Thursday, July 08, 2004

Me learning eLearning

Today I am at the eLearning conference, hosted by my university.

We are told that ‘e’ is for embedding and enhancing and so the day is less about the technology more about the pedagogies for eLearning. Matt Justice, who works at the Ryerson University, Canada told us the the ‘e’ is for evolution. ‘e’ is also for enabling according to George Roberts.

The diversity of presentations through the day made me think that ‘e’ is not for easy!

furthermore...

Samia Kamai presented to us a very useful comparitive analysis of a module being run in parallel mode - as Online and as OnSite. We have a lot of insightful statistics and learnt that the OnlIne students seemed to make a much larger contribution to discussions than did the OnSite students. There were no failures for those attending in OnLine mode and the OnSite addendance was poor in comparaison to the Online who participated throughout. Shpend Gerguri's presentation on the 3D Cad teaching for Technology students was very compelling. We were entertained with spinning 3D models of cameras, machie parts and assorted 3D objects. The 3D Studio Max software is taught on this module and a vast amount of online material is made available. It is interesting to note that this course teaches the software '3DMax' to enable the students to create presentations of animated 3D objects. A member of the audience from the Architecture department uses this same tool in the context of architectural design. There will certainly be some collaboration between these lecturers.