… an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). Taking my lead from my colleague Karl’s recent post  ‘A month in the life of … an eLearning Advisor (Learning Resources), I thought it might be an interesting experience to do the same thing, for myself but also for anyone who reads this and is interested to know what a month in the life of a JISC RSC Wales eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies) can look like. The first thing to say is that every day/week/month is different but that ultimately I am here to provide a service to our supported post 16 learning providers in Wales. Karl’s blog post focussed on the wide range of queries he and Sam deal with, so to make this different from his great blog I’m going to give an example of a selection of the activities I have been involved in over the last month, starting with the queries.

Queries
These are just a few of the queries (received in person, via email or Skype or over the phone) I have delt with this month:

Text Wall - we use a text wall to collect comments and questions from delegates who attend our events. During our recent ‘Learner Voice, Learner Choice’ roadshow we also suggested it might be one of the many tools that could be used to record the learner voice. A number of the organisations who attended the event had borrowed the text wall for a short period (in return for some feedback on how it goes) to try it out with their learners (Learning Centre suggestion box, opinions of Moodle, during Adult Learners Week, for feedback on lessons …) and one contacted me to ask for more details of the service (options for different walls, cost) because it was proving to be successful and she was interested in having their own wall. One follow up job for this week is to contact all of those who have borrowed a wall to find out how they got on. I’ll share the results via this blog.

Legal advice – at the last of our roadshows ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ I had a query from a college about whether there were any legal requirements or implications regarding allowing parent’s access to learners eILPs. JISC Legal, one of the JISC Advance services are almost always my first port of call for education related legal advice, so I contacted them and received a response within days which I passed on. Rather than attempt to summarise the response here the legal information regarding eILPs and parental access received can be found on a GoogleDoc.

Moodle – there have been a few Moodle queries this month but 3 of the most common ones are asking for a recommendation, asking for a way of doing something and asking for a solution.

• The recommendation was for someone who had experience of networking a number of Moodle’s together … I recommended the North Wales 14-19 Network;
• The way of doing something was for how to embed a web page in a Moodle page … I suggested using a handy piece of code (with the relevant web address inserted) given to me a few years ago that has been very useful: <iframe width=”100%” height=”500″ align=”middle” frameborder=”0″ src=”http://www.rsc-wales.ac.uk” border=”0″></iframe>
• The solution was for a problem a Learning Centre were having regarding how to push news out to their students, rather than expect them to go looking for it … and I recommended the RSS feed for Moodle forums that anyone could then subscribe to.

Facilitating the Moodle-Wales group
As the vice chair of the Moodle-Wales Steering Group, I have the honour of facilitating meetings. Usually the Steering Group meet face to face after one of the Moodle-Wales User Group meetings or via video conference but this time we decided to try something a bit different and we chose to use Skype (the latest beta version that allows up to 5 videos). This meant that we could all meet from our desks rather than having to book and travel to VC studios. It worked surprisingly well for a tool that is in beta.  After the meetings I compile and publish the minutes online and then get on with my actions!

Visits to providers
We try to visit all of our supported learning providers at least once a year to find out what they are up to and how we can help but we also do follow up visits too. The following are some of the real (and virtual) follow up visits I’ve done in the last month:

• Coleg Elidyr to show staff the potential of some of the free, open source applications available via Edu-Apps.
• Coleg Glan Hafren to collect the Turning Point interactive response system set we loaned them, along with feedback about its use.
• Barry College to take them on a virtual tour of our Second Life Office, followed on another day by a face to face session to show them the basics of building in Second Life so that they could borrow some space on the University of Wales Newport, School of Health and Social Sciences island (where our SLOffice is based) to try and engage with learners who won’t engage face to face.
• Coleg Gwent to take a virtual tour of our Second Life Office and the island and later to test (virtually) the Skype (Beta) multi video setup for a session they want to run.

Events
Organising and facilitating events is also another part of my role as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). This month I supported colleagues at the Cardiff  ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ roadshow, which was the last of the series of three roadshows, the other two of which I was much more involved in (’Barrier Busters, Accessibility and Inclusion‘ and ‘Learner Voice Learner Choice‘). For the last few months I have also been working on organising the one big, cross sector event that we are running in Cardiff on 30th June this year – ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol‘. There are still some places available on this FREE event so if you are interested then you’ll have to be quick and book now!

