Here are nine guides written initially by the authors listed below. Nearly all are current or recent members of the ALT Research Committee. The guides went live in June 2010, and we encourage users with knowledge and experience in the field to contribute to their long term maintenance and development. ALT does not have the resources to closely monitor whether and if yes how the guides are changed, but will be keeping a general eye on them.
The government is to delay the research excellence framework by a year to see whether consensus emerges in the sector over plans to measure the social and economic "impact" of academics' work. - Ha Ha!
The recently released ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gives some excellent insights into trends in college students' technology ownership, perceptions, skills, and habits.
XPERT (Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory) project is a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use.
Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.
This post provides an annotated bibliography of some work on using social media (in particular Facebook) as a pre-registration/pre-university/induction tool. The references given can also be found at my Delicious site. Some examples of the use of Facebook for induction purposes are given at the end.
SNAPP is a software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies. The network visualisations of forum interactions provide an opportunity for teachers to rapidly identify patterns of user behaviour – at any stage of course progression. SNAPP has been developed to extract all user interactions from various commercial and open source learning management systems (LMS) such as BlackBoard (including the former WebCT), and Moodle. SNAPP is compatible for both Mac and PC users and operates in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
Splicing information and social relations to suite the needs of different situations is increasingly important. The fields of learning and development have not yet been transformed to the online environment. The combination of learning/knowledge analytics, data visualization, and activity streams provide, I think, a sufficient basis for educators to begin planning for a post-course view of education.
A. Rovai. The Internet and Higher Education, 10 (1):
77 - 88(2007)Special Section of the AERA Education and World Wide Web special Interest Group (EdWeb/SIG).