Learnetic, a Polish-based eLearning publisher and developer, has just released Lorepo — an online authoring tool dedicated to the creation of interactive digital content compatible with desktop computers, tablet devices and smart phones. Thanks to HTML5 technology and the development of specific design guidelines, the new tool enables authors to create interactive learning objects that are compatible with the wide variety of operating systems, screen resolutions and mouse/touch interfaces in today’s marketplace. Read the rest of the press release here >>

 

lorepo.com -- Lorepo is our key solution for everyone interested in learning, creating and sharing interactive content.

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Lorepo is provided to you by Learnetic, an eLearning industry leader offering a wide range of products and services for modern education. Lorepo is our key solution for everyone interested in learning, creating and sharing interactive content.

Either you are an individual person willing to share some knowledge with your friends or the whole world, a teacher eager to provide your students with personalized learning resources or a publishing company aiming at preparing professional, multiplatform interactive content, Lorepo is the best choice for you.

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Also see:

 

learnetic.com-  Learnetic S.A. is a world-leading educational software publisher and e-learning technology provider,

 

.Learnetic S.A. is a world-leading educational software publisher and e-learning technology provider, based in Poland. Its content, publishing tools and eLearning platforms are widely used by publishers, teachers and students in over 30 countries, including Poland, United States, United Kingdom, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile, and Australia. The company’s talented team of software engineers specializes in designing applications for education markets and is dedicated to satisfying the diverse needs of contemporary educators and learners.

Comprehensive report regarding online learning in Austrialia - April 2011

Originally saw this at
one of Stephen Downes’ blogs

 

Excerpt:

In particular, the report outlines the operations of two significant distance-learning institutes in Australia:

  • Open Universities Australia (OUA), a consortium of universities providing distance-learning opportunities for students across Australia.
  • eWorks, focusing on Technical and Further Education (TAFE), equivalent to college education level courses.

This report outlines unique features and best practices of both organizations, details specific roles within the organizations, and explores options for potential collaborations and project partnerships.

Open Universities Australia (OUA), a $70 million for-profit consortium which originated in 1992 with Federal Government funding, is now fully funded from student fees and projected to double in growth in the near term. 70% of students receive financial aid. As a consortium, it relies on the reputation of its constituent members. The board, comprised of participating university chancellors and independent directors from the professional workforce which includes an academic committee, governs the introduction and quality of programs and vets new providers. Most course work is delivered asynchronously with increasing progression towards synchronicity. Demand (rather than supply) drives new courses which are offered to complement existing courses in accordance with market forces. More than $1 million is available to aid in development of online delivery of existing face-to-face courses.

eWorks, a support service of The Australian Flexible Learning Framework (AFLF) develops (rather than delivers) content, based on nationally mandated curriculum competencies for the Vocation Education and Training sector (VET) sector, and coordinates access to existing vendor products into a single environment, generated from a single platform. Standardization of both learning objects and formats for storage and accessibility resulted in a federated search engine: the Learning Object Repository Network (LORN). Success of LORN relies on standards compliance by each state and territory.

 

 

Adobe Museum of Digital Media, A lecture by John Maeda

From DSC:
If online courses could feature content done this well…wow! Incredibly well done. Engaging. Professsional. Cross-disciplinary. Multimedia-based. Creative. Innovative. Features a real craftsman at his work. The Forthcoming Walmart of Education will feature content at this level…blowing away most of the competition.

 

John Maeda -- Adobe Museum -- March 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 


This is also true for materials like the item below!


 

 

Cambridge Global Grid for Learning Partner with Moodlerooms
Leading broker and aggregator of digital educational content has established a joint partnership with proven provider of enterprise Moodle-based e-learning solutions to improve access to digital content.

Baltimore, MD — Moodlerooms, Inc., the provider of proven, enterprise Moodle-based e-learning solutions has established a joint partnership with leading broker and aggregator of digital educational content, Cambridge Global Grid for Learning (GGfL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Cambridge University Press, one of the world’s most respected publishers, to further the effort of providing educators and learners across the world with a safe and reliable environment to search, stream and download high quality and copyright-cleared learning resources from multiple content providers.

Over 40 content providers are currently available through GGfL, including Cambridge University Press, Intel, Science Photo Library, Classical Comics, Corbis, Reuters, EduPuzzles, and Bridgeman Education, making it one of the most comprehensive digital educational content collections in the world.

Rest of article…

Tagged with:  

Who needs textbooks? — from Newsweek.com
How Washington State is redesigning textbooks for the digital age.

Who needs textbooks? How Washington State is redesigning textbooks for the digital age.

Jessie Sellers, a student at Tacoma Community College in Washington state, was puzzled when he logged onto his school’s website last December to figure out which book he needed for his upcoming English class. Whereas for all his previous courses, the 24-year-old education major could simply click on a link to view the name of the required textbook, this time there were no books listed at all. It was no mistake: thanks to an ambitious pilot program aimed at reducing the cost of textbooks at public colleges, Sellers and hundreds of other students across the state won’t have to buy textbooks for more than three dozen courses offered this winter.

Washington’s Open Course Library is the largest state-funded effort in the nation to make core college course materials available on the Web for $30 or less per class. Financed with $750,000 from the state of Washington and a matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal isn’t just to reduce student costs, says program architect Cable Green. It’s also to create engaging, interactive learning materials that will help improve course completion rates. By the time the project is completed in 2012, digitized textbook equivalents for some 81 high-enrollment classes will be available online for the more than 400,000 students enrolled in Washington’s network of community and technical colleges. Even better, the materials can be shared across the globe, largely for free, because they will be published in an open format that avoids the most onerous licensing restrictions. To keep costs at a minimum, the teachers developing the materials are relying primarily on either existing material in the public domain or embarking on the painstaking task of developing materials from scratch.

Math that moves -- the use of the iPad in K-12 -- from the New York Times

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From DSC:
I post this here — with higher ed included in the tags/categories — because if the trend within K-12 continues (i.e. that of using such technologies as the iPad, digital textbooks, mobile learning devices, etc.), students’ expectations WILL be impacted. When they hit our doorsteps, they will come with their heightened sets of expectations. The question is, will we in higher ed be ready for them?

Global Grid for Learning – 1 million-plus resources — from MJO
Hugh John checks out a BETT newbie, online service provider Global Grid for Learning

globalgridforlearning.com.

Global Grid for Learning (GGfL) aims to connect teachers and students at all stages in education to single sources of digital multimedia learning resources from multiple providers.

Discovery Education Digital Curriculum - as of Dec 2010/Jan 2011

Google to build education software marketplace — from The Huffington Post
which links to:
Google pushes education software through app store — from BusinessWeek.com

Tagged with:  

The Coming Golden Age of Open Educational Simulations — from Mike Caulfield

From DSC:
Thanks Mike for sharing this information, these lessons and reflections. Although your posting stopped me in my tracks, it was good to reflect upon. It made me wonder about such things as…

  • If we could get a billion from the fortunes that Gates, Buffett, and other billionaires are donating, could we create open learning objects/courses and make them available worldwide? Or would that not work?
  • Were you all ahead of your time?
  • Where does this leave us? That is, is it a wise goal to create interactive, professionally-done, engaging, multimedia-based applications? If so, under what conditions?
  • If we pursue this goal, who and how should we do it?
  • If open source models are followed, should we move towards the use of consortiums to create the learning objects? i.e. to spread out the development costs?
  • What would you say to instructional designers if they are following similar endeavors/efforts? How can one know all of the context that speaks to each individual taking the course?
  • Will “The Reusability Paradox” be a show-stopper for us?
  • What should our strategy and vision be?
  • Or did I miss the whole point here?!

OpenSesame -- another online-based marketplace for learning appears on the scene

From E-Learning Queen

“Our goal is to create a community where both buyers and sellers thrive and elearning is accessible, easy to implement and rewarding for everyone.”

Open Educational Resources (OER) 101 -- by David Wiley

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Excerpt from the Executive Summary:

Academic libraries have long enjoyed their status as the “heart of the university.” However, in recent decades, higher education environments have changed. Government officials see higher education as a national resource. Employers view higher education institutions as producers of a commodity—student learning. Top academic faculty expect higher education institutions to support and promote cuttingedge research. Parents and students expect higher education to enhance students’ collegiate experience, as well as propel their career placement and earning potential. Not only do stakeholders count on higher education institutions to achieve these goals,
they also require them to demonstrate evidence that they have achieved them. The same is true for academic libraries; they too can provide evidence of their value. Community college, college, and university librarians no longer can rely on their stakeholders’ belief in their importance. Rather, they must demonstrate their value.

Purpose – The following review and report is intended to provide Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) leaders and the academic community with 1) a clear view of the current state of the literature on value of libraries within an institutional context, 2) suggestions for immediate “Next Steps” in the demonstration of academic library value, and 3) a “Research Agenda” for articulating academic library value. It strives to help librarians understand, based on professional literature, the current answer to the question, “How does the library advance the missions of the institution?” The report is also of interest to higher educational professionals external to libraries, including senior leaders, administrators, faculty, and student affairs professionals.

Scope – This report is intended to describe the current state of the research on community college, college, and university library value and suggest focus areas for future research…

Who We Are
The Learning Registry project is an informal collaboration among several [U.S.] federal agencies that share the same goal: making federal learning resources and primary source materials easier to find, access and integrate into educational environments.

Key members of the collaboration are:

In addition we have been working with:

While we focus on the availability of federal resources, our approach and goals are shared with others worldwide.  We are talking with and working to leveraging the activities of many others, including:

Thus we hope our results can enable a broad ecosystem of discoverable and accessible learning content and help to build an international community with a shared vision.

Addendum from 9/20/10:

It was only a few weeks ago that we posted about Steve Midgley speaking at the Government 2.0 Summit in Washington, DC.  In this five minute video, Steve explains at a conceptual level what the Learning Registry will enable: discovery of learning resources through a common set of APIs. You can download his slides here: The Learning Registry – How to Find and Use More Resources for Learning Presentation


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