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Thursday, February 09, 2006

Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mashups

One of the really interesting things going on in Web 2.0 that has real impact for eLearning 2.0 is the ability to add Mashups or Add-ins as part of your learning environment or learning content. In other words, in the middle of my content, I can throw in some fun learning component that I've created through an online tool.

An example is shown below with a simple poll that I created using Bravenet MiniPoll. And, I've provided the code for it that you could easily add into your blog or course or whatever.

Some examples of this would be:

  • Poll

    I can put in a poll that would be hosted elsewhere and would allow the student to see previous results of other students who have taken my courseware.

  • Discussion

    I can add in a simple discussion inside of my course right on that learning page. Of course, I can have it also live elsewhere and beyond the course. This could allow me to have previous answers from students.

  • Announcements / Updates

    I can put in an announcement or update place in my course that will automatically be updated with the latest information.

  • Find & Add Assignment

    I can make students go find an interesting example and add it to that page in the course that will be a leave behind.


  • Rating

    I can have students rate things and see other peoples ratings. I can also embed a question about how well we are doing on a particular topic within our company to spark thinking and hopefully discussion.


  • Survey

    I can embed my end of course survey into the last page of the course.


  • Leader Board

    I can have who is leading among those who have taken the quiz and/or based on other data.





If you have a chance, go ahead and add a link to this article and the poll code into your blog. The code is:




Keywords: eLearning Trends, eLearning 2.0, Web 2.0

4 comments:

Tony Karrer said...

Mix,

If you happen to come back, it would be great to hear what you've used around virtual agents that has been successful.

I have seen only a couple cases where people have used them and then in very different ways.

That said, probably worth consideration in the list.

Tony

Lisa Dawley, Ph.D. said...

Interesting, thanks for labeling the term for me. Just today I was trying to integrate an external xml feed to display dynamically within my website. No such luck as of yet, but I see the tagging is very similar. Thank you.

rlubensky said...

Tony, elearning is always about something or within a certain context. Participants have a story to tell about their relationship to that subject or context (eg. what they did to solve a problem once, why they are doing the learning). While "discussion" is fine, I think a facility for participants to tell their story or testimonial for others to read would be useful. This would help build the learning community.

Tony Karrer said...

Great comment Dean. I agree that widgets will definitely not improve content reusability and have the risk of making things worse in a couple of ways:

1. If you use widgets that have restricted access, then whoever you share your content with, will need to also acquire access to the widget. It's a little like having to have the authoring tool today, but with widgets, there are more of them running around.

2. Many widgets do not have the concept of content sharing, modification, etc. Thus, if I hand off my content to someone else and they want to change it, they will have to recreate it.

Definitely a note of caution is in order if you are looking at content reuse.

Probably worth a blog post on its own.