Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning? Culture Digital Tools Teaching Strategies Flickr: Incase By Nathan Maton Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point. The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best?
“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to. You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. Related. Interactivity and British Library Sounds - Sound Recordings. Have you recently visited the new British Library Sounds website and tried out its new features?
The British Library Sounds website ( now has 50,000 sound tracks, all freely available for listening online. It represents the most diverse online collection of scholarly sounds anywhere, and now has improved interactive features, including tagging, favouriting, playlist generation and timed annotation features. Simply register on then those features are enabled. Registering allows you to make notes, add tags and personally manage items using favourites and playlists. An example of timed annotations is here: (& see the screen grab image below), but please do register yourself and add your own notes to other tracks. Watch this space over the next few weeks as we announce more collections that have recently been digitised and copyright-cleared for public access. Cloudworks - JISC. 20 tips and resources for using learning technology in higher education | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional.
Allison Littlejohn, director of the Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University Blended learning should transform learning, not just replicate teaching: Companies want graduates who can source, filter and use existing knowledge to create new knowledge, and the university is key to equipping students with these skills. Yet we seldom see technology tools being used in radically new ways in HE. They are usually used to replicate lectures - think of websites or podcasts - rather than enabling students to learn in new ways. Massive Open Online Course is one example of transformational learning. The courses are semi structured, decentralised, and (crucially) open.
People contribute via blogs, tweets and a variety of other web 2.0 tools. Learn from industry: There are lots of examples of collaborative and collective learning in industry. Other useful examples: • iSpot, UK Open University - where students, experts and members of the public share ideas on botany Resources: