Getting Started!
Introduction
This blog is the public profile for our project “E-xtraordinary Learning For A Digital Age” “ELFADA” for short. Checkout the “About the project” page to find out what we hope to achieve.
We are in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia – most but not all of our students across the Institute are based in the Wheatbelt, although we have increasing numbers from other parts of regional WA and from the Perth area.
Because of our “thin” market (most of the Institute’s students are external/flexible delivery, studying through various blended learning models with differing proportions of different delivery strategies including online/e-learning (virtual classroom, LMS and others), paper-based, block release, work-based and workshops.
Getting Started!
Well we are back on campus and were into project start-up mode this week! Last week, although lecturers were back at work, was taken up mostly by professional development and various admin activities. Everything is a bit chaotic at the moment as is usually the case at the start of the year.
Most of the project work so far has been setting up this blog and the course blog, planning in more detail the content of the course and the Web2.0 tools that we will help students learn to use. For the rest of the team this has included beginning to explore blogging. Because the students will be using blogs for simple, media rich portfolios it is essential that the team can support them and it is also preferable that we all post on the course blog and preferably on our own individual blogs as models for the learners.
The course blog will have a lot of posts prepared in draft form so that they can be published sequentially as required for the first course delivery. For subsequent deliveries we may either make all the posts private and then make public sequentially or password protect and remove the protection sequentially.
The team all have familiarity with virtual classroom (Elluminate/BbC) and with the current LMS(CE8) – we are in transition to Bb9 and this is likely to pose issues. The plan was to use Bb9 for this project, however our full CGEA course on CE8 has not migrated well (it is big and also has a lot of customisation to suit the needs of our literacy learners) so we may have to use an alternative approach. We will see what the next week brings!
Conclusion
Next week we will be continuing development and our team member tasked with partner liaison will be catching up with our partners.
Jo Hart
