SLOOP2Desc Interim Meeting / Slovenia 2010

I attended the SLOOP2Desc interim meeting in Ljubljana (finally learned how to spell that!) Slovenia last week. It is a EU Leonardo sponsored knowledge transfer project aimed at giving teachers new skills in development of web2.0 learning resources.

We have LOADS of work to do as it is approaching the interim report mark, DEIS is the evaluator in the project so i'll be writing the evaluation report of the project so far over the next few weeks.

Ljubljana is lovely! Beautiful city, very friendly people. It was bizarre there at night time, the streets were deserted, the architecture in the centre of town is really elaborate and ornate, so it was like wandering around in some empty, overblown, moonlit stage set. I also visited the Castle while I was there, it's been redesigned and is now a really interesting piece of modern architecture, coolest castle i've ever visited! Anyway, here are a few photos, more over on my flickr.

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking

I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.

New Essential French Demo

Happy New Year!

So here are some stills from the Essential French demo I was working on before Christmas, again the demo was made in aftereffects, a mix of vector graphics and stock photography. The course itself was developed by us in DEIS using a mix of articulate studio and flash. In terms of design I concentrated on colourful, chunky, fun graphics to appeal to the secondary school target audience. As part of the design I developed icons for the three sections of the courses; Listening, Reading and Vocabulary, and Grammar, you can see these in the screenshots above. We worked closely with the Essential French grind school to develop an online moodle portal populated with French language lessons. The lessons were informed by the schools face-to-face experience as well as our own expertise in the area and feature a mix of accessible learning resources (such as mp3s and vocab lists) as well as interactive, self-corrected exercises with intelligent feedback and step-by-step introductions to key grammatical points.

DEIS also developed a site for Essential French, see; essentialfrench.ie

Sloop2Desc kick off meeting + Essential French Demo

I'm just back from Sicily and the Sloop2Desc kick off meeting, we're evaluators for the project. I've never worked on evaluating an EU project before, so I guess i'll learn as I go along! I'll get a lot of help from my boss in DEIS, who has evaluated plenty of these projects. The project is based around developing an open source learning repository of reusable scorm compliant objects to help IT professionals achieve EUCIP qualifications. EUCIP is a new EU wide industry standard that was developed as part of the EQF.

Sicily was lovely and the partners were very hospitable! I had amazing food every day, good times!

Now it’s back to office work, this week I’m starting storyboards for the Essential French demo. We developed an online course using articulate for Essentail French last summer. A lot of work went into it and it’s very expansive, so now we need a demo to showcase the work!

As part of the work last summer we developed a new branding identity for Essential French, this image is of the new logos I submitted, they eventually choose the flag as it was closest to their original logo.

Rotterdam MEP Meeting

Preparing for the Rotterdam MEP meeting at the moment. Flying to Amsterdam at 5 from Cork, then a train to Rotterdam, i've never been there, there's meant to be amazing architecture so i'm looking forward to taking some nice pictures and seeing some cool buildings - that is if I get a chance to slip away between meetings!

DEIS is working with the NMCI on this project. It's an EU funded project, aimed at developing learning objects to be used in maritime courses. We completed one of the courses last April. It was html / css / flash based scorm module to teach learners about AIS (automated identification systems). We used reload to package the scorm modules. In my experience Reload is quite reliable, and has the bonus of being free!

The course itself was developed along a previous template we used for Citi. The template can be seen to be broadly based on Gagne's Nine Steps of Instruction, in that the focus is on providing learning objectives, reminding the learner of prior knowledge, recalling facts presented, providing opportunities for performance and feedback and priming the mind for further learning. Further learning supports are supplied in the form of links, references, etc. Articulate quizmaker was used to build learning activities for the course.

The Dutch partners are presenting their course at this meeting. It will be interesting to see what technology they used and if they are running a SCORM based course also. I'm not convinced that SCORM is necessarily superior to a straight forward html / css based course, especially at this stage of the project, where it is unclear if anyone will be tracking learners progress on the course.

We are using an LMS called Dokeos, which as far as I know is a descendant of Maricomp - a previous LMS used by the NMCI in EU funded projects. It seems to be much the same as maricomp, but there are some superficial differences in terms of labeling of tools and the interface itself. There were some difficulties with uploading the course to Dokeos. I thought it was a problem with the SCORM package itself so I packaged the course using several different versions of scorm and tested it in Moodle, SumTotal and Maricomp. The course was accepted in these LMS' but not Dokeos, it was quite frustrating and after many calls to our Dutch partners the problem was finally identified as being server related on their end. As is often the case the problem turned out to be quite basic and straight forward! The NMCI have subcontracted DEIS to develop a second course for the MEP project, so hopefully all server issues etc will be straightened out by then!

Just because a post with no pictures is a bit boring... here are some screen shots from the course we developed and packaged last April.