Universal Design Principles Checklist

The Universal Design Principal Checklist is a tool for VET providers to assess materials and communications and enhance accessibility for everyone. It was designed by the Qld Department of Education and Training. These principals apply to face to face, hard copy, elearning and mlearning design and delivery.

Searching for elearning tools?

Learning Tools Directory : Over 3,000 tools listed

C4LPT - Center For Learning and Performance Technologies

Of particular interest to me is the mobile tools directory, which no doubt will become the fastest growing area in coming years.

Billboard your Brand

If you want to create custom images, that make it appear that you have a bigger advertising budget than Coke, then check out MakeSweet, and upload your own brand to wherever you want to!

Mobile Web Design

What makes a good mobile web design? It involves usability, browser compatibility and needs to just make sense on a small screen. Here are 6 of the top mobile site designs recommended by Mashable.com. For some design tips visit Authentic Boredom for a beginners guide.

Aviary gets your creative gloves on

The online creative editing tools @Aviary just blew my mind. If you have learners who need to engage in a creative process for assessment, then point them towards the funky set of online editing tools available at Aviary. These include a 'quality' vector editor, beat mapper, audio mixer, image editor and more. It's easy to sign up through an existing Gmail or Facebook/Twitter account, and you can save your work to your own harddrive or share it with the Aviary community. Before I share it with others, I think i might have a few projects of my own to sink my teeth into.

HTML School

learn quick and easy HTML, CSS and more, or just for quick reference, I use W3HTML

Facebook, Google, as an LMS?

Call me crazy, but with all the fuss about what LMS is the ultimate solution to online training, has anybody considered that the emerging online social networks might be ready to replace a packaged LMS?

The fundamental elements of the LMS you use, (Moodle, BBoard, JoomlaLMS) could already be ready and waiting within the very popular an accessable Facebook and Google space. Let's face it, our learners are using FB and Google everyday.

Facebook as an LMS

Users can Sign In with any email account, then creating a private group, you now have a 'course' where you can create discussions, share training video's, leave notes, and create course events, create new polls and quizzes and I'm sure more will emerge as FB does. Seeing how 1/4 of all Australians internet time is spent on FB, you won't have any hurdles getting learners ready to use this already thriving online community platform.

The one thing you can't do, is upload and share documents, and there is no grading system if your looking to use your LMS for grading.Google as an LMS

When neovet talks about Google, he doesn't just mean 'search'. I'm talking Gmail, Goodle Docs, Google Calender and more.... With Google accounts, learners can Sign In with any email account, the using Gmail and Buzz as a platform , you can update students as a group, launch new discussion boards as Buzz threads, create a course calender, share Google Docs, which can now be almost any file format :) .

The number one reason we haven't used Google as an LMS so far is that most of our students are in Education Qld Schools, that tend to filter/block Google products.

Progressive huh!

If you use Social Media as an LMS, or part of as we already do, please let neovet readers know by posting your story here.

AVATAR movie & metaphor

Pick a metaphor, religious, scientific, cultural or political and your sure to find it layered in this block buster of a movie somewhere.

Neovet couldn't help but see some parallels with the idea of running around in the brain of a giant blue elf warrior and vocational training through elearning. The best part being that Jake Sully can do the impossible thanks to a virtual, (be it real) environment.

Jake can now walk in the virtual world and learn a whole new culture, language and set of skills. Will this re-inspire second life learning? Probably not, but 3D, AVATAR based social media and elearning is only moments away if your following the latest moves by Google to make the browser a doorway to a "Pandorian" web experience through it's O3D api.

Touch of Genius

The new arrival of touch technology in 2010 could change the way learning technologies are designed and displayed online.

School age learners and above are already natives to 'touch', 'drag' and 'scribble', with the popular use of the iPhone, Kindle and Nintendo DS all involving the heavy use of touch technology.

Now is the time to start road testing your learning spaces on touch devices. With the new mac tablet hitting the stores soon, you can expect a flood of touch devices and with it, an expectation from learners to be able to touch navigate to learn.

Big VET e's 2009

Cathy Moore who's hosts my fave blog of very-good elearning examples from around the world, was the keynote speaker at this years BigVETe's conference in Brisbane.

The 2 Day Conference held at the end of each year by the Federal Department, The Flexible Learning Framework, proved yet again to be a valuable time of networking with VET and elearning professionals and to discover new tools, practices and funding opportunities for developing and embedding elearning in your teaching programs.

neovet and V2Training demonstrated how new media can be embedded in wiki's, google waves, LMS's and other websites, not without it's problems as I'm sure you've experienced!. To find out about future funding and conferences, keep an eye here at neovet and at the Flexible Framework website.

Top 5+ LMS tips and tricks

A top 5 is usually a random list of ideas that you can take or leave, so feel free to take what you want from this random tips and tricks for managing a learning experience through an LMS. Here is my top 5.

1. Make external links open in a NEW window please, so the learner can still stay logged into the LMS and NOT lose half their work eg. discussion posts. All it takes is one click and your users will navigate away from their learning space. Let them explore a link in a new window and you will keep them happy. So always set links to "Open in New Window", or in HTML, type target="_blank" in side the link tag.

eg. Same Window or New Window

In the near future you should be able to specify opening new tabs or new windows through CSS.



2. Discussion Groups/Forums, need to have critical mass to be affective. Obvious. But how do you build a healthy level of participation from learners?.

What has worked for me so far, is making Discussion posting a compulsory part of the course. This may sound extreme, but a discussion forum without discussion is dead. Some training organisations simply use a participation point system.

The other way to keep forums alive is to give relevant, current and stimulating material for learners to talk about. Add a little spice to your topic headings, invite some controversy and/or play the Devils Advocate.

