Posts
Mariann Solberg at the University of Tromsø, Norway writes about “Educating the Citizen of Academia Online,” where experiences with the use of the tool Elluminate Live are presented and the extent to which this tool has turned out to be helpful in developing the quality of online courses is discussed. Elluminate Live is a real-time application that enables synchronous oral dialogue, simultaneous sharing of texts, and so on.
Abstract
The Arctic is a vast, sparsely populated area. The demographic situation points to online distance education as a solution to support lifelong learning and to build competence in the region. An overall aim of all university education is what Hans Georg Gadamer calls Bildung, what we in Norwegian call dannelse and what Richard Rorty has called edification.
A first problem to be addressed here is that in online distance learning some teachers find that is harder to support the development of the student’s voice. Being able to express oneself and to position oneself in a scientific community is vital for a well educated graduate.
Another problem in online education has been the extensive use of writing as a means in the student’s learning process. Writing is vital to academic education, but in online courses there is in general a danger of overuse.
At the University of Tromsø we have tested the web conference tool Elluminate Live. This is a real-time application, integrated in the University’s learning management system (LMS), Fronter. The application enables synchronous oral dialogue, simultaneous sharing of texts, and so forth.
I present our main experience with the use of Elluminate Live and discuss the extent to which this application has turned out to be helpful in developing the quality of online courses.
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Frank Rennie, Sigurbjörg Jóhannesdóttir, and Stefania Kristinsdottir report on “Re-Thinking Sustainable Education Systems in Iceland: The Net-University Project.” This report is written in light of the recent economic crisis in Iceland, which has raised issues of the sustainability of Icelandic Higher Education, but it might be sensible for other countries to be prepared for hard times too.
Abstract
The recent economic crisis in Iceland has raised issues of the sustainability of Icelandic higher education to new levels of importance. A key strategy in relation to this economic crisis is to consider the merger of the four public universities in Iceland and to introduce a much higher enegagement with online and open delivery methods of higher education. The Net-University Project was an EU Leonardo-funded initiative to compare approaches to open and distance education in Iceland, Sweden, and Scotland, with additional lessons from Atlantic Canada.
In particular, it sought to focus on the transfer of innovation in continuing university education, with particular emphasis on the development and delivery of online higher education courses throughout rural Iceland (i.e., outside of Reykjavik). The partners concentrated on how knowledge and experience about distributed and distance learning models could be transferred between the partner countries and how such models can be integrated into the education system to better support higher education and lifelong learning.
There was a particular interest in the practical use of open educational resources (OER) for course design and in the sharing of these course modules among university partners. Some good practice and lessons from OER use in course creation are listed.
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Source: The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
