Final post - Something new i'd like to try

An Intelligent Personal Learning Environment

I would like to investigate and develop and online learning environment that combines the use of the tools that were investigated in the course to customize and personalize the eLearning process and overcome a number of issues and difficulties associated with delivery and effectiveness of eLearning. 

The rise of massive open online courses or MOOCs attempted to address the mass education exodus that the advent of the World-Wide Web brought about. These were even more supported by a favourable international market and an escalation in information and communications technology in general.

So what I have in mind is to investigate a number of techniques to explore their potential at adding value to what eLearning can offer. The techniques include:

• CrowdSourcing (CS) as a concept that harnesses socially-mediated collaborations, playing a key role in such a scenario. 
• Personal Learning Environments (PLE) to bring together the different information sources and techniques, and finally,
• Techniques from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain will be factored in as they will contribute to automatise the user-profiling process to adjust the content accordingly

23 things an Internet native educator should do ...

1. Attend 1 or more online courses to gain an insightful experience;
2. Create a Facebook account to reach out to students at a level medium;
3. Create a Twitter account and tweet educational related material;
4. Create a WhatsApp account to communicate with other right away;
5. Create a Google hangouts account to set group meetings;
6. Create a Skype account to communicate in real time;
7. Create a Viber account to communicate synchronously;
8. Create an Instagram account to bookmark interesting stuff to share;
9. Create a Second Life account to simulate virtual environments that can serve educational purposes;
10. Create a diigo account to save, organise and annotate online sites that are considered interesting, useful and important;
11. Create a Pinterest account to share interesting photos;
12. Create a blog to post your thoughts and opinions for others to follow;
13. Create a wiki to store information and educational resources;
14. Create a Scoop account to be able to reuse content from other interesting sites;
15. Create a Flashmeeting account to be able to set realtime meetings with numerous people concurrently
16. Create a Merlot account to access ready made educational resources;
17. Create a Jing account to be able to create your own content;
18. Create a Prezi account to author some dynamic presentations;
19. Create a Slideshare account to be able to share all your presentations;
20. Create a Quia account to be able to set online polls;
21. Create a SurveyMonkey account to develop online surveys;
22. Create a Moodle account to host your lessons;
23. Create a communal google calendar with your students to remind them and ensure they are in synch with all set activities.

Online Surveys and Quizzes

Numerous free online ways to perform surveys and quizes.

To set up meetings and ensure that all the participants jot down their availability I tend to use Doodle which is an excellent scheduling tool that syncs with some of the major calendars like Google calendar, Outlook, iCal, and others. It offers a wide selection of online solutions that makes scheduling a piece of cake by coordinating entire groups by launching polls automatically to your contacts or participants ... and requires no registration or login.

Another interesting tool freely available but that requires creating an account is Quia. It is a collection of tools that allows you to create online content customised to the needs of the educator with existent content and automatic grading that can be used year after year. Quia is an excellent educational tool that engages students and serves the teacher in an adaptable, flexible and convenient way by creating classes, activities, surveys, and polls.

Proprofs is a suite of tools that allows educators to build and test content via online training and assessment. It hosts a knowledge base of resources allows the creation of tests, quizzes, surveys and other facilities.

One of the most notorious survey builders is SurveyMonkey that allows educators not only to build and deliver surveys but also offers easy editing, fast reporting, statistics generation and customised reporting.

Together with SurveyMonkey another tool called Zoomerang has partnered to provide the best services to develop and deliver polls, quizzes and surveys.

Crowdsourcing

In this post I would like to talk about the application of crowdsourcing to education especially through online courses. Apart from defining crowdsourcing I will also go into 3 applications that employ crowdsourcing in practice, namely:

• Mechanical Turk

• foldIT

• considerIT

Jing

Jing is an easy to use desktop software to share captured images off your own screen, as well as short videos of you performing some task on your own computer. This can easily be very useful for work, home, play, hobby ... but definitely to teach something specific to your students. The same software enables you with such functionality and at the same time allows you to add extra stuff to your captured images and videos and share them online in a couple of steps.

I have shared an overview video on our MVCR group through Diigo :) which I followed from http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

With Jing you can:

• Capture
• Record
• Share

A really short video on how to use Jing is found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZKhz0tSVII

Scoop.it!

At a first glance or a straight answer to what is Scoop.It you will get the following ...

Scoop.it: You are the content you publish.

www.scoop.it/

Discover, curate and publish great content to get visibility online.

Logging in can't be easier as it picks up either your Facebook account or Twitter account. The system explicitly ask a simple tick your interests popup and automatically populates your front interface without experiencing the traditional 'cold start' problem.

As a curation engine this fantastic service allows you to excel in what interests you most and probably you are the best person to curate material about that particular topic. As shown in the image below you can access material online, aggregate it efficiently as you're the expert in that area and eventually create now content. Together with the software the individual user can assist the crowd even more by sharing, synthesising, filtering, researching and discovering new material.

Finally, the applicable areas that can benefit from Scoop.It are limitless especially in Education. Just to give one example, as shown below, it can be optimally employed with young students to recreate an old skill ... story-telling. Scoop.it allows users to build an entire story line by reusing related online content that has been carefully and meticulously selected, picked, tailored and tweaked to fit the purpose.

Educators Resource Portal - MERLOT

This portal allows educators to access, search, and use / reuse educational resources as part of their teaching material.

Some resources are protected by 'copyright' so users need to request permission from the rightful authors who have obviously provided the resource in the first place.

Some other resources fall under the 'creative commons' and thereby can be reused without prior permission usually for educational purposes only.

Finally, some resources fall under the 'public domain' and these can be used without any permission.

Merlot has numerous capabilities as shown below:

Try it yourself ... http://www.merlot.org/