A (fair) while back I think I mentioned that I had put together a little project full of interviews with online teaching and learning fellows at my, ahem, place.
Well, that kinda got picked up on (as these things kinda do) and the net result is the niftily titled “Contemporary Online Teaching Cases”.
Basically it’s over 70 (!!!) interviews, flash movies and resources from teachers doing good stuff in online teaching and learning at the Uni… you can look through them by faculty, discipline, graduate attribute, study level, approaches to learning and a fair few more approaches. Each case (for example) has interviews broken down into chunks, transcripts of those interviews, related cases, flash walkthroughs of the environments and sometimes a fair bit more.
Anyway, with the team having pretty much put this together in isolation in the last 6 months or so (I was kinda more of a ‘consultant’… you can tell this by the fact that it’s not a blog ;) I guess what we’re really after is some feedback and perspectives from, hey, you lot!
So whaddya reckon? Could you see yourself pointing anyone to this site? Considering a similar project for your institution? Designing it differently?
I have just shared it on our internal mailing lists to our regular groups of faculty using technology, our facutly developers staffs, our centers for teaching and learning…. I think it is valuable, especially for providing a variety of ways to navigate the cases.
The major problem I see with this site is that all the content appears to be static HTML; it looks pretty, but any future updates or additions are going to take a heap of manual editing. The content is fairly structured, and would easily lend itself to be database driven, which not only makes adding/updating content, it could be easily repurposed into other ways of presentation.
To coin a tired phrase… its Web 1.0 ;-)
The other tihing is I imagine many people might like access to some of the learning materials themselves…. as is now it is just information about some nice materaisl. In fact, there is not any kind of statement about ownership or open-ness of the content. It would be nice if it were… “repository”-like, with loads of Creative Commons stickers.
Still, its a nice model. When I shared it I felt like chiding our system for not even having anything close to it as a resource.
Thanks for the comments and sharing it around Alan, I agree with you re: database and 2.0 ;)
Yeh, with most of the material relating to stuff in side WebCT… it’s moreorless the best we can do to offer flash bits… but if I have my way perhaps the next batch might be a bit different!
[...] For my own record and just in case anyone’s interested here’s the powerpoint (don’t have a heck of a lot of time free!) for my ODLAA gig talking about those cases I mentioned. [...]