You are browsing the archive for forum.

ocTEL is over, long live ocTEL

24/06/2013 in Course information

Please forgive the slightly self-important title, but what we wanted to let everyone know is that, while the first run of the course is over, ocTEL will continue to be available for a variety of purposes:

  • participate — existing participants can keep doing the course activities, posting on their blogs or the course forums until further notice (we stopped taking new registrations a couple of weeks ago);
  • access — the course materials will remain available on this site until such time as we want to repurpose the site for another run of the course (then they will be archived in another accessible location);
  • remix — all the materials we’ve originated are available for re-use under a CC-BY licence, and we’re interested to hear how they can be made more useful for re-uses.

To take each specific component of the course, here are our current plans, which are subject to change in the light of feedback and experience.

  • Forums — these will continue to operate, and you can post and reply to new topics as you have throughout the course, until further notice — into the summer until such time are they are no new posts or we get a spam problem, at which point they may be frozen.
  • Email list — this has been quiet for some time, so we’re likely to retire it in a week, at which point we’ll clear the list of subscribers, but the archive of messages will remain available.
  • Course reader and daily newsletter — we will keep these going while they are still serving a purpose: that is, while there are still a meaningful number of new posts to bring to participants’ attention, however long that proves to be. Read the rest of this entry →

Getting the right level of challenge

14/05/2013 in Course information

Continuing our series of featured contributions by ocTEL participants, here Nicola Whitton draws out some points from blogs and forums in the Week 3 activities (which she led). It’s good to see that several of the discussions from ‘past’ weeks are still drawing interest and interaction. 

I was struck by an interesting conversation in the ocTEL forums discussing the game NotPron. This is a particularly hard game, with a steep learning curve, that also requires high levels of technical expertise (or the ability and confidence to pick up technical skills very quickly). I think that NotPron is an interesting example of how technologically-simple games can stimulate learning; but it is a very bad example of how to make a game accessible for a wide audience.

Sue Folley blogged about the game, discussing the difficulties she had getting started and being able to play the game. In her analysis, the lessons learned from her experience for students:

… the hints provided were not sufficient scaffolding for me to guess what to even try to do to get to the next level. I suppose this is a lesson learned in making sure that that enough scaffolding is provided for all level of student, and it provided me with the insight of what it felt like to feel way out of my comfort zone.

Read the rest of this entry →

Skip to toolbar