Innovation Profile 003
Online learning needs a managed learning environment
City-wide online learning communities are now being created. But web portals do not offer the kind of functionality that is needed for effective curriculum online support of learning and eLearning . What is needed is a Managed Learning Environment (MLE).
An effective MLE should offer you the following features
- Groups of home pages for any level within the learning community and for each individual teacher and student.
- Effective ways to find content which do more than traditional search engines. Examples include searching via taxonomies or hierarchies, such as a list of subjects which is split into modules and units. Another example is searching of folders or folder groups that are named secure repositories.
- Easy to use tools to create, edit and share content, in a flexible learning object format.
- Content which matches the latest international standards for content packaging (eg IMS). This means the user will derive most benefit from the content and a publisher can expect all MLEs to be able to use their content without difficulty.
- The ability to automatically create active communities of learners (including teachers and parents), within secure groups and with controlled access to folders, discussion forums, calendars, courses etc.
- Tools for building assessments, recording progress and building courses.
- Anytime, anywhere access to the learning with directories to assist in finding people to work with collaboratively.
- Opportunity for teachers to use digital assets libraries (images, videos, sound files, animations) to build content and for learners to adopt constructivist approaches to learning.
- Optional avatars to allow users to record their own voice to give instructions about the content. This makes a welcome change to using text, helps overcome reading age issues, and can be lip readable.
- A research & development programme which will continue to provide innovative solutions, such as user personalisation, into the future.
Many of these features are new to educators and need to be considered carefully. Digitalbrain (www.digitalbrain.com) has experience of running the largest school based learning network in Europe, for all 2700 schools in London. They are focussed upon delivering services to education across Europe and can help you to understand the benefits of this approach.
The Digitalbrain Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company.
If you would like to know more please contact enquiries@digitalbrain.com
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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org
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