BCIT Guide to Developing Online Courses

The idea behind British Columbia's Institute of Technology's Developing Online Courses site is to bring together a basic guide to online course development, with accompanying resources, such as checklists and templates, that will be useful to a variety of people involved in creating online courses.

Guiding the E-Researcher

We're coming to the end of the final week of the Guiding the E-Researcher seminar at SCoPE. The discussion is facilitated by Janet Salmons, author of the book Online Interviews in Real Time. It's been a fascinating discussion, mostly focused on conducting online synchronous interviews, but also more broadly on scholarly research in general. And it's has gone far beyond the idea of trying to replicate face-to-face interviews in an online environment. 

Earlier this week we explored the use of multi-channel meeting spaces for online interviews using Elluminate. The recording of that session is available, as well as an audio only (MP3) version.

January 29, 2010 we'll be exploring Vidyo, an example of using desktop videoconferencing for onine interviews. Martin Harvey and Joshua Sherman from Coroware have been fantastic in helping to organize this session. A couple weeks ago we met up to try out Vidyo and to talk about the upcoming session. Martin beamed in from Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario (top), Janet from Boulder, Colorado (bottom middle), Joshua from Seattle, Washington (left), and I was in Lac Le Jeune, British Columbia (bottom right).

During our trial run there were no technical issues, and the quality of the video and audio was amazing. Some issues may arise during our sessions tomorrow because Vidyo isn't intended for a large groups, but we're giving it a whirl! You're welcome to join us! (details here) To ensure we keep the communication channels open, we have set up an e-research text chat using BackNoise.

2010 Horizon Report

The New Media Consortium 2010 Horizon Report is now available!

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education.

SynchTube Beta : Watch Videos With Friends in Real Time

Nik Peachy tweeted about synchtube this morning, so I thought I'd try it out. This is a specific need I've had in the past as an online facilitator -- how to have a conversation while viewing/analysing video clips. This simple tool works very well!

From the synchtube beta site:

Watch Videos With Friends in Real Time: "Simply paste a YouTube link and create a room. You can share this room with others, and watch videos in real-time... well enough talking, just try it already!