Three and a half years later
Everyone wants tutors to use new technology but little of the money poured in to Government educational training agencies ever seems to reach them or buy them a bit of spare time to be trained.
Friday 23 November 2007, 8:17 PM
Not another VLE
I am working on a project to bring together the many tutors in FE who still haven't managed to publish course materials or provide on-line access to things for their IT-hungry students.
Moodle has swept the board and, indeed, Academic Boards throughout the FE community and replaced WebCT, Blackboard and other hugely expensive and generally awkward and rickety systems in the majority of institutions. But try getting someone with a bundle of old Word notes, presentations and other bits and pieces to upload them. It's a tortuous process and even if some kind assistants do it for them there'll be more to add next week and they simply don't get round to it. Even those who show some initial enthusiasm soon get fed up with the clunky editing process, the bizarre way some folder structures are presented, the mimimal changes that can be made by normal people to the look and feel of things and the need for someone expert in PHP to rescue everything when the server gives up.
I am a very enthusiastic person but I'm worn out now. I am finding moodle so tedious, slow and whilst I can make pages look a bit better in places, I still struggle to change much more. All that tutors are doing is the very minimum they can get away with to keep the managers happy! We're all missing the point. Students are not finding it a very effeicient way to access things. They're used to the smarter interfaces of Facebook, the great tools that Ajax brings to a number of new applications and being able to store files on-line in a flash.
Ages ago I experimented with using blogs and normal web pages. Tutors can't edit web pages but some can manage most blogs. That provided some opportunity for progress and is being used now to add useful links, news and the like on course areas I have developed. Blogger, though, isn't quite simple enough for others, though, and there were still things like file storage and interactivity to sort out. So I've turned to some of the other new applications out there and listed on my webtools site, http://ahi2000.com/studyzone/webtools .
It's all going to need some tweaking yet and I have to create a nice initial user interface but I'm getting there. The big test will be whether the guy in Business Studeies can be persuaded to use it instead of the photocopier and OHT slides! More information soon.
Moodle has swept the board and, indeed, Academic Boards throughout the FE community and replaced WebCT, Blackboard and other hugely expensive and generally awkward and rickety systems in the majority of institutions. But try getting someone with a bundle of old Word notes, presentations and other bits and pieces to upload them. It's a tortuous process and even if some kind assistants do it for them there'll be more to add next week and they simply don't get round to it. Even those who show some initial enthusiasm soon get fed up with the clunky editing process, the bizarre way some folder structures are presented, the mimimal changes that can be made by normal people to the look and feel of things and the need for someone expert in PHP to rescue everything when the server gives up.
I am a very enthusiastic person but I'm worn out now. I am finding moodle so tedious, slow and whilst I can make pages look a bit better in places, I still struggle to change much more. All that tutors are doing is the very minimum they can get away with to keep the managers happy! We're all missing the point. Students are not finding it a very effeicient way to access things. They're used to the smarter interfaces of Facebook, the great tools that Ajax brings to a number of new applications and being able to store files on-line in a flash.
Ages ago I experimented with using blogs and normal web pages. Tutors can't edit web pages but some can manage most blogs. That provided some opportunity for progress and is being used now to add useful links, news and the like on course areas I have developed. Blogger, though, isn't quite simple enough for others, though, and there were still things like file storage and interactivity to sort out. So I've turned to some of the other new applications out there and listed on my webtools site, http://ahi2000.com/studyzone/webtools .
It's all going to need some tweaking yet and I have to create a nice initial user interface but I'm getting there. The big test will be whether the guy in Business Studeies can be persuaded to use it instead of the photocopier and OHT slides! More information soon.
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