Free Resources for Educator Excellence (FREE) for Developing, Integrating, and Delivering E-Learning Solutions

Open Educational Resources, Professional Development, Schedule Development, ,

I attended a presentation at the E-Learn conference animated by Dr. Robert Moody of Fort Hays State University, USA. See below for the blurb on this. His presentation is available online at http://goo.gl/G988y

E-Learning Solutions (ELS) became widely available in 1997, and its attractiveness and use have increased significantly ever since. This software provides instructors who exclusively teach online with the resources to make course materials like syllabi, lecture notes, tests, asynchronous discussion boards, and live chat available online in one, easy-to-manage location. Online students can use these ELS sites to access course materials, submit assignments, check grades, as well as interact with instructors and other students. Among the most notable are Blackboard, WebCT, Desire2Learn, ANGEL, and eCollege. These vendor-driven software solutions have been extensively adopted by higher educational institutes throughout the United States. In fact, many have also been adopted by K-12 educational curriculum providers to supplement textbooks and other educational materials. This tutorial will provide insight and the presenter’s reasoning behind his departure from Blackboard, to creating his own unique E-Learning Solutions using several free open source digital tools.

Some of the tools he mentioned are listed below.

First ones that I’m already familiar.

Skype
Google Apps
YouTube
Facebook

There were several that were new to me.

Ning is a cloud based tool for creating your own custom social networking environment. See http://Ning.com. Dr. Robert uses Ning as his Blackboard replacement.

Screencast-o-matic is screen capturing software. It is supposed to have a feature set similar to Camtasia. The latter costs $200 and up. It will let you record videos up to 15 minutes in length.

Engrade.ca “is the Canadian version of the popular US-based online classroom community tools. Engrade.ca is hosted on Canadian web servers to comply with Canadian laws concerning government data storage.” I wonder if it is the open source grading solution I’ve been looking for.

Voice Thread was also mentioned and recommended but not discussed. Flash Meeting, a video conferencing system was also discussed. It won’t work on the iPad as it Flash based. It records the conference as well. You can have up to 30 people.