Have been playing around with myUdutu, an online learning authoring tool with which you can build your own courses. You can choose a theme, upload your logo, include assessments with audio and text feedback options, create slideshows, add & stream narration, add groups, scenarios, add flash, videos, documents and links.
You can extract the course into a zip file which has your self contained course in SCORM 2004 or SCORM 1.2 compatible format which can then, according to myUdutu, be:
loaded into your existing CMS
distributed via CD
hosted on your own webspace
kept for your archives
It is free to author, preview and pilot it but there is a watermark (which you click to remove) on the pages until you choose the publish live option. Then it appears to be that you must purchase screens for hosting which are $1 each. I’ll post a sample course when I’ve finished creating it.
WiZiQ is a free virtual classroom with live audio-video communication, chat, content sharing, and session recording capabilities. A demo is available on the site and from what I’ve seen it looks very straightforward. The video below also gives a brief outline of the features:
A quote on the VastPark website describes this as “the Ning of virtual worlds”. VastPark is a 3D interactive platform which apparently allows you to create your own world. It is being labelled by some as the next Second Life.
The program has been in development since 2003 and since then the founder, Bruce Joy, says the focus has been on:
“how to scale the virtual web up to millions of worlds; how to connect them together; and how to solve the infrastructure issues so that no one person or company ‘owns’ the virtual web. Although our ‘beta’ software implementation requires Microsoft Windows®, our underlying framework is absolutely cross-platform and non-device specific.” (Bruce Joy, October 2007)
The Beta 2 version has now been released and you can sign up for the closed beta here. It seems to be an interesting development so I’ll be keeping an eye on progress.
McDonalds is the focus of the BBC article, (’McDonalds to Serve up ‘A Levels’ ) and (’McDonald’s A-level ‘tough course’, says Brown’)
of the Education Guardian . Both articles focus on McDonalds and then go on to include the other two less newsworthy companies, Flybe and Network rail, who have also been approved awarding body status to Level 3.
There is further information about awarding body status being given to employers on the QCA website.
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