YouTube: An eLearning Environment?

Back in September, I blogged about a course entitled "Learning From YouTube.” Taught by Andrea Jurhasz, a media studies professor, this class is still drawing a fair amount of attention from her colleagues in both media studies and ILT. Initially some thought that she was crazy to open herself up to possible mocking from her students, other YouTube patrons and educational community.

However, she’s attracted quite a bit of attention, including a notice in the New York Times:

September 15, 2007 – Here's a dream come true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube. Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

While there still has not been much posted about the effectiveness of YouTube as a learning environment, I would be quite interested in hearing what you have to say (after you check out this course, of course). What do you think: Is this just a way to generate hype? Does the YouTube environment have any validity as a learning space?

Handbook of e-Learning Strategy

One thing I really like about the eLearning community is its willingness to share resources and I'd like to contribute to that exchange of ideas. Today, I stumbled across a useful publication developed by the The e-Learning Guild. Titled The e-Learning Guild's Handbook of e-Learning Strategy, this e-book contains a collection of articles, tools and approaches for incorporating eLearning into a variety of enviroments and situations. While I'm still wading through it, it has been thought provoking and I wanted to share it with my classmates and peers.

Disclaimer: This book was sponsored by Adobe Systems--think Connect & Captivate--so it's not impartial. However, there's still good information to be had here.

In the Eye of the Beholder

It's been an interesting week . . . I had eye surgery and have been recovering somewhat slowly ever since.

However, as I've been trying to do my coursework in 15-minute increments--trying not to strain the ol' eyeballs--I started thinking about eLearning for the visually impaired. Too often, I make the assumption that my learners will have full use of their eyes and ears. However, that's not always the case; learners come in all shapes and sizes and levels of abilities.

This little bout of pondering lead to a Google search on "eLearning for the visually impaired." Here are a few of the resources that I ran across:

e-Learn VIP (eLearning for Visually Impaired Persons) - This consortium has a newsletter that provides some interesting insights into designing elearning for those who are blind or visually impaired.

Customisation of an eLearning Environment for Visually Impaired Students -- This article from the Waterford Institute focuses on "how both Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) technologies can provide individual customisation of an eLearning environment for Visually Impaired Students."

There are a number of other available resources, but I'm at the end of my 15 minutes. I'll likely add a few more later!

Betsy