other, creating original works and embedding recursive feedback mechanisms were key features of this course.  How this was facilitated through the CG Scholar system in a learning community was truly innovative (and impressive) in my view, in contrast to other systems and courses I have experienced. Here is a link to the CG Scholar (a web application that is probably best described as a Learning Management System plus publishing platform):   http://cgscholar.com Below is the course outline from the U of I webpage: EPSY