Talking Heads videos for MBS Worldwide students

MBS Worldwide believes in bringing Manchester to the student wherever they are studying. Numerous videos of academic faculty are available for viewing on the support site covering administration, programme introductions, FAQs and module introductions. These are short videos are designed to enhance the learning experience and to assist in the overall induction process for new students. These videos are mainly stored on the Support Site

A good example of this is given by Professor John Arnold, Director of MBS, welcoming new students to the school here

Synchronous & Asynchronous Discussions

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Synchronous and Asynchronous Discussion

'Synchronous and asynchronous discussions are both types of internet communication that can be utilized in blended learning to fulfill the technology requirement.

Both synchronous and asynchronous discussions utilize the internet to provide forums for use by the classroom teacher to either give instructions, facilitate office hours or conversation among students that would normally take place in a classroom setting.

Asynchronous and synchronous discussions can be teacher or student led and can be guided by a pre-set format or take place in a more open setting, just like a classroom discussion. Both synchronous and asynchronous discussions have advantages and disadvantages.

Asynchronous discussions allow time for reflection by the learner. In addition the asynchronous format allows for the diversity of the learner. It provides some flexibility for the learner to respond at his individual 'peak time', when he/she is at his best. The asynchronous model also enables each learner time to adequately respond. There is no need to 'grab the mic.' Each student is provided the opportunity to reflect and post a reply as deemed appropriate.'

Within MBSW each module that is delivered through the LMS (at Masters and Doctoral Level) has both asynchronous and synchronous discussions, normally one asynchronous discussion board per unit, plus one for introductions and technical help. There are e-facilitators who monitor these boards to deal with student queries promptly. Also the coordinators use the chat facility on a weekly basis in some modules to see if the students have any issues that need solving, this is particularly useful in the DBA programme because the students are required to communicate with their supervisors on a regular basis to discuss their research.

Here is a screen shot from the introductions thread in our Business Information Systems Module:-

The DBA programme goes fully blended with online chats

The Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programme is the logical extension of the MBA programme which emphasises application of knowledge to specific management issues to directly improve the quality of decision making.

Manchester Business School Worldwide has now introduced a fully blended learning option for busy professionals who want the flexibility to study for a prestigious DBA award. The programme utilises face to face workshops, video conferencing, online chats, discussion boards, email and other extensive web facilities. The programme is delivered through University of Manchester Learning Management System(LMS) WebCT.

For more information on the DBA click here

Kaelo Launched - 'An interactive simulation tool for Managerial Economics'

Managerial Economics can pose some conceptual difficulties to some students, to overcome these issues the Teaching & Learning Team at MBS Worldwide has introduced a new simulation tool called Kaelo.

Kaelo is a series of 10 simulations covering the basic principals in Managerial Economics.

Patrick McNutt Module Coordinator says:
'The software will help to guide you through some of the foundation steps in microeconomics. The illustrations will capture the concepts of demand and elasticity, introduce the Marris model of management behaviour, explain the basics of the concentration ratios as deployed in modern antitrust and introduce you to the foundations of basic non cooperative game theory. Kaelo compliments the executive support materials located on my web page .'

To try the tool out please follow this link .

The tool is constantly under development, we welcome any comments.

Syndication

Hi All,

Ok we are going to talk a bit about content syndication today, the main type of feed we will concentrate on is the RSS feed however there are also other types of feeds such as OPML,Atom and various other XML Based feeds.

Okay Wikipedia define content sydication as

'Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; however, in general, web syndication refers to making Web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website's recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts).
This originated with news and blog sites but is increasingly used to syndicate other types of information. Millions of online publishers including newspapers, commercial web sites and blogs now publish their latest news headlines, product offers or blog postings in standard format news feed.
Syndication benefits both the websites providing information and the websites displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertisement.
The prevalence of web syndication is also of note to online marketers, since web surfers are becoming increasingly wary of providing personal information for marketing materials (such as signing up for a newsletter) and expect the ability to subscribe to a feed instead.
Although the format could be anything transported over HTTP, such as HTML or JavaScript, it is more commonly XML.
The two main families of web syndication formats are RSS and Atom.'

I find sydication very useful because I get informed when websites get updated , its means that I do not constanly have to check websites and get notified when new infromation appears.

The JISC CETIS Conference 2006

Hi All,

Well I have just returned from the third annual JISC-CETIS Conference.

There was not as many people attending this year in comparison with last years conference held in Heriot Watt University, but there was still a good crowd there. This years conference was called 'Linking Formal and Informal Learning'.

The conference kicked off with a presentation by Bill Olivier, Director of Development (Systems and Technology) JISC, where he explained his views on what the JISC priorities for the forthcoming year was and what had changed since last year. Bill also mentioned how we were moving from using Reference Models to using Domain Maps. He also mentioned that if anyone had interesting projects that might benefit from a TECHWATCH report to contact Gaynor Backhouse. I had not heard about TECHWATCH before but its is a very useful and publication and worth checking out.

Next Up Prof Oleg Liber, spoke a little while on the New JISC-CETIS Service, moving CETIS from a project to a SERVICE offered by JISC. So the new JISC CETIS Service is a service run by the CETIS team in Bolton. A bit confusing but good news for all of us.

We then had a really cool Keynote speech from Ernest Adams, a games designer from the states. His talk was entitled 'The Philosophical roots of games design' and was very interesting.

All Keynotes and major presentations will be available from the Conference website

After that we split into our strands for the next two days. Some strands ran over two days , these were :-

1) Future of educational media
2) Personal Learning environments :inclusion, pedagogy and informal learning

Other one day strands were offered on the following topics
1)Identity, games and synthetic worlds
2)Identity, Portfolio's and Personalisation
3)Architecture of Service Mashups
4)Thinking the Unthinkable
5)Assessment and Personalisation
6)Future of Educational Institutions

I went to the PLE sessions both days as it is of most interest to me. The scope of the group had been increased this year to include inclusion and accessibility which was ok however we spent most of the first day looking a various projects that were implementing the IMS LD spec, not one of my specialist areas but it has made me think about LD a lot more and I will be checking the reload tool out again. Also there were a few presentations about what certain people had been up too. Dai Griffiths gave us an update on the TenCompetence Project and Mark from CETIS gave us a update on what he had been doing with Flock and XUL, then a very interesting presentation from Raymond Elferink on his repository program.

The second day we split into our stands groups again, and tried to work on what the JISC-CETIS priorities for the next year were and this will go on the JISC CETIS website soon.

It was a very informative conference and was nice to see that we are all working in the same direction

Stefano :)