25 January, 2006

EDUCAUSE Review Magazine: Multi-Disciplinary Teams and Podcasting

EDUCAUSE is in it's own words "a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology".

The EDUCAUSE Review magazine is available on-line. While many of it's articles are American focused or relate to IT support rather than our Learning Technologist roles, there are some very interesting ones.

In the January/February 2006 issue it is worth reading "The Myth about Online Course Development", by Diana G. Oblinger and Brian L. Hawkins. This is quite a concise but complex article discussing issues surrounding the development of online courses. The major point being made regards the importance of a multi-disciplinary team approach in the creation of a course, and everyones need to know their role in it. From this they bring up some of the important issues that need consideration at course conception.

The November/December 2005 issue has a very positive article about Podcasting, and the possibilities that can be enabled by it's use. Here in Learning Technology, we have been developing an easy way for Academic Staff to record their lectures, or discussions and put them online in various formats. The next steps that I see are to look at distributing the recordings through RSS feeds and iTunes (as done by Stanford Uni), and creating training for students to begin using these technologies if they don't already.

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