During one of my most recent visits to a retail cellular store to browse through the newest mobile technology, I wasn’t surprised too surprised to see a three-year-old rifling through his mother’s cell phone, then quickly giving that up to play with one of the new tablets on the showroom floor. The place was as familiar to him as his favorite story or coloring book.
With more people telecommuting these days, it only makes sense that teachers and scholars would do the same through student-directed learning.
Perhaps you have seen recent advertising campaigns pointing at home-schooling opportunities now available for K-12 students, in addition to those curriculums offered at online colleges and universities. This reiterates a growing trend for learning online and the concept of student-directed learning is changing the traditional classroom environment.
In recent years, online learning has exponentially increased in popularity. Technological innovations have enabled people of all ages to learn from a distance and by utilizing a variety of different mediums; from video tutorials to info graphics and slideshows. It is staggering how online much learning has evolved over the years, and how it continues to revolutionize modern educational practices.
With the creation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, educational institutions soon began to incorporate technology within their educational practices.In 1994, the very first online curriculum was introduced by CALCampus. Their online school was made available for several major telecommunications networks; including PC-Link, AppleLink, AOL and CompuServe amongst others. Significantly, in early 1995, CALCampus Online Campus made its online school available through the Internet as CALCampus.com. In this way, CALCampus was instrumental in introducing the concept of online-based schools for the public; enabling real-time classroom tutorials to take place via the Internet.
In this day and age, thanks to our increasingly wired and connected world, you can learn something any time you like. Education goes beyond what you can Google or find on Wikipedia. To get a job or impress a boss, you’ll first need to broaden your professional skills. Knowing to how use the basic software and programs related to your industry has always been a core requirement. But those who really excel in the workplace or in their consulting careers possess a wider range of knowledge, skills, and expertise. Continue reading
Why has elearning been a great encouragement for students around the world? The prime reason for that is that access to knowledge was never open to all. People with financial restrictions, geographical barriers or physical impediments who had little chance previously in the academic sphere now have the doors to lifelong learning open to them. The new age education system brings you an updated version of knowledge that you can access at your convenience with millions of people from different parts of the world. It’s a blissful learning age for students far and wide.
In a nutshell, learning online is popular because it’s… Continue reading
Do you want to make your content more appealing and interactive? You can enrich it by adding videos to your units! There are two ways you can do this:
- Upload your videos to the lesson’s file manager. While editing the unit place the mouse where you want to insert the video. Open the file manager, search for the video you want to add and simply click on the blue arrow: The video is now inserted and you can change its dimensions by dragging its edges. Continue reading
Interactivity is a key component in the learning process. While it’s relatively easy for a teacher in a classroom to interact with the learners and, by ‘reading’ the situation, involve them in the learning process in the most effective ways, it’s much harder for those producing online learning materials. For one thing, they can only make educated guesses at their learners’ needs, state of mind, attitude to and preferences for learning and so on.
So, when developing online learning materials, it’s important to define the content that needs to be learned; determine what the learner must do as a result of completing these learning materials, and so decide on the most appropriate ‘treatment’ for the content. Users must interact with online learning materials to navigate through the materials; amass information and make decisions.
Considering what the learner needs to know or do – rather than what the teacher wants to teach – involves you in ‘interactivity’. So here are ten things to bear in mind about interactivity when you’re developing online learning materials:
- Allow the learners to control their learning – so they’re more likely to engage with the whole learning activity. You should always let them see where they’re going on their learning journey and what options they have at each stage of that journey. Continue reading
There are countless articles all over the internet describing telecommuting and how that compares to “traditional” working in an office. However, most of them deal with the matter under the assumption that the employee is either self-employed, or has a flexible working schedule. That means, when comparing the two types of employment, one of the key advantages of telecommuting is presented to be the freedom in making use of your time in your own way.
This is not necessarily an advantage though. Under the light of recent developments, where Yahoo and now Best Buy are cancelling their flexible work programs, it would be interesting to present a third option: working from home, but in an office at the same time (for the sake of this post, let’s call this “telepresence”). This means that you get to work from the location of your choice but under the 40-hour schedule and availability obligations you would have if you were to work in an office (I have been working this way in our company for several years).
So, how does “telepresence” relationship compare to the other two extremes (and why is it better)?
You can find telecommuting vs office work comparisons all over the internet, so I’ll only present a list of “telepresence” advantages compared with telecommuting: Continue reading
The history of mankind has shown that information is the fundamental leverage factor for our mental development. The most profound moments throughout time have to do with changes in the way information was communicated, stored, processed. After inventing language and writing, the most important development was the modern communication networks. And now, the tablet.
What makes tablets so powerful is their inherent interactivity and intuitiveness. The Economist had a great article about Grace Wambui, a 14-year-old pupil in Nairobi, who was given a tablet at school. Having never touched a tablet before, she figured out how to use it within a minute or so. And she is old. My own niece, 18 months old, figured out how to see videos and photos on my tablet, after playing her favorite games. She learned how to play the infamous birds game and her favorite memory-cards game, while she could barely speak. Now, that’s a breakthrough. Continue reading
We would like to thank all contributors for their competition blog post submissions. It was a tough competition with a very high level of entries from all over the world – but we have nailed it down to our 5 favorites!
- Competition Finalist 1: John B. Lacson Foundation Maritime Uni. Case Study by Cristin Arante
- Competition Finalist 2: Meeting Learner’s Needs by Bob Little
- Competition Finalist 3: Social Learning Applied by Kalliopi Sigala
- Competition Finalist 4: Top 10 Startup Social Media Curation Tools for Social Learning in the Workplace by Duma Cornel Lucian
- Competition Finalist 5: Learning on Tablets by Rosalie Ledda
How will the winner be selected, and when will the winner be announced?
The most popular post will win the competition – that is, the post with the most social shares and engagement! We will leave these posts on the blog for a 3 week period from today to collect shares and comments and we will use all of our social media channels to share over the competition period!
The winner will be announced on January 10th and will be notified by email and on social media channels!