I am leaving shortly
for vacation for two weeks but wanted to give you a brief report on
where things stand on our MANE learning objects planning grant, and to
ask that you give some thought to some issues that we will need to
think through as we move forward with designing the data collection
methods for our various sub-projects. You'll also need to start
reaching out to others on your campuses that will need to participate
in the grant activities. And for those of you who raised your hands to
have your name on the grant, you'll need to recruit the students who
will do some of the web searching for us.
As you will recall
there are 4 parts to the grant
- Catalog of
Learning Object Repositories
Steve Bischof
and Sally Grucan from our library are working with me on this aspect
of the project. We have a twiki page at
http://twiki.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/view/Projects/LearningObjectRepositoryCatalog that
provides details about where we are at with this project. Sally and
Steve would like to start forming a group of librarians from the
participating schools to help move the project forward. Can you try to
identify a subject librarian or two that would like to participate in
designing this catalog of learning object repositories? We will craft
an introductory letter laying out the goals of the project that you
could then forward to the relevant person or people within your
library.
- Catalog of
Locally Developed Learning Objects
Amit Patel, Will
Gladstone, and V. Hoffman have begun to design a flexible database for
us to use to keep track of the learning objects that we have developed
on our campuses. The data structure is based on IMS, CanCore, and
Dublin Core, and can be extended to accomodate local metadata schemes.
We have a twiki page at
http://twiki.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/view/Projects/LearningObjectCatalog that
contains (or will shortly ! ) a link to a mock up of a data collection
page, a spreadsheet that maps the proposed data structure to these
standards, and a draft of a specification for the overall application.
- 'Disciplinary
Readiness' and selection criteria
Brian Fay, our
dean for social sciences and interdisciplinary programs, and I have
been working together to think through how we might approach the
creation of a process that will allow us to select learning objects
within disciplines that will serve multiple campuses. Somewhat
fragmentary notes about this are at
http://twiki.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/view/Projects/LearningObjectSelection .
One thought we have is to try to organize a half-day workshop in the
fall with interested faculty from particpating schools to talk through
these topics as a way to prepare the way for a more ambitious
proposals that we would present to our individual institutions. You
might want to start thinking about who on your faculty you would want
to invite to such a workshop.
-
Learning Object
Development Tools
We want to keep track of the tools, techniques, development
methods, and relevant standards (e.g. SCORM) that we are using on our
campuses, with the idea that the first step towards collaboration is
simply knowing what we all do and trying to find commonalities. As we
catalog our locally developed learning objects, I am hoping that we
can also track HOW we made them. I have set up (but added nothing yet)
a twiki page at
http://twiki.wesleyan.edu/cgi-bin/view/Projects/LearningObjectDevTools for
that purpose.
That should give you
plenty to think about. When I get back from vacation, I'll be
calling/writing to try to move each of these items forward. Please try
to take a little time to inform those on your campus that we'll need
to bring into this process about what is going on with this grant. I
hope to be able to circulate more formal design documents to collect
comments. In the meantime, comments on any and all of this are of
course more than welcome.
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