Week 3 EDUC5101G Blog - responses to two other students

Response to Rachel:  http://racheleduc5101.blogspot.ca/

Hi Rachel, I really enjoyed your extensive list, and I've already checked out two new tools I've never heard of, so thank you :) I would love to see a demo of how you used classtools.net, and some of the other tools you've mentioned. The application of google apps suite is awesome too. I'm going to think about how I can take advantage of this more in my own asynchronous college classroom.



Response to Janet:  http://janetyg.blogspot.ca/2016/01/week-3-educ5101g-post-digital-tools-for.html?showComment=1454377044868#c5951596648395933738

Hi Janet,

I loved reading the trends, very interesting.

I also find it interesting to read about what the corporate world is doing for their training. 

Last year at the Advancing Learning Conference I saw Articulate Storyline and absolutely loved it. As you know, it is ideal for asynchronous course design and development. But on my return back to Durham I discovered it's not in our faculty laptop image - it's an expensive license. 

Some of the bigger colleges have separate departments that have people who do nothing but instructional design and the faculty are SMEs who simply provide their paper-based old-school content for adaptation into the online learning network (SMEs=subject matter expert). 

At Durham (and most other colleges) we are SMEs and we design our own online courses from the ground up, using our standard laptop image software platforms (nothing out of the ordinary) and free digital tools. While the academic freedom is unlimited (and of course I love that), at times standards can suffer. I believe a blend of freedom combined with some standards would be ideal (and a bagful of money to buy cool equipment and software too).