In partnership with the highly respected Aga Khan Foundation, a leading global development agency, ALISON launched a new Certificate course focused on the designing and implementation of monitoring and evaluation systems. More...

With so many eLearning authoring tools available, how do you choose the best ones for your course? Start by analyzing the content to ensure that your tools help you meet your instructional needs. More...

Voraussetzung dafür ist ein offenes standardisiertes Format, das ermöglicht, den Inhalt, die Metadaten und die nötige Begleitdokumentation für Ressourcen unterschiedlichster Granularität in einer einzelnen Datei zu integrieren. Die einzelnen Inhaltselemente müssen auf einfache Weise in der Datei zusammengefasst und daraus auch wieder einzeln extrahiert und bearbeitet werden können. Das vom International Digital Publishing Forum IDPF im Oktober 2011 verabschiedete Format EPUB 3 erfüllt diese Anforderungen. More...

The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) has published the report "Quality models in online and open education around the globe: State of the art and recommendations", a must read for any person concerned with quality in online, open and flexible higher education. More...

The Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab (LINK),  from the University of Texas at Arlington, has published a review of the history and current state of distance, blended, and online learning. More...

Issue 42 presents eight papers which discuss the process of eliciting and using design patterns in the design and delivery of open online education. Website: Design Patterns for Open Online Teaching and Learning.
The rapid rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has renewed interest in the broader spectrum of open online teaching and learning. This “renaissance” has highlighted the challenges and potential associated to the design of such educational environments.
The papers in this issue respond to a desire to understand the design processes and mechanisms by which we come to create and deliver open online learning at scale and by extension how we can formulate this into sharable design solutions that can be applied by others.
In the first paper (What do MOOCs contribute to the debate on learning design of online courses?), Hatzipanagos offers a review of the MOOC literature and asks what MOOCs contribute to discussion of learning design. He concludes by providing an example mapping of the identified learning characteristics with a number of MOOC design patterns.
In the second paper (Towards an open, collaborative repository for online learning system design patterns), Salvador and Scupelli highlight the importance for collaboration in the pattern production process. They describe a data driven pattern production methodology and a supporting open repository for patterns in the domain of online learning system design.
In the third paper (MOOCs as granular systems: design patterns to foster participant activity), Lackner et al. use a learning analytics perspective of participant activity in MOOCs to suggest three design patterns to combat high drop-out rates.
In the fourth paper (Designing MOOCs for professional learners: Tools and patterns to encourage self-regulated learning), Littlejohn and Milligan provide a view of MOOCs targeted at professional learners. They identify a gap around self-regulated learning and in response provide a set of five patterns to help support MOOC design for self-regulation.
In the fifth paper (Practical Patterns for Active and Collaborative MOOCs: Checkpoints, FishBowl and See Do Share), Mor and Warburton then describe the outputs of the Design Patterns Project that utilised the participatory pattern workshop methodology. They demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through three practical patterns for active and collaborative learning.
In the sixth paper (Patterns for Using Top-level MOOCs in a Regular University), Koppe examines the value of using an externally hosted MOOC for use in a flipped classroom setting. This paper uses three interlinked patterns to demonstrate how this can be achieved.
In their paper on peer interaction (Design patterns for promoting peer interaction in discussion forums in MOOCs), Liyanagunawardena et al. focus on discussion fora and draw from seven separate design narratives to present three patterns for facilitating meaningful discussion when the number of participants is large.
In the final paper (Making it Personal: Understanding the Online Learning Experience to Enable Design of an Inclusive, Integrated e-Learning Solution for Students) Dacko et al. take an alternative but complementary design approach and draw on a particular design methodology to show how it can be used the sphere of inclusive e-learning to create a cohesive and unified solution. More...