Virtual communication
We communicate with our learning providers in many different ways but 2 areas I have responsibility for contributing to (as do most of the team) are:

• Twitter – I tweet as@HelenHRSC on a very regular basis but also as @rscwales when it is my turn. As a learning technologist I am constantly on the lookout for news ideas and examples of effective practise and I find that Twitter is an excellent way of sharing what I find quickly … as well as also finding out what others are doing and sharing that too.

• Our teaching and learning (and technology) blog – I managed to blog 3 times last month (twice about Moodle and once about digital communication) but this varies depending on how much I am at my desk and whether I have been inspired to blog and feel I have something worth saying!

Twitter is my first virtual port of call for sharing stuff, followed by our blog and also the news pages on our website.

Keeping up to date and sharing with the team
I use a whole variety of ways to keep up to date with what is happening in the world of education and technology (RSS feeds, Twitter, mailing lists, newsletters, attending events, taking courses,  talking to people … ) and as well as sharing all of this with our supported learning providers I also make sure I share with the team too. A couple of tools that I have come across and shared recently are Twiddla (a bit like Etherpad(as was) but allows images and password protection) and Wallwisher (a web page for sharing ideas and comments that can been used in many ways).

As I said at the beginining, each day is different and this is just a flavour of the things that I am involved with as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). I guess the job is like both education and technology … always something to learn and share … but also ever changing!

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).

The AoC Beacon Awards for 2009-2010 were announced on 17th November, with Welsh Colleges winning several awards, or ‘punching above their weight’- as ColegauCymru (formerly fforwm) put it. One of the Welsh winners was associated with a technology-related project: Coleg Gwent received the CLA Award for promoting the value of copyright as a result of the development and use of plagiarism-awareness modules for use in Moodle. More information about this success can be found on the Coleg Gwent web-site, and a modified version of the resource can be viewed on the RSC Wales Moodle.

Swansea College was also highly commended for its entry to the FENC Award for the creative production, adaptation, and delivery of learning resources.  Their project involved the production of French-language podcasts as a flexible resource for adult and community students in particular. Podbean was used for free online hosting, and the very popular podcasts mainly involved brief weekly round-ups of news and events in France. Accompanying transcripts were also provided on a specific Podbean site to help learners, along with lists of key vocabulary. Further information about the award can be found on the Swansea College web-site.
   
Congratulations to both colleges, and all the other award-winners and entrants from Wales. A full list of all awards and winners can be found on the AoC site

At last weeks FOTE09 event I heard about Oxford University’s experiences of using iTunes U during Peter Robinson’s presentation ‘A Pocket University: Open Content and Mobile Technology’. “But what is iTunes U?” I hear (some of) you cry … as I did the first time I heard the word/term/phrase. Very simply, in Apple’s own words, ‘iTunes U is a digital campus that never sleeps and can be reached from anywhere’ and ‘it gives any university or college a single home for all the audio and video course materials that faculty create or curate’ plus ‘it also makes it simple for students to find and download just what they’re looking for.’

iPod/iPhone/iTunes/Apple fans might be cheering at this point but I can also hear the sceptics crying ‘what about those who don’t have/like/use iPods/iPhones/iTunes?’ and ‘why would you hand all of your content to a third party?’ … which I must admit I also thought too when I first heard about iTunes U a few months ago. However, as with many of the presentations at FOTE09, Peter Robinson’s explanation of why and how iTunes U works for the Oxford University students and staff has made me think again … hence this blog.

What I heard about iTunes U was:

• Universities have lots of good stuff to support teaching and learning but they aren’t all great at (a) telling people it’s good (b) making it easy for those who know about the good stuff to find it  … iTunes U can help.
• The content can be stored on your own servers … you don’t have to hand it all over to Apple
• You can also have a web portal … which allows access to all of the resources without having to go through iTunes
• It’s free
• The audio can be MP3 and the video can be MPEG4 … not proprietary Apple formats
• With structured and guided support staff can create content to share relatively easily and quickly … and students can too
• Cross departmental sharing and working on a project like this can break down some of the barriers that may exist
• The legal side of who owns what and can share what with whom can be tricky but it can be overcome
• Marketing is a key to getting the students and staff on board … and Apple even have promotional advice for you on this

From Oxford University’s point of view (according to Peter Robinson) it has all been worth it. Here are few stats to support its success:

• 1 000 000 downloads and a number 1 hit in less than a year
• 2 500 downloads per week for popular feeds
• 956 items in 186 podcast feeds
• 90% of the downloads via iTunes, 10% via the parallel web portal

… more stats and information are available via the FOTE09 presentation or from the iTunes U at Oxford web portal, http://www.ox.ac.uk/itunes_u.

