Monday 17 September 2007

Conference news

I know I said there were too many relevant conferences worldwide to be posting them all here, but there are a few coming up that might be of interest.
  • Next month is E-Learn 2007 in Quebec, Canada.
  • In November is the 2007 European Practice-Based and Practitioner Research conference on learning and instruction in Maastricht in The Netherlands.
  • A few days later is the annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE 2007), in Fremantle, Western Australia.
  • In December is the annual conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite 2007) in Singapore.
Finally, the conference is not until March, but I couldn't resist linking to the "Computer and Internet Applications in Education" Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Did someone mutter the word "usability"? My screen-reader sees nothing...

Saturday 15 September 2007

A busy summer

Production of the course is now well advanced. Personally, I've been on my holidays, and then the conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI), held this year in Budapest.

But while I've been away the rest of the course team have been busy finalising the Block 2 materials and firming up Block 3. We're also busy planning the podcasts, about which I'll say more in a future post.

We've now had useful feedback from our Critical Readers: these are the folks outside the course team who go through the materials and online activities in detail and suggest improvements. Our Critical Readers seem genuinely as excited by the course as we are, which is great!

We've had a gratifying number of applications from people wanting to be tutors on the course (see the advert). We'll be shortlisting soon. We'll continue to accept applications even after the first tutors are appointed, because we won't know until February how many students we'll have and so how many tutors are needed.

Now that students are registering on the course, the February start date suddenly seems very close!