Educational Technology Innovation and Impact/Multimedia Courseware/Online Demonstrations

Online demonstrations are particularly useful to show how a piece of software works or how it can be used to instruct or teach in a classroom environment. This usually involves some sort of interaction with the learning experience. As the title of this subject implies the learner has to log onto the web to take part in the learning opportunity.

A good example of this form of learning is through an online demonstration, Macromedia offer live one hour on line demonstrations. The benefit of these short interventions is that they are interactive and the learner can join education experts as they conduct live, online product demonstrations. These demonstrations are aimed at Key Stage 12 and higher education teachers, faculty, staff, and administrators that may wish to use the software as part of their teaching/learning. The software also let’s the learner combine existing learning materials such as text books or hand-outs with real-time interactivity which enables collaborative teaching and learning experiences (Macromedia Website 2006)

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) offer a range of on-line learning resources for education and research purposes. JISC has commissioned a series of five exemplars which demonstrate how Further Education (FE) practitioners can use content found in online resources to support their teaching. Each of the exemplars showcases available electronic resource material for the teacher and it demonstrates how each of these materials can be used to assist in delivering the core syllabus to students/learners (JISC Website 2006)

The following link is the ‘Leisure’ exemplar; http://restricted.jisc.ac.uk/exemplars_fe/exemplars/leisure/index.html

Another good example of online collaborative methods of teaching and learning is through the use of Blogs. These are private web pages which are published by either an individual or a group of individuals. They can be personal journals/diaries and are used to comment on all sorts of topics depending on the interests of the author, often referred to as a Blogger. Most Blogs enable the visitors to post comments and/or suggestions allowing interactivity between the Blogger and the visitors. So from this it can be argued that the exemplars that JISC use, product online demonstrations and Blogs are excellent mediums for online educational purposes.

The following link is extremely useful to view live demonstrations on various e-learning products; http://elearningcentre.typepad.com/whatsnew/

References; www.adobe.com/products/breeze (accessed 27/3/06 www.jisc.ac.uk Joint Information Systems Committee Website (accessed 27/3/06)