In my subsequent quest to find out more about the use of iTunes U, I came across this briefing paper from The University of Edinburgh about their new and developing presence on iTunes U … if you want to know a bit more, then this is worth looking at (imo).

So now I am going to spend a bit of time looking at the content on the Oxford University iTunes U and the iTunes U’s of the other Universities … The Open University, Coventry, Warwick, Brimingham City, UCL, Trinity College Dublin to name but a few of those from the British Isles. I could look at the content on my laptop but for a true test of how mobile my learning could be I shall download a selection to an iPod and see what I learn

I first read through JISCs recent publication ‘Effective practice in a digital age’ a few weeks ago. At the time I thought that this would be something good to blog about but I couldn’t quite figure out what angle to take with my blog post … and I still haven’t, so instead here are a few of my thoughts and comments about the publication:

• ‘Effective practice in a digital age’ is a very readable publication that I have already referred back to on a number of occasions since first reading … and know I will refer to again in the future.
• The supporting videos in the Effective Practice Resource Exchange are great additional resources, especially the ‘Responding to learners’ video from the University of Edinburgh and ‘Rethinking learning resources’ from Birmingham City University.
• The ‘Choosing pathways’ table (p18-19) gives a clear overview of the case studies, from ’simple’ to more complex in terms of the type of technologies used and includes the learning outcomes (goals) expected, the technologies used, etc. It is also a very helpful quick reference when going back to the publication to look for a particular case study or example of how a technology has been used effectively.
• The highlighted ‘Key points for effective practice’ for each case study are great for focusing you or making you think further about the specific practice (example below).

• The continuing story of effective practice (Where did we start? Where are we now? Where are we going? p50-51) demonstrates quite clearly that this is an evolving story and that as institutions, thoughts about pedagogy, technologies and learners continue to develop and change then so will how we define ‘effective practise’ with regard to technology enhance learning. The story most definitely has a long way to go (IMHO) and as the quote by Lewis Carroll (p4) points out:

The last point above should probably have been my final comment on this subject but, as the first thing that caught my eye when I initially read the publication was e-Learning = enhanced learning (page 8), I am going to end this post by saying that if anyone asks about my job title (e-Learning Advisor) in future then I am considering explaining that I am an enhanced learning advisor for RSC Wales because it sounds a lot more appealing and far more relevant than saying I am an electronic learning advisor

This is something I have been mulling over for a few months … since the RSC Wales ACL conference in March when I heard Alan Clarke, Associate Director of ICT and Learning at NIACE, speak about independent learners and the elearning skills they need. I hold my hands up and say that until that point I really had not made a clear, conscious distinction between the skills needed by learners in order to learn in a technology infused environment and the skills needed by teachers to teach in the same environment. Having had my brain cells prodded by what Alan said I realise that elearning and eteaching are two different (but related things) and that when we generally talk about elearning we are doing neither the learner or the teacher any favours by lumping the skills required altogether. A teacher may need to know how the technology works (a wiki) but they then need to be skilled in identifying how it can be used to enhance their teaching (a collaborative learning experience where this will replace or supplement face to face work). A learner may also need to know how to use a piece of technology (a search engine like Google) but they too need skills in using the technology effectively to support their learning (refining a search, identifying reliable sources from search results).

I have also just read Steven Wheeler’s, Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth, blog about ‘7 skills for the successful e’tutor’, which is what actually prompted me to put my thoughts down in words. Comparing the skills he lists for e-Tutors to those listed by Alan Clarke (on the 7th slide of his presentation) for independent learners the two that sit together are the confidence of the learner which can be developed by the support and encouragement of the teacher and the communication skills that both require.

Even after writing my thoughts down I am still not sure where I am going with this one. I think I was just pleased to see from Steven’s blog post today that it has been identified (by some) that the skills need for eteaching are different to those needed for teaching and that just because you can teach it doesn’t mean that you can eteach without a bit of help … as we can’t expect learners to elearn without support too.

All comments and thoughts welcomed!