Same old questions
Alex November 4th, 2008
In the elearning project here, I still have a lot of questions in my mind as to the best course of action to take for some aspects. I’m sure anyone who has tried to implement an elearning system in their institution will have asked themselves very similar questions!
Take, for example, the uploading of the course manuals into Moodle. Some considerable time has been spent copying and pasting the course manuals (from Word or pdf format) into the eXe eLearning XHTML editor (http://exelearning.org), exporting this as a SCORM package then uploading into Moodle. Due to the time already spent in doing this, I’m very reluctant to not then make use of the packages that have been created. However, I have doubts in my mind as to whether this is a valuable and sustainable approach to continue to take.
This is similar in approach to that taken by OU to get their materials into Moodle for OpenLearn – having the course manuals converted into OUXML format, then uploaded into Moodle.
I feel a better approach to take in this project would be to concentrate on getting teachers to create online activities in Moodle and not to spend so much time in converting the raw course content into another format. The students will be given the course manuals in paper format regardless of whether they’re online too – none of the students here would have reliable enough internet or computer access to rely on online access only.
The online activities can then just be created for the corresponding week in their study schedule, avoiding the huge time expenditure in the cut’n'paste approach which, in my mind, won’t be of any real benefit to the students. It also avoids all the reformatting that’s needed when cut’n'pasting.
Maybe just a Freudian slip, but I’ve been told we’re having a ‘brainwashing session’ about the next steps of the project later this morning. Hopefully this will be after I get some breakfast, up at the staff lounge earlier, I was told I couldn’t have any food because they didn’t have any plates…
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