New England – Expanding our Universe
Jupiter and Ganymede
New England Institute continues its adventures and exploration of new boundaries with its shuttle load of teachers coming along for the ride.
Shifting, shaping and Moodling!
Since our last meeting we’ve run 6 face to face Moodle training sessions at Campuses around the Institute, travelling around 2000km to do so.
At the same time the team has worked with CLI to get the LRR underway. We’ve garnered strong Faculty support from Assistant Directors to facilitate uptake of their resource repository which will help with storage and retrieval of resources, validation, sharing of resources and also improve Institute wide storage management and requirements. This has been extended to a Data Classification Project which is a joint project between Information and Communication Technology Unit and Educational Developments Unit to establish a NEI data classification framework and rules.
Janison transfers have continued, based on an audit of enrolments and usage (type and frequency). CLI’s IMS extraction tool has been a great help in this.
Playing and planning!
Knowing how we love to play- ICT has decided to give us our own Educational Developments Unit sandpit so that we can extend our trials including integration of Mahara and Skillsbook, Joomla, and more…
The team have also developed a plan to repurpose our IDL studio into a dedicated M Studio- multicast studio, which we’re really excited about.
Spruiking!
Campus briefings for returning and new staff have been underway and the team has, via various means, managed to get around to nearly all Campuses to spruik about the “wonders” of the Learning and Assessment team and how we can help staff to effectively use learning technologies in their training and assessment.
We’re sure that 2009 will be an exciting year – full of challenges and opportunities, and new destinations to explore.
And… I’m sure we can help each other to expand the universe of our staff and communities, and to avoid those dreaded black holes we occasionally come across.
SWSI Update
Development of an actual e-learning Unit – “Innovations & Technology Based Learning Unit” being formed for 2009. Julie Collareda from Sydney Institute has been appointed as the manager of the Unit and starts on the 9th February.
Development/Branding/Training of Sharepoint sites for all Institute teams are in progress with many exploring the possibilities for sharepoint to meet the various team needs.
Moodle hosted externally has now been branded and setup in preparation for classes in Semester 1. Training of staff and development of courses have been in progress from November and those involved are very excited and have built courses from toolboxes, CD’s Janison content and directly into Moodle. All faculties are involved in some capacity and we have over 520 users and 50 courses currently and this is before students have even started.
Podcast Server being reviewed to have similar look and feel as Teacher tube.
The unit has been working on having systems and workflows that are simple and have had some positive feedback from staff as to the effectiveness of this new system. These workflows will be reviewed regularly and adjust as improvements are identified.
All 83 Smartboards from the ANT2 Project have been installed and are ready to be used by staff in Semester 1, 2009. Training will be ongoing in the use the smartboard and the related software and peripherals through L & D Unit.
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