Rhodri Thomas, The Open University, UK
The OU has for some time now been offering Google Apps to our current students on an opt-in basis, initially to offer a replacement to the OpenText FirstClass service we used to run, and to complement students’ personal email provision. We now have in excess of 24,000 students using our my.open.ac.uk Google Apps domain via single-sign-on. Of more interest to our learning systems and curriculum teams however was the potential to adopt some of the other tools – such as Docs and Sites. This presentation will cover early adoption of Google Apps ‘out-of-the-box’ for curriculum use in some of our popular modules as well as developments to integrate better with our VLE in Moodle.
In particular, now that the more recent move to Moodle 2 coincided with plans to provide more opportunities for personalised learning online, other Google Apps integration work was undertaken by the JISC DOULS project [ http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/douls/ ] to bring module information into personal spaces such as iGoogle. We are also looking to Google Apps to support a broad range of functions previously delivered by an in-house ePortfolio toolset. More information about our adoption can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/googleapps
The OU has for some time now been offering Google Apps to our current students on an opt-in basis, initially to offer a replacement to the OpenText FirstClass service we used to run, and to complement students’ personal email provision. We now have in excess of 24,000 students using our my.open.ac.uk Google Apps domain via single-sign-on. Of more interest to our learning systems and curriculum teams however was the potential to adopt some of the other tools – such as Docs and Sites. This presentation will cover early adoption of Google Apps ‘out-of-the-box’ for curriculum use in some of our popular modules as well as developments to integrate better with our VLE in Moodle.
In particular, now that the more recent move to Moodle 2 coincided with plans to provide more opportunities for personalised learning online, other Google Apps integration work was undertaken by the JISC DOULS project [ http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/douls/ ] to bring module information into personal spaces such as iGoogle. We are also looking to Google Apps to support a broad range of functions previously delivered by an in-house ePortfolio toolset. More information about our adoption can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/googleapps
Prompt slides used on the day (incl. slide notes): | The resulting recording from Hangouts on Air: |
Google Apps as part of OU Learning Systems:
Internal bespoke 'MyStuff' ePortfolio system being replaced by a toolset range from other services
An earlier demonstration of the OU Google Apps integration for curriculum use: