eLearning 1

For the last several weeks of my Higher Education in the Digital Age course, I have been tasked with investigating and writing about a current topic (or a set of current topics) within the course purview. As a math / information and communication technology (ICT) teacher, I wanted to chose a topic that would be directly relevant to what I do in the classroom. Inspired by our investigations in class, I've been using several online resources this Spring with my students, including Code Academy and Khan Academy. I've also been maintaining my own online educational resources on ibiblio.org since 1999. Since the start of school this year, I have been hearing about flipped classrooms in professional development and staff meetings at work. At the Education Summit I attended at Pycon last Thursday, I learned that the MOOC platform edX runs on a completely free software stack, which has been released as a project called Open edX. This greatly increases my level of interest in exploring MOOCs, since I can do so without violating my commitment to software freedom.

My goal for our end of course investigations will be to some how tie all these things together, to look at how they relate to each other, and to develop a short to medium term plan for how to use these tools in my work as a teacher.  I'll also use this opportunity to jot down some thoughts on what a longer term plan might look like.

The first thing to do is to figure out if there is a single term that can be used to refer to all these differing tools and technologies, which have in common only that they make use of the World Wide Web. After poking around on Wikipedia, it seems that the best fit is the term eLearning.  Specifically, what I'm interested in is web eLearning. So for my current topics investigation I plan to explore how I can use web eLearning in my teaching.