Manchester Metropolitan University

You may have got used to putting your powerpoint slides on WebCT/the network/a web page for students to look at after (or before) lectures, but have you thought of leaving a recording of the lecture as well? At Purdue University, they are offering to record all lectures this academic year for students to download (to their MP3 players, of course) and listen to later. The system is set up so that students can even receive a reminder when a new audio file has been posted.

At last, a proper discussion of marking. Double blind marking
of political philosophy papers tells you all you need to know about implementing the author’s “double blind marking system”.

Comments welcome!

If you use a common textbook, you might find that the publisher provides banks of multiple-choice questions linked to the book. Fill in this search form to see if there is anything from ‘your’ textbooks or on your topic. We have a site licence for Respondus which makes the process of importing questions very painless.

You might also like to search the WebCT company site for materials related to your subject. These may also include online tests. You will probably have more luck if you use an American textbook, but UK publishers do produce materials as well. We can import these materials very easily if you make an arrangement with the publishers. Just contact us at web-ct-tech@mmu.ac.uk if you are interested in doing it.

Are you interested in using something like this Update to communicate with your students and or colleagues? James Farmer in Australia is offering “edublogs – free education blogs for teachers, researchers, writers and educators the world over”. You can set up your own blog on his site.

You can of course do the same thing at Blogger but the advantage of joining an education site would be to make it easier to find and share with other teachers and students. Once a certain critical mass has been achieved, of course. James explains his motivations on his website. He hopes that an educational organisation will take over this free service – perhaps it’s more likely that educational organisations will offer blogging to their own staff and students, as happened with web space. Anyway, until we have that facility, you can now use Australian blogspace!

The Department of Computer Science at Manchester University, in conjunction with the Learning Technologies Group of Oxford University (keen supporters of Open Source Software) are hosting a free seminar on 5 September 2005, which will demonstrate various tools and explain how to iintegrate them. It says that “The talks and demonstrations are aimed at decision makers and potential users of the system who may be considering adopting or switching to an open source VLE.” You might need some technical background to appreciate all the topics.

This looks like a similar event to the one we flagged earlier in Oxford, so if you went to that one, you won’t need to go to this one!