Small group for those teaching Business Education?

[Andrew Chambers]

Anyone interested in using Technology, distance education or Moocs in Business Schools? I’m an educational developer/elearning specialist at the Australian Graduate School of Management. Our program is 3/4 online with extensive use of Moodle and other techs to support students learning our specialty Masters in Business and Technology.

I would be keen to form a group based around teaching in business schools. Anyone else from this discipline who would like to catch up?

[JaneBritton]

Hi Andrew,
Can I join your group?  I work in the Management Science department at UCL  (we don’t have a Business School as such).  I am very interested in developing use of on-line and e-learning tools generally for teaching management courses, including distance options.  My own particular specialism is Project Management.  We already use Moodle but I don’t think any of our programs are as extensively online yet as yours seems to be.  UCL has a graduate school in Adelaide where I have taught also.   Nice to meet you!

[AliSheph]

Hi Jane and Andrew

I teach accounting at Leeds University Business School – so I’d love to join your group.  We use Blackboard and I’m using a range of other technologies in my teaching – Twitter, Articulate and podcasts being the most recent of these.  I’m in the process of planning a small project where a group of colleagues will use iPads to develop our teaching, grounded in our subject discipline.

My intro. is at http://alicesadventuresinedtech.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/octel-week-0-introduction/

Nice to meet you both!

Alice

[JaneBritton]

Hi Alice – nice to meet you!  I am now following your blog.  I started one up yesterday for this course, not much on it yet though:   http://elearningjane.wordpress.com/

I will upload my Intro shortly.
Cheers, Jane

 

 

[CvetankaWalter]

Hi,

My name is Cvetanka. I have been teaching Business English in Germany for several years. I started offering Moodle activities to my f2f courses. I would like to join this group.

[Andrew Chambers]

Great to hear from everyone,

Apologies for delayed response. But the weekend ensued and 3 kids means its sometimes busy…

Cvetanka, I teach study skills workshops face to face and online webinars on the same topic. It’s pretty full on come start of semester but a very rewarding experience. If you would like to see what we teach I can point you at our creative commons study skills materials.

Alice, I would be interested to know more about your online MBA course. Could we share content? The use of iPads is also intriguing. We have yet to go down this path however.

Jane, I had not heard of UCL before. It’s interesting. I will take a look at your blog. I might use Storify again like I did for the last MOOC I took. My earlier storify is here (partly incomplete and dated now: http://storify.com/atsc/moocmooc-reflections I found Storify to be quite powerful for linking together thoughts about online resources.

All for now. Must fly. Kids guitar lessons (And of course I signed up in moral support to learn Bass)… 😉

A.

 

[ActivateLearn]

Hi everyone

My name is Helen Blunden and I’m a Virtual Learning Consultant at the National Australia Bank. I’ve been in Learning and Development for 23 years mainly in private sector with strong corporate background.  I’d like to join this group if possible.

I’m taking the course to see what can be applied in a corporate L&D programs so some stuff may be relevant, others not so – however, it’s still a massive learning opportunity for me.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter (@ActivateLearn) and my blog at: http://activatelearning.wordpress.com

My reflections for the first week activities are here:

http://activatelearning.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/week-1-introduction-to-octel/

In our organisation, we’re considered quite ahead in social learning space – although we do have a crappy LMS (SAP).  I’m working on a project currently to implement a social learning platform http://www.weteachme.org so that we have a platform to allow anyone in our organisation to run their own coaching sessions to anyone in the bank.  Effectively it’s peer to peer learning but the platform allows registrations and promotions and evaluations quite easily (without the need for the LMS Administrator team to dictate what we need to do and how).  It’s going to introduce a lot more flexibility in running training.

Also our organisation strongly supports Yammer – we have Sharepoint and online work spaces but we still have some way to go to fully integrate these.  My role is to support the business to use virtual classrooms, online learning spaces, podcasting, blogs and wikis in in their learning programs.

[Andrew Chambers]

Hi Helen, You are mmost welcome to join us…

BTW we use Yammer internally too. Seems to work reasonably well for discussions about the running and use of of the LMS (for example). From what I have heard sharepoint may drop some of its product line related to web sites shortly. We had been using this internally but am unsure where that project will head now.

