[LINK] Educational Content Authoring Tools Seminar, ANU, 23 Feb

[Tom Worthington]

Dr Lachlan Blackhall will present a free seminar on "Educational Content
Authoring Tools" 1pm, 23 February 2011, at the Australian National
University in Canberra: <http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/2784>.

This is part of the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science,
"Education Innovation Series". The next is "Managing content delivery
effectively" 24 Feb: <http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/2767>.

Check the ANU CECS Seminars List for others in the series:
<http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars>.

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College of Engineering and Computer Science
EDUCATION INNOVATION SERIES

Educational Content Authoring Tools

Dr Lachlan Blackhall (CECS, ANU )

DATE: 2011-02-23
TIME: 13:00:00 - 14:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101, Computer Science and Information
Technology Building, The Australian National University

ABSTRACT:

The authoring, storage, delivery and reuse of educational content is
rapidly becoming a significant problem in the tertiary education sector
where significant content is generated for the plethora of courses
delivered each year. Effectively being able to manage this authoring
process (authoring, storage, delivery and reuse) will offer significant
advantages for the tertiary education sector. The challenges being faced
in the content authoring process in tertiary education sector can be
summarised as follows:
   # Little or no archiving of content (each lecturer redevelops content).
   # Tools used are content developer specific.
   # Content types supported depend on the platform used by each
developer. Important standards are not necessarily supported (i.e. WCAG,
SCORM, etca).
   # Content is typically recreated for each delivery mode (i.e. PDF,
PowerPoint slides, lecture notes, etca).
   # Content cannot be updated easily.

     This report focuses on the specific requirements of the authoring,
storage, and re-use, and delivery of education resources of a variety of
types. The report is limited to the authoring tools that exist either as
standalone systems or as authoring tools within a variety Learning
Management Systems (LMS), both open source and commercial.

     Of all the content authoring tools AContent conforms to the most
useful standards whilst offering a simple and effective authoring tool.
The tool itself is uncluttered, offers the ability to include all the
necessary content types and conforms to the important accessibility
standards developed by the W3C. It creates modules that are compatible
with most existing LMS through the use of standards based export
mechanisms. Importantly AContent allows the creation of metadata that
describes the content being developed.

BIO:

Lachlan Blackhall was born and grew up in Sydney, Australia. He received
a Bachelor of Engineering (Aerospace) and a Bachelor of Science from the
University of Sydney in 2007. He has previously worked for the
Australian Centre for Field Robotics and as an electric propulsion
engineer for Alta Space in Pisa, Italy. He was a student in the Systems
and Control Group in the Research School of Information Sciences and
Engineering at the Australian National University where he pursued
research on dynamical network theory, fault tolerance and diagnosis for
networked systems and systematic complexity reduction. He recently
submitted his PhD, and will soon take up a Post Doc position in Lund
University, Sweden.
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-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra