For an online course in instructional design, David Cillay created synchronous and asynchronous learning environments, used both audio and video components to enhance lessons, and offered content in both graphic and text form to reach students with a wide range of learning styles and technical expertise. Cillay describes his “multi-modal” approach and offers tips to instructors interested in such rich course delivery. [Technology Source]

I love Technology Source... it just keeps on hitting the mark. Y'know what it needs though, a bit of xplanaing, especially in terms of that little orange button. Also, who wants to sign a petition forcing James L Morrison to keep a weblog :o)

10:41:04 PM    

filament - Weblogs in English (Community College). Quote: "The spring semester has come to an end, and it's time to evaluate the blogging experiment. I'm not that happy with it." [Serious Instructional Technology]

Reflects some of my early experiences too. The key issues from my perspective were conveying purpose, getting past the technology and integrating it with the rest of the course. Good to have another angle!

10:40:08 PM    

James M Nugent, on DEOS-L writes:

"I am concerned that too much of what we see as "DL" is little more than a correspondence course that's been html tagged and put on the internet as something other than a correspondence course. Such courses tend to be boring, relatively rote, and not conducive to a whole lot of learning. Such content is very often driven by budgets set up to milk DL without putting resources into allowing instructors to do it well without killing themselves, and I think this is a real problem."

Yes, DL, the great budget saver... has that myth passed on yet?

10:39:08 PM    

Excellent resource: Encylodpedia of Educational Technology (via Ed Tech Dev)

10:33:37 PM    

Learning Object Repository (UBC - Applied Science)
At one time, I thought eventually we would end up with one large, dominant repository for learning objects. Instructors and developers would use this central repository for adding, selling, acquiring learning objects. That view has changed. It seems that learning object repositories are more like web pages - every institution has one (or will have one)...and each will have functionality, look, and feel in keeping with the branding of the organization. This personalized, decentralized approach is probably a good thing...but some standardization is needed. If this is trend (everyone creating their own repository), then two things are needed in order for repositories to be useful to others outside of a particular institution (after all, repositories are most useful when they can connect and foster learning resource exchange between collleges/universities/schools...not just internally):

• A standard for learning object repositories. HTML is simple, flexible, effective. Yet it allows browsers to access most websites. A similar standard is needed for LORs...but it has to be simple. This standard should dictate how learning objects are exposed to tools seeking to locate/explore them. I'm not sure if RSS is the final answer...
  
• A search service. Google makes the Internet valuable. 4 billion pages without organization has no more value than 1000. The organization is the value. Learning objects need to be "findable" to have value.
  

10:32:45 PM