Lastly, get involved. Learners want their teachers to join in discussion and be part of the online learning experience. After all we are all learning together and it shows you actually care about what people are posting!

3. Keep it fresh and personal. Learner don't want to visit the same old looking site week after week. Add student photos, funny videos, interesting posts on your front page and in your course areas. Pick the 'forum post of the week' and put it at the top of your course page for all to see. Change the style of your page, just a little, a couple of times a year, or even better, some sites allow for custom color schemes for users. I also invite learners to contribute to blogs, and content to give users ownership of the site.

4. Keep your pages and menus simple, and don't assume just because you know where to find everything on the site that learners will too. Before we started using Accordion, and drop down style menus, our pages looked like a maze of links confusing learners and sometimes even myself. The worst course area we had at one stage, was a list of topics down a 2 meter page that had forums, links and pdf's icons scattered all over the place, and embedded video content of all shapes and sizes making matter worse. Never again.

What you want to do is break down your core course elements and only display what users need to find under clearly defined headings and sub headings. All your menu headings should be consistent throughout the site to help build intuitive navigation amongst your users.

5. Be open and available for feedback, in fact go further, and invite feedback from user on how to make the LMS experience better. Learners are more forgiving with a 'system error' error or a login issue, if they know that you are dedicated to improving your LMS for learners all the time. Plus, users are in the best position to find what works or doesn't work for them in your LMS.


+ I invite comments from others to continue this list.

Joomla Moodle MashUp - jfusion

For a YOUTH WORK training course that I manage, we wanted our online learning portal to have the best of Moodle and the best of Joomla, hence the Joomla/Moodle MashUp we could but won't call Moomla. Joomla does now have a LMS componant called Joomlalms, but we are happy with and loyal too Moodle but also want the great design and plugin aspects of Joomla.


We achieved this Moomla site by using jfusion http://www.jfusion.org, see tutorial below.

SketchUp Contexts for learning

This great little 3D mapping app from the ever and sometimes suspiciously generous Google company, is great fun, easy to use and could be best described as an AutoCad for dummies.

How SketchUp can be used for students studying anything related to design; but it could also be used to help students build a context for learning. Imagine a student in a Retail or Events Management qualification, could demonstrate competence in setting up a room for clients or developing a new shop window fit out.

All this and more can be done in Google SketchUp, so download it now and start pushing and pulling your designs into existence.

e listen - modules

Go to this URL to visit the e-listen project:

Dave from Stop21 and I finished this project in 2008 as part of the Australian Flexible Learning Frameworks: Innovative Projects Grant Program.

Here you can see the SCAR Theory in action, also the use of a Flash Story board, Accordian View conten tabs and the use of Google Forms and a Blog to connect our learners to extension content and invite them to give feedback about our product.

Find me a good lesson plan

James Dalziel has written an excelent chapter in the new publication from MIT "Opening Up Education",( (available for download HERE



This is a good read for anybody interested in how we can better share content and also teaching processes across the web. As James suggest, there is plenty of shared content, but not many shared experiences of how teachers can use that content to help learners and/or sequence lessons.

There is nothing like a good quality lesson template, that can be used again and again for different lessons just by changing the content but maintaining the teaching process. but Alas, Google away and see if you can find anyhthing worth using.

How to mak a Tag Cloud in Blogger

1. Sick of boring labels lists like this?

Want
a Tag instead?
Cloud

Cut and Paste this code from phydeaux3

into your Blogger Template. Syncs with your existing 'Label Widget', so you can keep your current tags and start adding new ones immediately.

SCAR (EN)Theory

I have bee working on a particular set of learning objects and wanted to have some consistency in my design approach. I came up with the SCAR model.

1. Story
2. Content
3. Action
4. Reflection

This is the model so far, each word describes the approach for an element in a single learning object. At this stage it is more of a planning tool than an underpinning theory of learning design but here are my thoughts on its merit for shaping a quality E-learning experience.

STORY is one of the most powerful learning tools used in the past and present. Beginning with a story puts the learning in context, invites the learner into the learning experience in a relational way. It also is loaded with emotional, cultural and social connections for the learner.

CONTENT in most cases, needs to be 'pinned' down somewhere, while a story tells a thousand words, the content element formalises the key learning concepts, language and models.


Our Training organisation has followed an ACTION + REFLECTION model for many years.

" An un-reflected experience is a lost experience"

Action being interactive and focused more on the skills, than the knowledge. The reflection element is formative assessment for the full object experience.

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The fifth element...

5. Extension
6. Network

Two extra elements are both related to the need for learners to be able to extend their learning, or go beyond the object experience by going to other learning sources (Social Networks, Blogs, Wiki's). Extensions would be created and defined by the learning designer, eg. Support site with further information linked by tags in the learning object.

Network describes the wider context within which the learner is using the object. This includes peers on or off line as well as online resources that the learner may search within to extend their understanding.

Q. How can E-learning objects work in synergy with Web 2.0 constuctivist learning experiences?

Boil it down

Instructional design:

I just joined the E-learning Guild

I highly recommend their eBooks that have been co-written by the guild community, especially for E-learning designers who are looking for some frameworks to work with.

One common principle of E-learning design is keep the message simple

When people give a speech, we tell them stick with two or three main points to communicate to the audience. This should be the same with learning objects.

E-learning is in the end about changing behaviour - says Dr. Michael Allen (Podcast)

You can't judge instructional design by 'good graphics' or tricky flash games -

Good E-learning involves a good story, told well, in a powerful dynamic context.

eg. Remember the old radio shows that kept people entertained before T.V. and the Web? the format had no 'images' yet captured the imagination. Because it told the story well and captivated the audience.

Q. How is your E-learning tools capturing the imagination of your learners?