Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

I haven't had much time to post lately due to projects are piling up at work. One of them is a cross-institutional online course between UBC and University of Melbourne. The course provides students the opportunity for comparative inquiry of Indigenous experiences of colonization and the manifestations of that experience in the contemporary socio-cultural environment. Through the use of digital interactive technologies like Flash and Immersive 3D platforms, students will have the opportunity to engage in authentic learning. Compare to the past mixed-mode courses, this one is more challenging due to the aspect that many of the subject matter experts are in the remote places. We must rely on video conferencing and project management tools to pull things together. So far, the team members are pretty happy with Skype and Basecamp. There are many exciting modules in this course are under-development: Flash based games, 3D re-construction of residential school, collections of multimedia elements and much more. So, stay tuned...

Cyprien Lomas brought me this news. Blackboard and WebCT, providers of educational content management system have announced plans to merge today. Both software companies are well known in the global high education industry.

I have always thought that companies like WebCT and Blackboard are being "sandwiched" in today's market. Refer to my January's article: e-Learning: round up for 04, forecast for 05 [Part 2]

Both WebCT and Blackboard are medium sized e-Learning platform providers, above them, you have Enterprise software giants like Oracle/Peoplesoft, Microsoft, SAP are rapidly moving into this market. Underneath them, you have hundreds and thousands of new companies with cheaper products and fully integrated with all the new technologies like Wikis and Blogs. China alone, there are over 1000 new education technology companies have been established in 2005 alone. On top of all these competitions, you still have some great open source initiatives like Moodle and SAKAI…

Therefore, merging is a great way out for both companies and I sincerely hope their plan works out.

Just found this out today, Horizon Wimba acquired the assets of Silicon Chalk at the beginning of this month. Silicon Chalk is a Vancouver-based company that creates software which, from within a class, broadcasts an instructor’s prepared notes and lecture materials to local and remote students. It's founder - Murray Goldberg is also the founder of WebCT. Kudos to Murray's team. Once again, he created an innovative yet fully marketable software.

A high school friend came by Vancouver today after 3 years of military services overseas. We had a quite interesting talk on navy elearning over the dinner. Apparently, Canadian Navy provides the soldiers on foreign services the option of taking navy elearning programs. Even though they are called “navy eLearning programs”, but most of the courses in the program are offered by public education institutions at a standard schedule. However, the difficulty lies in most of the online learning programs aren’t really “navy elearning program” since they are not designed for “flexible” learning experiences. Sometime, the unit needs to travel to remote locations with a very short notice and the new target zone may not have appropriate internet connections. It has been really hard to carry out formal studies terms while serving the country. nevertheless my friend mentioned he has developed good skills of self study over the internet and is ready to take some normal online courses to pursue a formal degree. I wonder if rapid e-learning will somehow help out navy elearning demands in the near future...