cc licensed photo by marcelgermain

In its own words, eLearning Learning is “a community that tries to collect and organize the best information on the web that will help you learn and stay current on eLearning.” Their website collects and lists thousands of articles and other resources related to online teaching. Information can be searched by topic or author’s name (in case Googling yourself brings up too many results of other people with your name, perhaps). The site also offers RSS feeds for regular updates.

A Distributed Online Curriculum and Courseware Development Model

This recent article by Durdu, Yalabik, and Cargiltay at Middle East Technical University outlines a model for developing online curriculum and courseware. This may be of greater interest to instructional design teams and administrators than individual online instructors, as it analyzes specific instructional design models and theories on a program-wide level. If you have an interest in the broader theories of online learning and a curiosity about other countries’ approaches to global education, it’s worth skimming. The Avicenna Virtual Campus, for example, is a community of universities from 14 Mediterranean countries that developed 20 online course modules taught in English and the native language of the host school. It would be interesting to learn more about this community as it progresses beyond the experimental phase.

Durdu, P. O., Yalabik, N., & Cagiltay, K. (2009). A Distributed Online Curriculum and Courseware Development Model. Educational Technology & Society, 12 (1), 230–248.

Lastly, for those of you who are ready to move on from Facebook to the next social networking trend: StudyBlue is a networking site that lets students share class notes. The reasoning behind the venture is supposedly to help students study “smarter, not harder” by teaming up so they can learn more by working in groups than if they took all their own notes independently and studied them alone.

StudyBlue banner

As this article attests, some faculty are dubious of the ethical value of this resource. Is it a phenomenal tool to help online students collaborate in a shared learning experience, or does sharing the workload mean increased laziness on behalf of the individual student? Do students attend fewer classes if they don’t have to take notes for each lecture?

It would be interesting to hear from anyone reading this blog who’s had experience with this product. Since collaborative learning is such a mainstay of online education, it seems like this could potentially be useful for online students. At the least, I’m not sure it could increase students’ laziness about taking notes in class if there is no classroom for them to skip. It may have some potential. Has anyone actually used this?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Articles, Learning Aids, News in Online Education, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.