In between meeting new colleagues, getting new laptop etc set up and generally finding my feet in my new job a couple of things have caught my eye this week.
Jisc announce a framework agreement for Google Apps for education. Cloud hosting can cause headaches for many institutions so this should help ease some of the issues around institutional provision of some of google’s popular services – particularly the collaborative ones such as docs and hangouts. I also came across this really useful guide to getting started with google apps in education from the University of Sheffield
The HEA and NUS Scotland launched their Learning Journeys report which “looks at students’ experiences of their ‘journeys’ through education in Scotland.” It highlights some key issues around student engagement and entry routes to higher education.
Whilst the BBC announced its drive to get everyone coding Google launched web designer, their wysiwyg HTML 5 editor.
There have also been an number of webinars this week that I haven’t managed to tune into live but hope to catch up with over the next couple of days
*OER Research Hub continued its webinar series with “Policies – the cause or effect of Open Education?” You can access the recording here.
*SoLAR’s Open Symposium: Policy and Strategy for Learning Analytics Deployment also got going this week – lots of interesting webinars to catch up on and perhaps even engage in the discussions.
And last but not least, blended learning is pretty high on my agenda now, so seeing the these tips for better blends and outline for a book on blended learning was pretty timely too.