Insider Perspective on Ikarus

Background

How I got into Ikarus

• I heard about Ikarus from the IFETS mailing list (IFETS  International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and is a sub-group of IEEE – the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) http://ifets.ieee.org/.
• The email said that there was a free international online seminar on teaching and learning in virtual environments, and was inviting people to apply. For the full text of the invitation email, see Appendix 1.
• I browsed their website quickly, and decided to apply anyway since it was free. I filled in their (relatively long) set of questions, and waited for their reply as to whether I was accepted or not (this reply was expected to be just before the course start time in March)
  

Why I got into Ikarus 

• It was about teaching and learning in virtual environments (very relevant to this MEd and very relevant to my work)
• It was free! 
• It was a fully online course, so would give me a different experience of an online course other than the one I was studying for the MEd
• It was on a different learning environment (Moodle) than the one I used for work and MEd (both using same version of WebCT)
• It was international – a chance to see how others think all over the world and to network!!
• It said it required only 0.5 hours a day or 4 hours a week (not that much time). I will later show how I thought it required more time (and not just because I was an active participant)

 

What Ikarus 2004 is about, who it's for, and how it works

For full information from the course designers, see http://www.online-seminar.net/orga.html, but the below is a brief from my perspective:

• The objective of the course: to explore teaching and learning virtual environments collaboratively online. The course brings people from all over the world who deal with eLearning from pedagogical, technological and legal perspective.
• The divisions into disciplinary groups and sub-groups for discussions: the course included discussion forums divided by disciplinary groups and sub-groups. Some of the assignments involved reading articles and discussing them in the sub-groups (groups of about 20 participants for the pedagogy sub-forum I was subscribed to)
•  The interdisciplinary group projects: there were two projects that we did in pre-arranged (by the designers) interdisciplinary groups. The first project was an evaluation of 2 VLEs (our group did BSCL which was required and ATutor, which we chose from a list of two)
• The quizzes: there were weekly multiple choice quizzes consisting of about 3 questions. These quizzes looked easy but required a lot of internet searching techniques and a fair amount of reading online material to answer properly. They took tremendous amounts of time (up to 2 hours at first!) but were wonderful in the sense that they opened up our eyes to issues in eLearning that we did not have time to cover during the course. There was a special forum to discuss the quizzes, and some participants complained about the multiple-choice nature. Others in the pedagogy forum (with facilitator help) started to understand that the quizzes were not about multiple choice questions, but more about opening up doors for us to explore interesting angles on eLearning. This is where I learned about blogs and RSS readers!
• Some of the features of Moodle

.         A technology called "wiki" which has simple formatting easy for anyone to use and is very  user-friendly in the output
·        Group editing of the same document possible on a wiki workspace
·        You can see who is online at the same time your are (available in many VLEs)
·        You can easily navigate between forums, etc.
·        You can mark certain postings to go back to later
·        While reading someone's posting, you can easily go straight to their profile
·        You can edit your profile any time and put a picture, etc.

Concept map for Ikarus 2004 done by my subgroup 
The last activity done in the pedagogy sub-groups was to collaboratively create a concept map about Ikarus 2004. This was a new experience to many of us, and something not very easy to do collaboratively! If anyone is interested in seeing the resultant concept map, email me and I'll send you a copy (I don't want to put it on public internet)