Online Research Supervision using Moodle

These are some notes for an unconference session at  MoodlePosium 2012 on the topic "Online Research Supervision".

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.

A year ago I set out to look at "Learning On-line Tertiary Teaching for Research-Led Education" (August 20, 2011).

Some thoughts:

1. Teach all degree students to communicate, mentor and lead (ie: teach them to teach).
2. Blend vocational, higher education coursework and research, using online tools (Moodle and e-Portfolios).

See: "On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century".

Fifteen years of online education

Greetings from MoodlePosium 2012 in Canberra, where Dr. Shirley Reushle, Associate Director of the Australian Digital Futures Institute  is talking on fifteen years of online education at USQ. She made the point that students like active learning and interaction with other students, which is possible online.

Dr. Reushle broke out of the usual Powerpoint mode of conference presentations by running a live feedback session using Polleverywhere.  She asked the question "How is interacting and collaborating online different to collaborating in a face-to-face situation?" and invited the audience to respond by SMS or web. This worked remarkably well.She then showed a number of videos from here students discussing the topic, which was less useful.

Dr. Reushle was describing a very personal version of online education, which I have had the benefit of. However, my worry is that a more mechanical version of online education, designed to reduce costs and teach "facts". Australian educators may produce excellent online courses, only to find they are replaced by MOOCs from overseas, simply because these are cheaper.

There is a tendency to have an idealistic view of new communications technology changing education. Beat Generation authors Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs expressed a view on instructional technology in Chapter 7 of their 1945 novel "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks". One of the characters expresses the view that recordings of university lectures will be broadcast by radio 24 hours a day, allowing access for anyone. The narrator of the story expresses skepticism over this idea. That skepticism was well founded.

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.