Thursday, November 22, 2012

Australian National University Going Mobile

Greetings from MoodlePosium 2012 at the the University of Canberra where about 200 educators from the tertiary sector are looking at e-learning. The theme of this year's conference is how to how to enhance the use of the Moodle learning management system. The key speaker is, of course, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle HQ.

As first speaker, Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at ANU announced that ANU will be introducing Blackboard Mobile, with applications designed for accessibility and well as use on mobile devices. Also Equella and Turnitin will be introduced. Also BlackBoard Collaborate is being evaluated.

I will be demonstrating my ANU on-line green ICT course materials which are designed for accessible and mobile use at 11:50am in "A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online with Moodle" (being just back from seeing how to do this in Indonesia).

Professor Nick Klomp, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), University of Canberra, then discussed the use of the Mahara e-Portfolio tool for students to plan what they wanted to achieve at university. He proposed working jointly with other universities to enhance the Mahara software, which is open source, to improve it use for universities. It happens I will be leading a discussion of this topic at at 4:20pm:
Moodle can be used for well structured course-work, but can it be used for supervising more fluid student projects and postgraduate research?

Tom Worthington has designed and run award winning on-line courses. He is now looking at how to apply this experience to supervising university student projects and postgraduate higher degrees, as a way to promote social inclusion. See: "On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century".

ps: The audience is made up mostly of staff from University of Canberra, ANU, CIT and USQ. For the last year I have been a student of ANU, USQ and CIT, as well as attending seminars at University of Canberra. So I feel very much at home.

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