Brian Shannon :: Blog

I was saddened to read the closure letter from Eduspaces.net today. This has been a great community and site, allowing us all to mingle and explore the opportunities of social learning and technology in the classroom.

It is apparent that many of us are looking for a new home that still allows the same level of service, so we created a community on our own site for the Eduspace. If you would like to join in and continue the conversations then try out http://www.college-cram.com/study/eduspace/. If you need assistance in moving content please contact us at support@college-cram.com 

I am excited to invite all of Eduspaces to our new social learning site at College-Cram.com. We have worked hard over the past few months in combining our student oriented e-learning library with the power of the ELGG to produce a true social learning site for students. College-Cram provides over 800 Cramlets™ (learning modules) covering the core curriculum of university classes in math, business, science, and foreign languages. Now students get the benefit of our proven content but also the ability to create study groups, share notes, and create study sheets while connecting with one another.

I found a new and interesting product, egrips appliqués, that I think could be used for schools in fund raising campaigns. It's a non slip grippy patch you add to the back of a cell phone, PDA, iPod or other handheld device that allows an organization to brand the device with full four color graphics. Nice little product and it works. I can rest my cell phone on the car dash and it doesn't move, cool!

What are your thoughts on generic content for e-learning?

There is a base level of theorems, laws, and principles, that are required for certain subjects and doesn't require new publications (textbook) every three years to support. What about creating a digital library of these to be housed on the web. Would you be willing to use this in a classroom or suggest it to students for usage? Let me know your thoughts or ideas.

I have have observed a tremendous effort in building administrative infrastructure for e-learning.  What I mean is the development of learning management systems that are to facilitate learning to students. In reality all these provide is the ability to administer a class and are dependent upon others to provide content. The emphasis in these systems is more on the instructor and institution than on the student.

Maybe I am naive but I thought learning was for the learner (student and instructor). This is why I am excited to see some of the moves in the academic arena trying out social networking and collaboration tools. I hope and promote this new web 2.0 environment of content collaboration but would like to see it become an alternative or replacement to the textbook in the classroom. From my experience as a student the book was a door stop more than it was a learning block.

As we have been building our study library at college-cram.com we have been exploring the ability in creating an environment for students and instructors to collaborate with one another for the purpose of learning. We are evaluating ELGG as the social classroom for our content to collaborate more with our students and instructors. We are shooting for a coffee house exchange of ideas with students studying, learning, collaborating, and having the informal interaction with their instructors to learn. Maybe it is a little utopian but I think the market needs to have this outside of the academic community more on the student level were the student has control not the administrators. I want students to study what they need when they need it.

So far I am excited and impressed with the flexibility of ELGG and look forward to sharing it with you all as we start implementation into college-cram.com

 

What is the ideal culture, atmosphere of an academic e-learning module? How would you describe it and the capabilities that it offers?

The big push in 2000 was to break down the barrier of the brick and mortar classroom.  I think this initial approach worked to help move smaller universities with limited physical space into a new and growing market. My one concern of all the improvements since 2000 in LMS and CMS has been the focus. It appears that all the money and infrastructure has gone into the facilitating of the courses and little emphasis has been on the student and the types of content delivery and creation available in this new age. Will E-Learning 2.0 address this? What are your thoughts and ideas or am I off base?

New here to ELGG.net but I have been spending my time reading through the different offerings and capabilities of ELGG. I am particularly interested in how I might be able to wrap it or integrate it into my company's e-learning site College-Cram.com.

College-Cram.com is a site that I and three others have built to eventually compete and provide a possible alternative to the over priced and out dated textbook in the US market. As all three of us used to work in the textbook publishing industry we are very familiar with the quality and inner workings of the textbook. While working with one of the then big four publishers I was tossing out ideas about the creation of generic content to be housed via the web. This always went over like a stone floating in water right to the bottom, because it was against the current business model. Long story short we were sold and I found it to be a good opportunity to explore and try out some of my ideas and College-Cram.com was born.

We have been targeting our content directly to the student covering the basic core curriculum of university (college algebra, pre-calculus, economics, biology, chemistry, etc.). We wanted to build something to help the students! Each learning module or Cramlet as we call them is based on a single topic, ie. shifting the demand curve, allowing a student to access only the topic they are struggling with. A Cramlet is designed to be a quick concentrated learning experience for the student with no prerequisites or mandates that you need to study afterwards.

We originally felt that we should charge a subscription fee for access to the content but after listening to our students and instructors this last fall we opened our library up to all for free requiring a registration for password. All our content is written in house and then verified and certified by our network of subject matter experts.

We have been experiencing some modest growth but are now back into the content authoring phase to better provide our students with the help they need. More Content!