Dr Rónán O’Beirne’s Weblog

Education; Technology; Digital Transformation; Information & Knowledge Management; Librarianship; Digital Leadership

This painting “Turn In The Road” oil-on-canvas by my cousin Niall Wright was one of a number on show at his latest exhibition recently held in Dublin. Follow this link to see more.

With externally-funded projects starting to show a return and the VLE infrastructure firmly in place, we are beginning to see our own turn in the road. What lies ahead is a new landscape where the delivery of learning becomes appropriate to the learner. Key staff are working daily and meeting weekly to pull together and deliver the virtual learning environment.

One area that still needs to be addressed is staff development. We are planning a series of events over the coming months that will ensure that all staff have a excellent understanding and knowledge of the principles and practical application of e-learning.

When it comes to creating courses, tutors and lecturers can be assured that we are looking at making things easy in the new online world. We will do this by developing generic templates and tools that can be shaped and utilised on specific courses.

Also we are looking at streamlining the production of online content, giving tutors a framework within which to specify and develop, along with Central Media Services, high-quality material that engages learners.

We have also identified, and in some instances evaluated, online learning material repositories. These online repositories can be used to procure learning objects which, in turn, can be placed within courses in the VLE. Many learning objects have been tried and tested with learners therefore we can have a high degree of confidence in their quality.

So, as we make that turn in the road, we look forward to exciting times – together.

“Currently, the majority of researchers think that their institutions’ libraries are doing an effective job in providing the information they need to do their work, but it is time to consider the future roles and responsibilities of all those involved in the research cycle – researchers, research institutions and national bodies, as well as libraries – in meeting the challenges that are coming.”

This extract is taken from:
Researchers’ Use of Academic Libraries and their Services – A report commissioned by the Research Information Network and the Consortium of Research Libraries.

The report is very thorough and well written and challenges the future roles of academic libraries. If you are interested the link is here.

It is still early days for Moodle at Bradford College but the signs are that many staff have already engaged with this powerful easy-to-use course management system. We have set up two servers: the sandbox is available for all development work and in here you can play away until you feel confident with Moodling,  the production server hosts live courses and is reserved for completed work that is ready for students to enrol.

As we gather pace with Moodle developments expect to see many more posts here with hints, tips and news about this exciting learning environment.

LILAC 2008 (The Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference) will take place at Liverpool John Moores University,  17th – 19th March 2008.

This years conference themes are as follows:

• Supporting researchers
• Diversity and social justice
• Practical approaches to information literacy
• The net generation
• Ethical information
• Staff development and Information literacy
• Marketing Information literacy

Click here for more information on LILAC 2008.