Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Vol. 9, No. 2 of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT at http://jolt.merlot.org/) has been published and is available online. In this issue you will find 12 peer-reviewed scholarly articles, nine of which comprise the much-awaited Special Issue on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), guest edited by Dr. George Siemens (Athabasca University), Dr. Valerie Irvine (University of Victoria), and Dr. Jillianne Code (University of Victoria). The remaining three articles are regular-issue articles relating to various aspects of online education. More...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. This is the first day of Alt-C2013 which takes place in Nottingham this year. I am glad to be part of the preparation group of the panel discussing Technology Enhanced Learning in times of crisis. There are multiple people present and the ideas discussed during this debate came (in part) out of the Alpine Rendez-Vous that took place at the beginning of this year.
If you want to you can join us at 11.45 on Tuesday 10 September 2013 in session 342, right after the keynotes. For a full time schedule, look here. More...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. The first courses will be going live on FutureLearn platform, the first UK-led provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs). FutureLearn is the result of nine months intense work and testing since its initial launch. For those interested in the business set up: FutureLearn is an independent company owned and spearheaded by The Open University, but in collaboration/partnership with top UK, Ireland and Australian universities. From today, some of the courses from our 20-plus partners will be showcased at a media event at the British Library, in London; but some of the courses will also be open to the public. Those courses will be public beta courses, so courses that are open to critique, improvements, and overall learning to get better. More...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. I blogged on Tin Can before, and now there is an interesting experiment you can join. Varadarajan (Varadu) Sridharan recently joined a cohort conducted by Advanced Distributed Learning ( http://adlnet.gov/ ) where everyone learns about Experience API (xAPI or Tin Can). Experience API is an e-learning software specification that allows learning content and learning systems to speak to each other in a manner that records and tracks all types of learning experiences. FYI, ADL group is also the team behind the widely-popular SCORM framework, and Tin Can is really an visionary, cross-platform standard that will boost learner analytics (and big data in general I think). More...