Weekly Learning Technology Digest... 23

Image by Karen Booth, under a
CC BY-ND 2.0 license

The weekly learning technology digest is a tad late this week due to my being on leave last Friday - so I come bearing cake by way of apology for not getting this online sooner!

Grab a cuppa... help yourself to one of those lovely looking cakes... and sit down for this week's digest...

One of my bug bears is 'when elearning goes bad' - which so often it does... so 5 Tips for Beating Boring eLearning is a handy nudge in the non-dull direction. None of this is rocket science, but they're points which can slip by some times!
Oh, and while we're thinking about making elearning a bit more interesting, what about Five Factors that Affect Online Student Motivation from the Faculty Focus newsletter? Point number 5 is especially important, even if it might seem a little too touchy feely!
And a final one about online learning... How [not] to Design an Online Course is going to be useful if you're starting to think 'I need to get this course online' and don't want to fall into the usual traps! It's not all 'don't do this' stuff, there's some constructive advice kicking around in this one too.
The quality of teaching also appeared in the news in the Times Higher in their article Post-1992s give sector an object lesson in instruction and for an overview of HE teaching, this is a useful article to read.
As a diversion from learning and teaching for a mo, how about a tool which converts text to speech for you... free of charge? I spotted SoundGecko in LifeHacker and if you'd rather listen to long articles rather than read them - this could be just the app for you.
MOOCs (massive open online courses) are still in the news and The Guardian covers it with an article provocatively titled MOOCs: a massive opportunity for higher education, or digital hype? The conclusion seems to be that it's too early to tell... but this is a nicely balanced overview of all things MOOC.
My final bit of learning technology loveliness is 8 Great Reasons to Flip Your Classroom (and 4 of the Wrong Reasons), from Bergmann and Sams - a bit of a mouthful of an article, but again since 'flipping the classroom' is one of the current educational technology trends to note, then we like anything which gives a good quick overview. And this does!
And finally... a video! This one is from the RSA Animate series called The Divided Brain and it's just... well... interesting!