Universities Play Catch-up to the OU at 40
The Open University is forty years old this year and is still the world leader for distance learning. That the OU has been moving in the correct direction all this time is borne out by the number of online and distance learning courses offered by the traditional institutions as they learn how to do things the OU way.
At the New Curiosity Shop, we couldn’t agree more. Why travel to a bricks and mortar institution when you can learn in the comfort of your own home?
OU Call for Volunteers
Centre for Human Ecology
Centre for Human Ecology graduate Helen Jeans has been running an exciting new project which needs participants! Would you like to get involved?
Helen writes: “The Open University is developing a new Internet site to support collaborative learning called SocialLearn. The pilot version of SocialLearn is focused on climate change as part of the Open University’s Learning to Live with Climate Change Programme which facilitates social learning processes as a way of building understanding, consensus and concerted action on climate change. Both SocialLearn and Learning to Live with Climate Change are global programmes.”
Learn more at the Centre for Human Ecology.
Adult Learners’ Week
Adult Learners’ Week runs from 9th to 15th May this year and NCS is doing its bit to support it. You can try some course snippets and a complete free course over at the NCS ALW page. Try a course on Archaeology, Health Care or Herbology. It’s all free for Adult Learners’ Week.
Happy Easter
Happy Easter
A happy Easter to all our readers!
It also looks like the weather is improving; just the right time to be taking a course with an outdoors element. May we suggest getting out in the garden for some Herbal Remedies, or maybe the Ecology of Your Garden is of interest? Maybe travel beckons and an Introduction to Archaeology would be nice? There is still time to squeeze in one of our Astronomy courses before the lighter nights draw in.
We are aware that the southern hemisphere is moving into autumn and the longer nights are approaching, and for you we have plenty of other courses to while away the winter evenings.
Online Learning Goes Deeper
Researchers at Indiana University have discovered an unsuspected benefit for online learners over those working in more traditional ways. It seems that the online approach lends itself to deep learning, a type of learning that goes beyond rote memorising and focuses on reflection, integrative learning, and higher-order thinking such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which was conducted by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, collected information from nearly 380,000 randomly selected first-year and senior students at 722 four-year colleges and universities across the United States. NSSE explored the experiences of online learners through a set of additional questions given to more than 22,000 students from 47 institutions. The results were released on 10th November.
“Critics of distance education assume that face-to-face classes have inherent advantages as learning environments,” said Alexander C. McCormick, NSSE director and associate professor of education at Indiana University. “But these results indicate that those who teach classes online may be making special efforts to engage their students.” We know that NCS tutors always make a special effort and it appears that this is a real benefit to students.
You can read more at Top News.
New Courses At NCS College
Two new courses have been introduced to the catalogue of the NCS College of Online Learning. These are “Your Story – Writing A Life” and “The Wonderful World Of Psychology.”
If you have feel you have life experiences that would interest a wider readership, then Joanna Howard’s course could provide you with the tools to create your own memoir or autobiography. Anyone can write down what happened to them, but there are approaches and techniques that make the writing more illuminating for the writer and more interesting for potential readers. This is what “Your Story – Writing A Life” is about.
Have you ever wondered whether you’d make a good psychologist, or just wanted to understand more about why people behave in the ways that they do? Zaynab D’Elia can help you out. “The Wonderful World Of Psychology” is an introduction to this interesting topic. All areas are covered the lesser known with the better known and anyone considering deeper study of Psychology would find this a good place to start.
NCS Open Space is now… Open
We are proud to announce that our NCS Open Space is now open. Here you can try out a small range of course ‘snippets,’ from Egyptian Archaeology, to astronomy. We are launching this as part of Adult Learners’ Week 2008, but NCS Open Space will remain open from now on.
The course snippets themselves will change, so it is well worth popping back from time to time to find out what has been added recently. Join our mailing list, and we’ll keep you posted of new additions to our course snippets, and our course catalogue.
Have fun
Non-vocational Adult Learning Comes Back, but Without Teachers?
Peter Davies, principal of City Lit, is concerned that the Government’s desire to promote what it terms “informal adult learning” may herald the decline of traditional classes and leave many learners to study alone with little more than the support of the internet.
A consultation paper published in January by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills appears to focus heavily on the use of IT as a study aid and says little about the role of qualified teachers. Davies sees this as a potential erosion of quality. “The risk for us is that people will say there is so much going on through the internet that it’s no longer necessary to fund more expensive adult education classes,” he says.
Is the UK Government endorsing the New Curiosity Shop or is this just another spin on cost-cutting? More in the Independent…
Adult Learners’ Week – launch of NCS Open Space
As part of our contribution to Adult Learners’ Week we are launching our NCS Open Space.
In the NCS Open Space you can try a sample of our courses – course snippets – and try a liitle light learning. Each snippet should take no more than around 15 minutes to complete.
To find out more visit our Adult Learners’ Week page
Learn in Your Sleep – with your iPhone
Ever wanted to learn in your sleep? Forget playing a tape beside your bed, just switch on your iPhone and slip it under your pillow when you go to sleep.
All you need to do is download and install a new application for the iPhone – iSleepLearn. Once installed you copy over any online course via Bluetooth, and click on Learn. iSleepLearn will then scroll through the course reading out the contents quietly.
But here comes the clever bit. When iSleepLearn comes across a quiz it triggers the iPhone to transmit a weak signal at 45Mhz – just the right frequency to resonate with the wave pattern of the sleeping brain. This then generates a dream in the sleeper, and asks the questions. The sleeper responds – in his sleep – and iSleepLearn passes the answers on to the learning Management System ready for checking.
Based on the work of Dr Carl Mangus of the Institute of Freidleberg, SleepLearn Version 2.0 will feature DreamForum, where the learning sleeper can participate in a forum in his dreams with other learners in their dreams, anywhere in the world – and no-one need be awake. Like SecondLife, only sleepier.
Later versions of iSleepLearn will include iSleepWrite, where a sleeping student can write a report in iSleepLearn, and post it to their tutor – and all before waking up.
Here at the NCS Online College we are developing a version of our Astronomy courses to run via SleepLearn, available in 2009, at midnight on 31st March. Other courses will follow.
