Tag: Online learning

Wikispaces Goes Free for Higher Ed — Trevor Holmes

I have been using Wikispaces for many years now. It’s been a space to collaborate with peers on research, a space to house an organizational website that needs to be very flexible and easy to use while we seek permanent solutions, and a space for my students to go when other tools go down. By no means have I used Wikispaces to its full potential, but I do administer several wikis there and I’m thrilled that they are extending their ad-free version to higher education, after serving nearly a million K-12 users this way. A couple of examples of how I’ve used it:

  • A backup site for my Cultural Studies 101 course over at WLU
  • A working site for the Council of Ontario Educational Developers

If you’re interested in wiki use, we do have advice for you. And for ease of use plus the newly free adless version, I’d recommend Wikispaces as a strong contender for your time and energy.

SCoPE out this rich international resource – Trevor Holmes

I’ve just returned from four days in British Columbia, where I had a small glimpse of Olympic fever in Vancouver as I passed through coming home from a conference in Kamloops. While Canada’s medal quest will be over in a short while, a site I’ve used before and was reminded of this past Saturday truly deserves the Gold. It’s called SCoPE, and it’s for anyone interested in higher education research and practice, often but not exclusively with an online flavour. There are synchronous seminars with live interaction, as well as asynchronous discussions and archives of past events. The content-rich site has documentary, wiki, and video resources from their early seminars to their latest offerings — currently, “Pimp your Post,” about that important first class message in an online course. It’s free to join, and an excellent use of resources through BCCampus (after a start-up grant ran its course through SFU a while ago). This was just one of many resources showcased at Educational Developers Caucus 2010 at Thompson Rivers University; in the coming weeks I’ll report on other useful stuff I learned (or re-learned — sometimes it takes Your Faithful Curmudgeon a few tries).

______________________________________

The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.