Friday, 22 February 2013

Online Learning - Spoilt for choice and free!



Task 1 - Assessing a few educational video sites

I chose four that you introduced us to Michele, and then one that I came across myself as I searched, LearnersTV. I have ranked them all in a table at the end.

TeacherTube

Started by a teacher in 2007 as a forum for educational videos for both student and teacher learning, TeacherTube has now expanded to include audios, photos and user groups. It was very easy to find, being the first result when I searched for educational videos on Google.

It has a relatively uncluttered and well set-out Home page with clear links to the following resources: Videos, Docs, Audios, Photos, Groups, Classrooms and Collections. I'm not quite sure of the usefulness of Groups and Classrooms, but I did have to laugh when I found a Mrs Hardy under Groups! It is very easy to share resources on a number of social media sites via the tab on the RHS of the screen. I found the ads on the Home page a little sneaky as it wasn’t that obvious that they were ads, unlike those that popped up whenever I wanted to view a resource.

I performed a search for boolean logic and was disappointed to find just four results, only one of which was really useful. Climate change returned 994 hits, obviously a more relevant topic to the teaching fraternity. Smoking also returned a large number of results but these cannot be narrowed down by using boolean operators. Results can only be sorted by relevance or date, so that is a bit limiting. 

Overall I have given this website an average ranking as I feel it is that while it may have lots of content in some areas sifting through this to find what is really relevant may take some time. Like YouTube, it appears anyone can upload content so there is a lot of material of questionable value on the site.

LearnersTV

LearnersTV provides links to educational video lectures from institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford Graduate School of Business and The University of New South Wales, across a broad range of subjects including science, health and business. It also offers free animations, study notes, presentations, online tests and downloadable magazines. I came across it when I was searching for online educational videos where it was the eighth result returned.

LearnersTV is very easy to use, but very topic specific. It allowed me to use boolean logic to search, the only site that I visited to do so, and provided accurate, detailed and authoritative information for topics searched. Some content is so specific that it is confined to a single institution or series of lectures, but that is an indication of the quality of the material rather than a shortcoming of the website.

I found this an engaging site to use with lots of fascinating material. I especially loved the animations – who knew learning about cholesterol could be so entertaining! With this site to browse we will never have an excuse to be bored in our retirement years! It would be good to see more universities and institutions come on board in the future.

CosmoLearning

CosmoLearning was created by two sibling students in 2007 as an aggregation site for free educational resources to assist students and educators around the globe improve and extend their learning by accessing information in a variety of formats on a single website. That said, I found this site impossible to find via a google search using keywords such as online, learning, lectures, courses, science etc but it finally popped up on page 2 when I searched video lectures online.

I like the layout of this site and it seemed like it would be quite easy to use until I discovered that the Search tool does not work, several links are not yet operating, and some video content has either been removed due to copyright issues or does not play due to the site being over capacity or some other unknown problem. Where content is accessible, it is difficult to ascertain how thoroughly it is supported without being able to perform a search within the site. Where a topic is grouped with several resources I often found one or more of these to be unavailable. Overall I found CosmoLearning to be a disappointing and frustrating experience that I am not eager to repeat any time soon.

AcademicEarth

AcademicEarth was created in San Francisco with the aim of enabling technology to circumvent the barriers to a free high quality education for all via the internet. It provides access to lectures and courses from a variety of universities and institutions across the globe, including a couple from Australia, and was not too difficult to find via a google search using a variety of search terms.

It is very easy to navigate around AcademicEarth, with courses available to view by Subject, University, Instructor or Playlist (a specially curated list). Unfortunately the Search function doesn’t respond to boolean operators. I got excited when I discovered an Advanced Search link, but it was shortlived when I found it only provided a means of limiting the institutions or subjects searched. With the content on this site being provided by some of the leading universities in the world it is obviously very comprehensive and I like the links that are provided on the RHS of the page to related resources. Overall I enjoyed exploring AcademicEarth.

TED

TED is an acronym for Technology Entertainment Design and its mission is spreading ideas, which it achieves through its now well-known TEDTalks. A google search didn’t find TED as quickly as I expected, nor with some of the search terms that I expected, but along the way I did discover Edudemic which lists what it claims are the 100 best video sites for educators, and that made for interesting reading (take a look here http://edudemic.com/2012/08/best-video-sites-for-teachers/).

TED can be accessed as a web page or via an app. Both are easy to use but the app is much more basic than the web page. Both provide a search function with a basic sort and filter option, along with the ability to choose featured or random talks. The website also suggests related content and tags, and has Speakers and Playlists tabs, along with a wealth of other information relating to TED. I used magic as my search term and found a small selection of videos on the app and a larger range of material on the web page, but not as much as I expected. Overall though, TED is an engaging site to use.

Ratings

Website
Easy to find
Ease of use
Topic coverage
Overall rank
TeacherTube
LearnersTV
CosmoLearning
AcademicEarth
TED




Task 2 - Five Aussie institutions on iTunesU and five courses or lessons to take in my spare time or retirement (whichever comes first)

My choice of five Australian universities:
  •        Swinburne University of Technology
  •        RMIT University
  •        La Trobe University
  •        Australian National University
  •        Deakin University


Five courses or lessons which caught my eye:

      Deakin: The Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library – probably don’t need to explain why I chose this one. I wasn’t aware there was one so I had to find out more

      Australian National University: How To Become A Millionaire Without Losing Your Soul – I was just intrigued by this title

       La Trobe University: History of Children’s Literature – very relevant to our area of study and my work in a school library, this series of 29 lectures looks fascinating

      La Trobe University: Fiction for Young Adults – a series of lectures with such titles as Defining Adult Fiction, The Turmoil of the Teenager and Perceiving the Voice in a Story, this course looks like a great way of expanding my knowledge in this area and again is very relevant to my job

     Swinburne University of Technology: Using Educational Technologies: Wikis – just something I am curious to learn more about with regards to their use in an educational environment such as a uni or school








No comments:

Post a Comment