Educational Development

Had a follow up meeting with Hillary Jenkins today, revisiting ideas we discussed last time we met. Hillary was pleased to say that a go ahead had been given for the course she is to develop for flexible learning and told Terry and I about some of the limitations she expects with regard to some of the Open Courseware ideas.

We spent a fare amount of time reviewing the things we talked about, getting Terry up to speed and just rehashing where we were up to. Terry offered to help Hillary write up an action plan and they are going to meet in the next few days.

Hillary alerted us to some pretty extreme deadlines, so Terry I and will have to prioritise her project a bit. May 9 is an open day for the course! Hillary hopes to develop a short promotional video for the course by then, which would be a good thing in terms of marketing the course starting a small project to get familiar with video - a widely applicable form of media development. I advised Hillary to collect up to 30 minutes of stock footage, music, and stills that she has copy rights for, and take them to Will Marler to develop 15 second/30 second/1minute and perhaps even a 5 minute versions of the one promo video. To help Hillary source content for this project I pointed her to Flickr's Creative Commons search, and more generally the Creative Commons Find. These are places (and there are others) where Hillary will be able to source licenced music, photos, and video media to use in the promotional video. I also suggested that Hillary approach Communication Design and see if there is a student interested in taking this production on.

As well, Hillary should approach Jason Taylor and learn how she can manage the BTT website, with a view that she enhance the site with more information and even tasters to the course. Terry will also help Hillary start a Black Board shell for the course, and we will start Hillary off in working with Black Board - trying to find a balance between the closed and open resources and communications for the course. Given the very tight deadline, we are working through this one step at a time without devising a broad design for the course at this stage. We still need to get Hillary aware of the possibilities, so will be using the promotional preparations as ways to raise her general awareness.

I also showed Hillary the Travel Wiki and the Wikipedia entry for Otago Polytechnic as a matter of interest and to start her thinking about constructionist learning and assessment strategies for the course, revisiting some of the ideas of developing communication channels and student work portfolios that can exist beyond the life of the Black Board course...