Well, I think that one of the problems of the corporate universities is that there’s nothing to dislike about it on the surface, but only if one looks at nothing but the surface.

Here is one basic problem which doesn’t require much digging below the surface:

– One of the advantages of MOOCs is that a great teacher can reach many more students,…[Read more]

That’s fair enough! Thanks for the reply. I can see how mature students would prefer it for the more peaceful atmosphere – then again, I would think (apparently wrongly and perhaps unfairly) that mature students would be more used to traditional methods of lecture delivery and thus would prefer to be in the lecture theatre. It’s good to challenge…[Read more]

I really like the methods you adopted in selecting a new VLE. I wish more universities did this, and were more consistent about their use of VLEs. In St Andrews, we use several environments at the same time – MMS, WebCT, Moodle, iSaint, and e-Vision, and frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. The study materials for some modules are on MMS, for some on…[Read more]

Sounds like quite a project. I particularly like the fact that you decided to employ someone who will make sure that the technical part works – lecturers are often expected to deal with this sort of issues themselves, but we all know that setting up multiple screens and projectors is already quite tricky, save if you have to do it in multiple…[Read more]

[accidental double post, sorry]

I also tried the E-learning Examples, though I went for a different game: ‘Expedition: The Game’. I have to say I don’t see the point in it.

It started from a small technical issue – the game doesn’t work in Opera. I had to use IE to run it. The game requires you to run an expedition in Africa, rolling dice to gain supplies, porters and miles,…[Read more]

I find that at the university level the types of learning are very different depending on the year. In Scotland, undergraduate courses are typically 4 year long, with years 3& 4 contributing to the degree classification. This means that:

– level 1 students generally try to engage in deep learning, especially in the first semester, because they…[Read more]

I couldn’t agree more on the uselessness of the end-of-year summary assessments. In philosophy, students are typically given two hours to complete three short essays on topics chosen from 5-10 options. This seems to me to be the most unnatural way to conduct assessment – what is the relevance it bears to any actual practice students will engage in…[Read more]

That’s very interesting, thanks! The remarks on iPads would be interesting to research in a bit more detail – assuming that medium is a message, I think it’s safe to also think that different technologies which might give you access to the same resources, but differ in interface and input-output methods, lend themselves better to different kinds…[Read more]

I was just looking for something like this as well, thanks!

I think that giving students autonomy to “direct” their own learning is very important, though not particularly easy. This is something I find to be the most important part in student essay writing – students are required to do independent research on top of the compulsory reading (at least that’s how it works in Philosophy). They are given a g…[Read more]