By Tony Bates. I have a special interest in Blackboard. In 1995, I gave a grant of $25,000 from the university’s fund for distance education to a young, untenured associate professor named Murray Goldberg in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, to cover the costs of two of his research assistants who were finalising the development of WebCT, the first real LMS.  In 1999, WebCT was sold to ULT, who then in 2006 sold the product on to the current owners of Blackboard, Providence Equity Partners LLC, who further developed the product to its current state. So in a sense I was a midwife to Murray’s Blackboard baby. From a small acorn grows an oak. More...

By Tony Bates. I ran a short face-to-face workshop yesterday on ‘Thinking about Theory and Practice’ for about a dozen students taking the Masters of Arts in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University  My online open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age, is being used in this program and the instructors asked me to run a workshop on this topic, as students struggle with the relationship between epistemology, theories of learning, and methods of teaching. More...

By Tony Bates. Reading sources in the right order can avoid you having to eat humble pie. Immediately after posting Privacy and the Use of Learning Analytics in which I questioned the ability of learning analytics to suggest appropriate interventions, I came across this article in the South African Institute of Distance Education’s (SAIDE) newsletter about a conference in South Africa on Exploring the potential of data analytics to inform improved practice in higher education: connecting data and people. More...

By Tony Bates. This is a thoughtful article in the Financial Times about the pros and cons of using learning analytics, drawing on applications from the U.K. Open University, Dartmouth College in the USA, student monitoring service Skyfactor, and CourseSmart, a Silicon Valley start-up that gives universities a window into exactly how e-textbooks are being read. More...

By Tony Bates. An ocean-to-ocean conference located in BOTH Victoria, British Columbia (Pacific) and Halifax, Nova Scotia (Atlantic). The conference format is intended to profile the tools and technologies that enable mult-access, distributed learning – including videoconference connectivity and web conferencing – to connect the two locations. More...

By Tony Bates. It is difficult to do justice in a short blog post to this 130 page plus report about the state of e-learning in Africa. I need therefore to be selective. As a result, although the link between primary, secondary and higher education is critical, I will focus in this post mainly on higher education, infrastructure and policy issues raised in the report. However, for anyone concerned about development in Africa, I strongly recommend reading the whole report rather than relying on this analysis. I have put selected extracts from the report in italics. More...

By Tony Bates. This exploratory study examines video as an instructional medium and investigates the following research questions:

•     How is video designed, produced, and used in online learning contexts, specifically with regard to pedagogy and cost?
•     What are the benefits and limitations of standardizing the video production process?

Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. More...