elearning compendia

Multeversity - prelude to DEANZ

Today (Sunday or Monday - Monday here in New Zealand) seems an auspicious day and this seems an auspicious hemisphere (southern) in which to float a new concept.

This week at the DEANZ conference I shall be talking in a more public forum about the Multeversity - up to now this has only been in some online seminars and presentations to specific institutions and projects over the last few months.

The Multeversity (then called "Multiversity") started off life as an analytic container to bring together a lot of my work on virtual universities, colleges and schools over the last four years, but as I got into a number of related projects (OER, retention, funding, VLEs, etc) my former worries about the long-term health of the university sector began to surface again.

Re.ViCa wiki - recent updates

by Paul Bacsich, 25 October 2010

This regular posting provides information on what is new on the Re.ViCa wiki -  http://www.virtualcampuses.eu - on virtual campuses across the world.

The posting covers the period since 1 July 2010 from all the contributors to the wiki.

A really CAPITAL set of reports is released

by Paul Bacsich, 22 October 2010

(adapted from a posting to the ALT mail list by Ian Chowcat)

The final reports - and many other ones - from the "CAPITAL" project, commissioned by Becta to inform the previous Government's "Harnessing Technology"  strategy, are now released.

In 2008 Becta launched a programme of research to inform the future development of the then government's learning technology strategy, Harnessing Technology. The "Curriculum and Pedagogy" strand of this research, known as CAPITAL, was undertaken jointly by the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham and Sero Consulting.

Secret histories 2: USOU

by Paul Bacsich, 14 May 2006

 

Historical analyses of e-universities seems to be just like buses down Oxford St [cultural reference: London, England] – you wait ages for one, then two come nearly at once. Shortly after the news came in about the analytic report on BCOU and Tele-U in Canada, along comes this EDUCAUSE article about the rather longer-dead USOU – the US branch of the UK Open University, which flourished from spring 1999 until summer 2002. The article is written by Katrina Meyer. Some in the global audience may not recognise her but in the US she is a regular author and speaker on e-learning topics (including those of interest to us) and is heavily involved in WCET including having presented at most of the recent WCET conferences. (I went to several WCET conferences in the 1999-2002 era, which were excellent.)

Secret histories of e-universities: the Canadian scene

by Paul Bacsich, 13 May 2006

The small but (we feel) select community of e-university analysts round the world were pleased to see recently that the long-expected study of Canadian e-university "changes" has appeared. This is a twin study of two interesting situations: the absorption of the British Columbia Open University (BCOU) component of the former Open Learning Agency by the new Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and the merger of tbe Tele-Universite de Quebec into the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The study was commissioned by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) from Dominique Abrioux, who is President Emeritus of Athabasca University and and Professor at their Centre for Distance Education.