We mostly support our students via discussion forums, blogs (for reflection) and quite a lot of assignment submission. Note however that our courses are quite academic in nature. One issue at the moment is difference between old media e.g. paper and new media e.g. ipads and reading habits. We are still investigating this but the research I’ve read so far seems to indicate we are giving students too much content and will need to change for online delivery of our content…

[Andrew Chambers]

Wow, great blog Helen! I wish I had the time to committ to more blogging…

[AliSheph]

Hi Andrew

There’s some interesting stuff in the iPads thread on this forum.  It’s early days yet for us.

Re the online MBA module, it was at my previous institution so their IP but broadly, it was an introductory/intermediate financial accounting course.  We developed a workbook as the central resource, which was specifically written for the course with a series of short chapters by topic, including theory text and practice questions.  This was pdf via the Blackboard VLE plus hard copy.  There were then answers released to the practice questions on adaptive release, plus a discussion forum woven by me with space for less structured queries/interaction/peer to peer assistance, plus more structured forum activities on a weekly basis.  For revision, we then had some screencasts where I worked through particular tricky question types with technique tips in the audio commentary, and then partnering discussion forum threads.  Seemed to work quite well – the feedback was good, students who were across timezones and timepoor liked the structured but asynchronous approach, and the exam results were not too bad for what was deemed a difficult module.

[Andrew Chambers]

Alice, Thanks for the details. That MBA sounds very similar to our model. One question. How were the exams taken? On campus? Proctored at workplace? At an exam venue? Online?

The screencasts sound interesting as well. We mainly have professional video from the coordinators talking about the content.

What were these screencasts made with? I am looking for simple solutions end user academic staff can use…

 

Thanks

[AliSheph]

Hi Andrew

The exams were taken at proxy venues round the world – the institution had some overseas centres, or otherwise via the British Council in other countries.  There was a UK centre as well.  Hard copy exams currently – but I’m sure online exams will come down the track.

Screencasts- my current uni uses Articulate on campus-wide licences.   My previous uni used Wimba as part of Blackboard VLE (which I think is now Elluminate – which is being used for the ocTEL webinars).  This can be used for synchronous webinars but I used it for recording (ie I set up a room with no students, recorded the whole thing and then posted it on theVLE).   I find Articulate the easier to use, but it is powerpoint-based so depends if you like that sort of thing!  I had a good look around for free tools that would record longer than 5 mins and drew a blank.  Not sure if anyone else in this group has come across any ways of screencasting for free that they could share?

[GaryButtriss]

Hi Andrew

I am a researcher and educator at ANU however i have facilitated both online and face-t-face in the MBT program when i was at UNSW. I am interested in this discussion focused on business education. I am also trying to incorporate technology to better engage the students in learning ..why i am taking part here. i have been in higher education since 2000, previously in industry. At ANU we use Moodle and i have tried to incorporate technology in how i interact with students, deliver my face to face classes, and design student assessment, including using business simulations like StratSim, and currently working with colleagues at USydney to design a simulation for triple bottom line sustainability impacts; have also had my students work with Arts – film students to produce films as an assessable item ( their work can be seen through the link on my home page – http://cbe.anu.edu.au/people/rsm/gary-buttriss/ ). this would be the most successful i have been in engaging students in their learning and the outcomes were far greater than anticipated – and i dont just mean the quality of their films.

i am keen to hear how others are confronting the same issues of student engagement and technology assisted learning

cheers

Gary

 

[Andrew Chambers]

Great stuff Gary. Yes I seem to recollect your name coming up at some stage…

Your use of video is very interesting. We are investigating similar things ourselves. However at present we are considering individual participant contributions via video. However I can see from the quality of the product produced that group ones would likely work better (due to mix of skills required to produce the outcome). Of course for AACSB accreditation purposes (which is one of the drivers for us) we need to follow their guidelines on “oral presentations” and use of individual assessable tasks.

Your sim also sounds interesting. Most of our courses use discussion and activities around case studies and we have little use of interactive sims, role plays or the like. The “Everest” sim is used by some in MBA but of course that is a commercial product.

Would be interested to here the range of activity types that others use to support their business teaching practices…

 

Andrew

 

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