eLearning eVolution

Something missing from your webinars? E-Learning Queen alter ego Susan Smith Nash has some great advice about how you can make them more effective. You’ll want to read her entire post, but here’s the general idea.

• Capture attention at the beginning.
• Build a cognitive framework at the beginning.
• Encourage interaction.
• Connect to the audience experience.
• Reward the learners.
• Repurpose with a purpose.
• Respect culture and language.

Susan makes the point that weak webinars put learning and information technologies in a negative light. So it’s doubly important to use these technologies to their best advantage–to enhance teaching and learning as well as to promote further use.

PS. You can also check out Elluminate’s recorded events for a wide variety of information about live eLearning and web collaboration, like Bob Pike’s presentation, “17 Ways to Make the Dullest Meeting Come Alive.”

- Beth, Elluminate’s Goddess of Communication

Hi,

I am sitting here at 9:41pm, trying to finish an eBook about a topic I have passion for – interactive whiteboards, real-time webconferencing, and K-12 education. I just don’t have the end-to-end expertise to finish it in the way I know will do justice to the topic prior to the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC). So many people know so much more about this than I do. Not to mention I haven’t been home in like umpteen hours and miss my family.

So, here it is, for the world. An open source creative commons license marketing eBooklet. Marcomm for the (interested) sub-masses.

Yes, this is a commercial booklet with direct and obvious commercial goals. But, it also has value as an Edu professional development tool. At least I think it does.

If you are an educator who has as much passion about this as I do, feel free to take the original file and do what you want with it. Make a promise to post YOUR OWN version of it on YOUR blog (trackbacked or pingbacked to this post or mentioned in the comments below) and allow me to reabsorb bits and pieces of your work back into my version. I’ll add attribution on the credits page of the document via name, e-mail address, and URL to any files I post or update here or on our main web page. (As should you if you adapt the material.)

The dealio:

1. Take what I’ve got. Adapt it and add to it.

2. Publish the result on your OWN blog but trackback or ping back or comment to this blog entry

3. Only do this if you agree to have a simple one line attribution by a name, e-mail address, and URL in the credits page of any version we publish in the future

4. The original document referred to in this post is covered by this Creative Commons license:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

5. There is only one limitation to this activity (and you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to follow this). The vendors and screen shots have to be Elluminate and Promethean.

• Yeah, I am a corporate hack. So shoot me! It’s not like you don’t take a salary for your work in one way or another.

• If you feel the needs to adapt and write this booklet with OTHER vendor bias, have at it, but please attribute Elluminate as the original author and mention that this open source booklet project was first designed for and started by Elluminate and Promethean product marketing efforts.

The starting point:

1. The original file: Best Practices Document

2. Its (known) shortcomings

• PowerPoint is a totally inappropriate tool to use for this activity.But hey, my last formal layout tool was FrameMaker 6.0.So, cut some slack – and if you want to do Indesign or Quark, have at it!

• I don’t really have the graphics I need yet. I may get some soon. Maybe you can add some cartoons or properly credited and legal digital pix

3. Elluminate Goals (you can add your own)

• Show the power of adding real-time collaboration to interactive whiteboards in a room to room, room to desk, or multipoint mode.

Other important stuff
I’m sure some stuff will come up, so here is a placeholder for it.

• Comment – 12-June: OK, this isn’t really an “open source” project as much as a creative commons license experiment (there is no source forge or community editing process like Wikipedia).

Best regards, and keep onlinin’

Gary

While we have lots of anecdotal data about the benefits/results of using synchronous eLearning or blended (synch/asynch) eLearning, not much hard, statistical data is out there.

As a result, I am working on a new white paper for Elluminate about just that. The idea is that to continue to get funding for online programs, you need to provide facts/figures relating to the success of this technology.

If you are tracking results data, like course enrollments, student participation, retention rates, test scores, completion rates, or student/teacher satisfaction, I would love to hear from you.

 In addition, we would like to use the white paper to suggest tools for collecting this data for those academic institutions who would like to do so. So please share how you are collecting this data as well.

 Please reply through the blog or contact me at blogteam [at] elluminate (dot) com.

And if you are interested in reading our first white paper in the series, “The Impact of Synchronous Online Learning in Academic Institutions: Customer Experiences from K12 and Higher Education,” click here.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication