Not so long ago, I noticed a simple but effective way of setting up web-based activities on the Science course, S381 (although the same model may well be used on other OU courses too...), of which more below.
At the time, I mailed a note about it to a couple of people and FC conferences, and then promptly forgot about it... I am only reminded about it now because I was tidying out my mailbox and stumbled across it again.
In terms of knowledge management, this is not ideal... So I wonder whether blogging and tagging these sorts of posts represents a more effective way of capturing, and potentially sharing, this knowledge? One useful model would be to write a blog post, and then also have the option of mailing it to whoever I'd have sent it to if it was an email. This is likely to change for each post of course, so a simple notification to a (list of) the same email adress(es) is not really appropriate.
Category tags could perhaps be overloaded to perform this function, where the category tag defines a mailing list to send the post to as an email, as well as a serving a classification function.
But that is all a digression (albeit a recoverable one captured by the blogmail tag I'll assign as a keyword to this post).
So back to S381... the web activities are launched from a straightforward list of links to activities (you'll need OU-SAMS authetication to see the page).
Clicking on an activity link opens up two windows. For example, an activity on A review of binary evolution opens the activity description as well as a window containing the target website of the exercise.
As a model of interaction/instruction, it's very simple: a ttile, list of instructions, possibly a model answer (revealed by clicking a button in the exercise description pop-up window) and a target URL. Automatic URL monitoring can suppress the exercise and flag it for editorial/CT attention if the target site goes down, or even just if it changes.
The model is also readily describable in a structured way (for example, an XML DTD or schema).
Add a Wiki to this model of interaction and it may even be possible to grow a course from student input based on exercises that are rapidly generated (but not necessarily answered!) by course teams...
Posted by ajh59 at April 29, 2005 10:24 AM