Social eLearning Software Blog

Clearly this has been a tremendous year of growth for Twitter.

Current valuation estimates of the company are in the order of $1 billion, and users are expected to reach 250 million over the next few years.

As an eLearning provider, on a daily basis, we are talking to schools that looking at using it both for themselves as well as possibly having their students use it in some fashion.

Campus Technology recently reported, http://www.campustechnology.com/Home.aspx from a recent Faculty Focus http://www.facultyfocus.com/ survey that of 1,958 higher education professionals 30.7% are using twitter currently and another 20.6% reported that there was a reasonable chance they’d start using it in the coming year.

Of those that currently use it, 7.2 percent use it as a part of instruction frequently, and an additional 9.4 percent use it in instruction occasionally. I believe that is a relatively high adoption rate given the time that twitter has been in the market.

Depending on your particular academic sector you may also see appropriate uses for your students. I have opinions, but this week rather than taking the platform, I’d to see what everyone else thinks.

As well as Twitter, sites like Facebook often are used for school sites, events and groups. Possibly even course specific groups could be established and offer additional value.

In my blog this week, I’d like to pose three questions:

1) Does Twitter have a place in Education? If so, where and how do you think it could be used for maximum benefit.

2) What other social networking tools / sites do you feel most relevant in an academic environment?

3) Do you see value in blending Social Networking with eLearning?

To establish context, please indicate which area of education you are referring to. i.e. Higher ED, K-12, Corporate etc.

I very much look forward to your thoughts.

Also, you are welcome to attend our free, live webinar to learn more about how the classroom is being redefined:

Social Learning Around the Classroom
Thursday, Jan. 28, 2009
2:00pm - 3:00pm ET
Register Here - Space is Limited

Moodle has been a tremendous boon for schools and associations looking to pull away from the grips of enterprise LMS vendors over the last few years.

It’s also been a nice entry point for those wishing to dabble in elearning for the first time.

While it has both is fans as well as its detractors, it clearly has its place.

That said, we feel there is significant room for improvement in a number of areas especially in the Social or Informal Learning side.

Clearly, Moodle Forums Wikis, Projects and Chat are good avenues for collaboration or discussion.

We decided to extend that however, to make a much more contemporary experience for the students both in functionality as well as in the general user interface.

We’ve integrated a number of external social networks into the platform, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter. Our clients can enable / disable whichever ones they chose, and the students can use any of the enabled sites to extend discussions with authorized peers.

Very shortly we’ll be significantly extending this functionality even further by establishing fully integrated social networks around a course. They’ll be somewhat similar to LinkedIn or Facebook itself however be completely internal and limited to the students and instructors of a particular course.

Moodle Themes are fine for some, but we’ve significantly modified the user interface. We’ve made it much cleaner and easier to navigate using a mac-like like format and even integrated an optional iphone like cover-flow for catalogues and course material.

We feel we’ve made tremendous progress so far, and in the next few months a great deal more.

Clearly, not everyone can invest the time and effort to do this with their Moodle site. Unless everyone works for free at your organisation, you’d probably have to invest many hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what we’ve done. (We know this one from experience.)

If you’d like to see what we’ve done, feel free to join our upcoming, free webinar.

Whether you are looking for a solution, or simply looking for ideas about what you can do with your own site, you’re most welcome to attend.

We’d also love to hear from you about what other extensions you feel world enhance your learners experience. See more about what TOPYX has to offer at www.interactyx.com.

Patrick Batty
Vice President, Academic Solutions
Interactyx Limited

patrick.batty@interactyx.com
www.interactyx.com