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DL Practitioners' Forum

Welcome to the Brookes DL Practitioners Forum. The forum is for all people in the Brookes community who are engaged in or interested in distance and blended learning. Together we will grow the forum to meet the needs of the participants. There will be two broad streams to start:

an online discussion forum hosted on WebCT
an occasional series of meetings and seminar

Discussion forum

Members Log In

Join the Forum

The online discussions will take two forms:

Time limited discussions on particular topics leading to position statements for consideration by the university.
Open ended discussions on matters arising and matters of continuing interest, leading to a "help" file and FAQs.

The first time-limited discussion, concerns the term by which the university might refer collectively to e- blended- distance- online- virtual- open- web- etc- learning. Is there one term we could all use consistently that would help our learners, clients, colleagues and funding bodies to know what it is that we are doing?

The online discussion environment requires participants to log in. This will require you to enter your staff number (or guest account number) and your WebCT password.

If you are a member of staff or a student at Brookes you may either self-register through WebCT (help) or send your staff or student number to the forum moderator. Do not send your password!

If you are not a member of staff or a student at Brookes, guest membership can be arranged. E-mail moderator.

Meetings

The first meeting was held on 4 December. A great many good ideas emerged and two discussions will be continued on line:

What is your "special blend": what kind of learning models work? Are these discipline specific, course specific, culture specific or can they be generalised?
Resource allocation for the distance learner.

The DL Practitioners Forum will meet at least once, face-to-face, each term. Next term the meeting will be a showcase of DL programmes from across the university.

The context

Educating learners off campus is increasingly important to the University. Nearly 10% of our enroled students (c. 1,500) are studying wholly or mostly by distance learning. This percentage is likely to increase and that increase will contribute strategically to our success.

Read about the background to off-campus e-learning at Brookes.
Watch a multimedia presentation (requires MS IE 5+ and WMP 7+) on the e-learning policy context.
Keep up with two news services: one about the technology and the other about using e-learning to widen participation.

Please send me comments about this forum and these pages.

George (groberts@brookes.ac.uk)

For further information, contact George Roberts Development Director, Off-Campus E-learning

Last Modified:12 May 2003