Author: Roger Harrison
Hi, I'm a senior lecturer in public health, at the University of Manchester. For seven years I have been course unit leader on a fully online distance learning programme in public health/primary care. I've been designing & running course units for this, using Blackboard now. I work with other lecturers alongside a e-learning team. Having students all over the world helps give an interesting perspective to the teaching of public health and to using online learning. I am keen to learn more about pedagogical principles and development for technology enhanced learning, and how to maximise the student learning experience. More recently I have become involved in developing proposals and hopefully design and running of a MOOC. I am also interested in exploring greater use of OERs for public health and would like to pursue my research interest/hypothesis I am calling "Just In Time Learning". But with a PhD already alongside other things, my friends are trying to keep me away from more studying. I am a convert for free-education across the world, which is frustrating at times working in a university which clearly needs to bring in income too. But massive shifts have taken place with Web 2 and democratic education movements. I would like to find out if there is a local network / northern network for TEHL in higher education, and if not, perhaps we could start one.

This is an archive of the 2013 version of ocTEL.

#ocTEL Final Week

Well this is going to be a very short post. Not because I am not interested in the final topic on evaluation, but because I am busy preparing two conference presentations I am giving in just over a week. I

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#ocTEL Week 6 – help and ideas please!

Effective Assessment in a Digital Age (JISC, 2010): consider the following questions. Week 6 is certainly raising a lot of questions for me, and presenting challenges in terms of my current teaching methods. To be honest, I’m left wondering how

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#ocTEL: Digital Templates

This week, we’ve been asked to read and reflect on the use of templates for developing online courses. I read the paper by Hill and colleagues (2012), and was perhaps more confused by the fact that this just made common

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Hello, I've seen the fascinating link from John Duhring which gives a network analysis of the twitter…

Roger Harrison

Sat, 11 May 2013 03:03:31 GMT
– Community
Hello, I’ve seen the fascinating link from John Duhring which gives a network analysis of the twitter conversations for a particular course. I’ve also come across ideas where students can use whatever tools they want to share/discuss/comment (like the system in OcTEL MOOC) and they then get aggregated into one single place for all to view. What I’d like to know is how to do this. It would be great to see if I can persuade my Faculty to allow this for a course I teach on. If anyone could send me a link to how to set this up that would be great.

How to develop student communities

Hi – below is a rather rough comment I sent to Keith Smyth following his Webinar. I’m intrigued how to encourage my students to interact more on online. I would also like to find out more from other people how

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#ocTEL Application of Learning Theories

I had a bit of a backlash to this area because learning about theories either confuse or frustrate me. But I have found some value in reading about these, albeit briefly and then thinking about what I do already in

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#ocTEL Re: Understanding Learners’ Needs: Activity 2.1

Hi, I appreciate it can be frustrating to try and understand the learning experience from the perspective of the student. I have many years experience too, meeting students who enrol for an online distance learning course. Our students have varying levels of ICT or digital literacy skills. This can make one question why they have then decided to enrol on an online course. About a third of our students are based overseas – some of these students have extremely limited broadband activity at home, or none at all. They have to use a local internet café, and even when using […]

#ocTEL – why shouldn’t students with less than ideal ICT skills study online.

Hi, I appreciate it can be frustrating to try and understand the learning experience from the perspective of the student. I have many years experience too, meeting students who enrol for an online distance learning course. Our students have varying

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#ocTEL Understanding Learners’ Needs – Week Two in the course

Week Two of the ocTEL course and this week the material is looking at the needs of learners. I find this an interesting yet challenging topic because it is so diverse. It is however, probably the most important aspect of

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#ocTEL Socrates and Emergent Learning Models

Week One is only half way through, and already my brain is starting to hurt! I’m more of a practical person than a theorist, and easily get lost in articles and debates about theory. It reminds me of when I

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