New course for HE!

The Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE), a digital education partnership of the Bloomsbury institutions and the University of London, has created a free Digital Skills Awareness course for higher education (HE) institutions to roll out to students before they start university. This resource will provide new students with advice and guidance to help them have a…

We need new online discussion tools

We have to face it – online discussion tools are mediocre at best. They can be very useful, engaging and lead to collaborative and interactive learning, but there’s always a feeling of pushing against the grain — that discussions work despite the tool and not because of it. This is a big problem that deserves serious…

E-Learning is not IT

This is not really a follow-on from last week’s post but it deals with the same topic: the differentiation between E-Learning and IT. The two photos below may be a bit overstated, but they serve to illustrate the key difference between these two computer-related areas. IT E-Learning “IT” stands for “Information Technology” and contains within it all things…

E-learning vs E-working

Remote vs on site This will be a short post today just pointing out a hypocrisy that was made apparent to me recently when I responded to an advert for e-learning contractors at a well-know university. I emailed the project leader to ask about remote working, as I am not located near the university but…

Online learning environments: the basics

There are two big categories of e-learning technologies that affect your first decision of how to deliver your learning programme: Learning Management Systems (LMSs), also called Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs),  and toolkits / individual tools. How you proceed with your learning design and delivery will need to take into account which direction you want to…

No, technology is not everything; but yes, it is important

I don’t write much about technology in order to make sure that the other aspects of online and digital learning get due emphasis. This does not mean that the tools and technologies you use to develop and deliver learning are not important – they most certainly are: it is rather to keep this factor from taking…

Fetishising Technology

One of the key mistakes organisations make in starting down the road to online learning and training is to overvalue the technology and undervalue the role of learning design, leading to the question: does the technology serve the learning or master it? We may be winning the battle against the luddites, and slowly enticing the…