Curatr is the award-winning social learning platform from HT2 which enables rapid delivery of innovative, gamified courses that really get people talking.
Proponents and practitioners of the open web also bear responsibility for the missed opportunities in higher education. In retrospect, temperamental preferences for DIY culture, relentless tinkering and experimentation, and indulging the delightful paradoxes of ill-structured problems has not served to promote the adoption of open online tools in the wider culture. Whereas innovators and early adopters tend to have a relatively high tolerance for chaos, higher education as a whole does not (and arguably cannot). Railing against the academy's failure to embrace a perceived risk can be dismal fun for many of us, but an honest appraisal of our own missteps has to be in the mix.
1. Create social media tools that help teachers engage students and allow students to reach their potential.
2. Make sure every school in the world has access to them.
Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It's free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn't simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.
The recently released ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gives some excellent insights into trends in college students' technology ownership, perceptions, skills, and habits.
The <e-Adventure> platform is a research project aiming to facilitate the integration of educational games and game-like simulations in educational processes in general and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in particular. It is being developed by the <e-UCM> e-learning research group at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, with three main objectives:
Reduction of the development costs for educational games
Incorporation of education-specific features in game development tools
Integration of the resulting games with existing courseware in Virtual Learning Environments
From this website we wish to promote the use of the tools developed as part of the <e-Adventure> project. The core of the <e-Adventure> project is the <e-Adventure> educational game engine, that runs games defined using the <e-Adventure> language. Authors can use the graphical editor to create the games or directly access the human-readable source documents that describe the adventures using XML markup. With <e-Adventure>, any person can write an educational point & click adventure game.
There aren’t many things in life that are more fun than using the Blackboard discussion board system. But if we find any, they’ll be dutifully documented here.
"Revenue grew by 18% to $98.4 million... This over performance was driven largely by strong professional service and continued strengthen demand for managed hosting."
"Despite the attractions of security (behind the wall solutions) and cost effectiveness (on someone elses’s yard), I conclude that there is no one best solution from the three I discuss above. Perhaps only dancing among the compleixty and simultaeously hosting all three solutions in every fromal education program creates the necessary blend of security, innovation and public presence that defines quality education in networked era."
"actual student centredness not the ’students get to talk’ model we’ve been sold for years, involves the student's creating their own knowledge in their own space…"
Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a
Create an intranet. Blog. Podcast. Manage the school website, and all the club websites. Create a private workspace. Manage a class. Share files. Give students the tools to build portfolios that cross academic years and curricular disciplines.
Interact is an open source Learning Community Environment. It could also be called an OLE (Online Learning Environment) , or a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment).
G. Attwell. IATEL: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Technology-enhanced Learning; Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zum technologiegestützen Lernen, page 75 - 94. Münster, New York, München, Berlin, Waxmann Verlag, (2011)