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.