Waiting patiently

Posted on December 22, 2011 by David

English Instruction and Test Prep Through Cellphones in India

Posted on February 8, 2011 by David

McGraw-Hill is building a mobile-phone platform to teach English and college test preparation to people in India, which the publisher hopes will help it tap into rapidly expanding cellphone use in emerging markets.

The platform, mConnect, comes as textbook publishers are jockeying to supply learning materials on digital devices. If the software is successful in India, McGraw-Hill plans to offer it in other developing countries in Asia and Africa.

The service will initially teach subscribers through text messaging and automated voice response, said Bruce D. Marcus, McGraw-Hill’s executive vice president. For instance, automated software will give Indians feedback on their English-speaking abilities, and a text-message service will offer test-preparation questions and grade the responses.

via chronicle.com

A bit late to posting this or, well, anything lately.

What’s smart about this is the simplicity. Since SMS is the lowest common denominator, all students will be able to use the system regardless of device or carrier, and it can be ported to many other educational settings, schools, networks and so forth.

Of course, since it is not an “app,” is not called iConnect and doesn’t appear to have a little green robot mascot, it hasn’t garnered much attention here in the States.

Posted via email from David W. Middleton’s Posterous

NYC skyline from a distance

Posted on October 23, 2010 by David

OpenScholar 2.0 and the “Online Campus”

Posted on August 4, 2010 by David

Recently I’ve been in discussions with @morganmundum and @tjoosten about the future of the LMS, or Learning Management System. At the same time, I’ve been exploring how Drupal, Moodle and other open source systems might be integrated to provide a unique learning environment that brings together the expected traditional academic features of an Learning Management System (LMS), the potential content creation and collaboration benefits of a Content Management System (CMS) and the personal interactivity and relationship building possible from Social Networking.

In my mind I have envisioned this as essentially an “online campus,” wherein there is no division of administration, academic and social online activities for students, faculty, alumni, partners and adminstrators alike.

Working with both Drupal and Moodle has been a fascinating endeavor, exploring both to learn their nuances, both good and bad, and trying to identify how to foster their strengths and weaknesses. This has been challenging and engaging, and I have worked closely with certain faculty members and other institutions to identify what they are interested in seeing as the concept of the “Online Campus” evolves.

Enter OpenScholar. Harvard has released OpenScholar 2.0, which is described on their site in the following manner:

OpenScholar represents a paradigm shift in how the personal academic and research web sites are created and maintained. Built on the open-source framework Drupal, OpenScholar makes it possible to create academic web sites in a matter of seconds. Each web site comes with a suite of powerful tools from which users can facilitate the creation, distribution, and preservation of knowledge faster and more efficiently than ever before.

link

I’ll be downloading and installing this in the next few weeks to explore and see what the potential is and if this does truly mark a “paradigm shift” as marketed. In the meantime, take a look at the video below showing some of the features and functionality.

Recognizing this is still early, and is still focused on academic web sites, so to speak, is the the right direction for an “Online Campus?” What’s missing?