RLO CETL at ALT C

The RLO CETL had an exhibition stand at this year's ALT-C in Manchester, 8-10 September 2009. The RLO CETL director Prof. Tom Boyle was co-chair of the conference, for which the theme was "In dreams begins responsibility". Musbah, Claire, Tom and Colin from the RLO-CETL team hosted the exhibition stand to promote the recently released GLO Maker 2 learning object authoring tool and the forthcoming OER10 conference next March. The stand also gave the CETL the opportunity to talk to other commercial stakeholders as well as generally demonstrating learning objects. The response was very warm and it was great that so many conference delegates and participants took time out of a busy conference to talk and play with the tool and discover its charms for themselves. Let's hope they have us back next year!

Leeds Metropolitan Coaching Objects Workshop

A two-day workshop at Leeds Metropolitan University to produce "Coaching Objects" (or learning objects for coaching) is proving to be very interesting and productive. We have six highly motivated teams creating all manner of media assets, some of them realised in quirkily creative ways. The Sport and Education team are taking a wide-angle view on coaching practices, looking at the issues of peer-mentoring large cohorts of students. The Innovation North team is using GLO-maker to show how to conduct an effective job interview - and how not to.. (GLO-maker is proving a popular choice of authoring tool with its really simple to use features). Meanwhile, the Business School group have been grappling with the vexing and perennial problem of how to get students to understand statistical data and how it can be analysed. This is potentially an enormous problem space and they've had to seriously distill their initial broad learning objectives down to a more manageable size. The PC3 project group are focusing on a model of "Intentional Change" and have created a simple yet charming hand-drawn animation to illustrate one aspect of the model, which they will use as a media asset in GLO-maker. The team from the Library are exploring coaching within a teaching & learning context using the SMART technique. Finally, the Health Faculty group are showing how to make the most of a tutorial, also using GLO-maker. The sheer range of approaches and outputs is inspiring and the teams seem to be thoroughly enjoying the protected time and access to all the tools and templates.

CIES Reward Programme - University of Ulster

Back in Ulster for the third Programme themed around "Community building and use of communication tools". We have seven highly motivated teams from four faculties plus information services, with an ambitious and innovative range of proposals including use of Web 2.0 social networks, 3D and mobile devices. As always, the event is extremely well organised, thanks to Colette Murphy and her team who do a great deal of behind the scenes and preparatory work to ensure that the Programme is a success. Find out more at the CIES Reward & Recognition website