Recently I’ve become more and more excited about the learning opportunities that e-content could offer my students. Over the last couple of years I’ve experimented with various forms of e-delivery but I’ve never really sat down and developed an holistic strategy for integrating e-Learning into my teaching.
This year I’ve had a couple of professional development sessions that have really made me excited about some of the things that I could be doing and I’ve been investigating other ways that I could use to take by lessons beyond the classroom. I believe that the student that is regularly involved in learning outside of the classroom will achieve far greater success than the student that falls into the false belief that the classroom is the only interface for learning.
The blessing and curse of the Internet
Curiously, what has become one of the biggest opportunities for learning has also become one of the biggest potential distractions in the classroom. The Internet is a vast resource of information for learners but that learning material shares the same virtual space as niche forums, online games and ‘amusing’ videos.
I’m not an advocate of denying students access to the Internet. I think one of the most important lessons that young people must learn in their early lives is to govern themselves but making e-learning engaging is essential if a student is to develop that discipline. Needless to say, some Internet content must always be made unavailable (it would be better for everyone if it didn’t exist at all).
Moodle and SCORM
My college uses an open source VLE or LMS known as Moodle which, up until now, I’ve only really used to store documents, a few interactive tutorials and a couple of videos on. This is something that I intend to change this year.
I believe that potentially, the best learning can take place outside of the classroom and I intend to test this by giving students tasks to do outside that classroom that depend upon their use of Moodle. In order to assess if learning is taking place, there must be some kind of formative feedback – which is possible through the use of SCORM-enabled content.
About SCORM
SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) is a framework for deliverying e-learning content that was developed by a US government initiative called ADL. It uses XML and Javascript to deliver learning content that can include assessment. The SCORM framework enables the feedback of any assessment results to a SCORM-compatible LMS such as Moodle.
Free SCORM content editors
The biggest problem with using SCORM packages is that there aren’t many free tools out there to create content with. The only three I’ve found are:
Reload seems to be very complicated with a number of different tools available. I really like eXe and I’ve only just discovered CourseLab so I haven’t had the chance to try it yet.
Where I go from here
I’m fully intending to make a much greater use of e-Learning in my delivery this year and that will involve the use of either an IMS or SCORM content authoring tool. I’m going to play with the free tools I mentioned above and decide which one is the most suitable for the task and then figure out some kind of learning delivery program to support each module’s scheme of learning.
