There are so many tools out there that all supposedly support education that it’s mind-blowing. There is seemingly even a mind-map of mind-mapping tools!
Fascinating!
There are way too many that one could account for, let alone keep up with. Throughout the ONL course we are experimenting with quite a few, and while that’s perhaps not the learning objective of the course, it’s a good experience to get to know them from the student perspective. A few quick take-aways:
- Many tools are platform-dependent. And we cannot take for granted that all our students have the same platform. (MS Teams works differently for Macs vs PCs, and whatever is the official info, that’s what students report.)
- Some tools are restricted to people from the same organisation. (Sway sounded like a great idea until it didn’t actually work for people from different organisations.)
- Some tools don’t work with other tools. Try using them through your favourite screening app, e.g. through Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting etc. to see whether they are compatible.
- Most tools require individuals to create their tool-specific logins first. Quite a waste of time and effort to do during a class, but asynchronously tech support can be even more difficult.
- Others require one to have a credit card to begin with, even for the free version. Needless to say, we cannot assume all students can do that. (Interestingly, some tools, e.g. Prezi, requires that from some geographical regions but not others. How would you know what applies where?)
- …
Where am I going with this? A couple of things:
- We don’t know which interface students encounter when signing up for a tool. It may differ from the facilitator’s interface.
- We cannot presume students have the means or the platforms to get everything to work.
I.e. trying out things helps but only to some extent. Giving options could help; using only the tools that every student within a university, or across participating universities have access to restricts the possibilities somewhat but is a workaround. For MOOCs, it may come down to sticking to one and only platform throughout, without changing them for assignments, either.
This takes away quite a bit of the variety or creativity of the learning experience, though. => Any better suggestions?
