August 30, 2006
YUI Widgets Available for OU Online Course Materials?
Picked up from Jim Ellis' monthly Interactive Media Newsletter is the news that Moodle will be using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) toolkit as the 'official' Moodle Ajax tookit.
(For a demo of what the YUI supports, see 15 Things you can do with Yahoo! UI; for reference, see the YUI cheatsheets.)
I wonder if this means that OU online course materials delivered through the Moodle environment will also be "allowed" to make use of YUI functionality? If so, I wonder what the repercussions are for the OU online course materials XML schema (we are supposed to be moving towards an XML workflow...) More on this in a later post, (which may end up on the NOUS blog, depending how contentious it is ;-)
More OU news - there are a couple of posts being advertised over in IET:
- Senior Programmer/Web Developer, Institute of Educational Technology: Your key role will be lead programmer and developer for institutional and externally funded IT projects. You will focus on several concurrent projects, including working with national and international partners developing tools such as a Learning Design player, mentoring and student support system, online surveying, eLearning support and knowledge management services. Alex Little was blogging odd bits about the learning design player, I think, and Martin Weller has also blogged about LAMS in an OU context.
- Programmer/Web Developer, Institute of Educational Technology: The key role of this position is to carry out software and web development for a variety of externally-funded educational technology projects. Past projects have included knowledge management tools, a learning design player and new feature development for the open-source virtual learning environment Moodle. There is a growing interest in social software in the Institute and it is possible some projects may be in this area.
- Two Learning and Teaching Development Officers, Institute of Educational Technology: We are expanding the Learning and Teaching Development Team which works across the Institute and the University to provide support for the University's learning and teaching strategies. The team are involved in cutting-edge projects, including: evaluating new course material for Open University students; getting to grips with the challenges of student retention; exploring innovative methods of online assessment; working with academics to explore best usability practice in teaching.
If you go for any of these posts, please mention that you saw it advertised on the OUseful blog...
... or don't ... (blog post reading wastrels, pah!;-)
Hmm - what else is new...? Ah yes, this caught my eye (after a pointer from Juliet):
It's also put paid (temporarily, I hope) to the reviews that were fed through to course pages on the the course catalogue. If you can't remember what they looked like, I (thankfully) took a few screenshots for an earlier post reviewing the OU course catalogue web pages.
Juliet's observation also sensitised me to this post (obtained via Downes) critiquing: The Changing Face of University Websites.
And as I'm on the topic, for readers with SAMS access, check out Guy Carberry's blog on design matters relating to OU materials (both print and web-based)... it's good stuff...
Posted by ajh59 at August 30, 2006 09:12 PM