This week’s webinar was an opportunity to share approaches to and strategies for what we do and how we do it. With presentations from Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, University of Bath and James Little, University of Leeds the participants explored different contexts for strategies including involving staff, engaging senior management and working in partnership with learners. If you missed this session recordings are available. You can view the Blackboard Collaborate recording which lets you also replay the session chat or view the recording streamed to YouTube.

If you are feeling inspired by the webinar or if you have questions, then join this week’s forum on strategies for Learning Technology. We hope you enjoy the rest of this week and check out the badges for week 1 (please note that the webinar badge is currently unavailable – apologies) and don’t forget to enter the activity code given in the webinar to claim the badge for it this week).

Next week’s webinar will be on Wednesday, May 14, 2014 – 12:30pm BST (timezone conversion) where Panos Vlachopoulos will be talking about Learning design for student-directed learning. Here are more details about the session.

CMALT and ocTEL – a welcome

I have been following some of the…[Read more]

Each week there will be a blog post on the ocTEL blog from one of our volunteers, providing their perspective on how the week’s activities and topics can be used in a CMALT portfolio.

Participating
The course has an introduction week and 6 week-long modules (with a break in the middle). While you can participate from the first day to the last, there is no expectation that you do so. Modules, activities and live sessions don’t require you to have completed any of the previous ones, leaving you free to pick what’s most relevant to you, your role and your context. Each week there will be a “if you only do one thing” section, highlighting what we have chosen as a key activity. There will also be core activities, resources and a live session – and there is a new TEL explorer section for those of us who want to find out more about a particular topic.
Here is a list of the content of the course:

Week 0: TEL & the future (induction) – 28 Apr 2014
Week 1: Concepts and approaches – 5 May 2014
Week 2: Learners and learning – 12 May 2014
Week 3: Materials, platforms and technologies – 19 May 2014
Week 4: Support, feedback and assessment – 2 Jun 2014
Week 5: Leadership, management and keeping on track – 9 Jun 2014
Week 6: Enhancement, review and evaluation – 16 Jun 2014

Whatever you choose to participate in, there will be a range of options for doing so, which you can choose when you register and change throughout the course, including various social media channels, the course platform itself, your own blog, an email list, notifications and so forth. Lurkers are welcome! Particularly if you find something that’s relevant to you.

Re-use, re-share, re-mix
ocTEL is an open course. By open, we don’t just mean free or open to all (although it is both of these things), but its content and platform are openly published. All content of the course is published under a creative commons licence (CC-BY), which means that you can re-use it, share it and re-mix it. Thus, if a part of the course is particularly relevant to the staff development in your institution, you can download all the materials and use them in your own context.
We also collect data about the course and all related activity, with the permission of participants, which we then also publish openly for researchers and others to use.
We hope that as a flexible, open way to share and create knowledge about what works and what doesn’t, about the intelligent use of Learning Technology, you will find a way to make ocTEL work for you. If the course enables you to find out about something interesting, have a valuable insight or make a new connection between 28 April and the end of June, then the course will have been a success.

[1] In 2013 ocTEL was funded by a grant from the Innovation and Transformation Fund of the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.
[box type=”info”]The Association for Learning Technology Team[/box]
[box type=”note”]If you enjoyed reading this article we invite you join the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) as an individual member, and to encourage your own organisation to join ALT as an organisational or sponsoring member.[/box]