What's on the web

Citation

(2007), "What's on the web", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 21 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2007.08121fag.001

What's on the web

Hall of famewww.brandon-hall.com

For 15 years Brandon Hall Research has been providing independent expert advice in the form of published reports and phone consultations on the tools of e-learning: LMS, LCMS, authoring tools, content providers, and other tools that help organizations develop successful e-learning solutions.

The Brandon Hall web site itself is not as interactive or whizzy as might be expected but it does have nice clean lines and an easy-to-read layout. The hyper-links are many, quick and clear.

Research material is not cheap although you can sign up for “Brandon Hall News” and get free research downloads. However a comprehensive report profiling 63 learning management systems costs around $1,500 (£750) for a year.

Dr Brandon Hall is an acknowledged expert in a field where many claim expertise but few really exhibit it. He also chairs the annual US Excellence in Learning Awards, now in its twelfth year and the first recognition program dedicated entirely to the e-learning industry.

Blending it togetherwww.redtray.co.uk

Established in 2001, Redtray is a “blended-learning” company. It therefore prides itself on the creation, deployment and management of classroom courses and web-based applications.

The home page of their site is ghastly with a dreadful picture of “go for it” 20 and 30 something’s grinning madly in an attempt to express “teamwork”.

There are some good things on the site however. Their ALTO web-solution looks promising enabling clients to create, personalize, manage and deploy e-learning material. There is a good exposition of “rapid e-learning” which explains how it is about rapidly and easily developing e-learning content and deploying it to users in days rather than weeks or months with small teams and small budgets involved. Redtray have some high powered, blue chip clients and recently won praise from The Times newspaper. Just a shame about that photo.

Centre of excellencewww.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse

The UK-based e-Learning Centre is an information resource for learning and development professionals and academics and staff developers. On their site there is a large collection of selected and reviewed links to e-learning including the library with links to selected and reviewed articles, white papers, research reports, journal articles and resource collections in the field of e-learning.

There is also a showcase section with links to examples of interesting online courses, learning materials and other e-learning solutions, an events page, a products and services facility and an up-to date bookshop. The e-Learning Centre is a free information resource about e-learning provided by a commercial company, Learning Light Ltd. Obviously the company hoped to benefit from showing its expertise – and on the evidence of this site it deserves to do so.

Out of date but …E-learning-reviews

This site “provides those interested in research on e-learning with concise and thoughtful reviews of relevant publications. The most important goal is a well-balanced selection of seminal publications as well as interesting up-to-date publications from the various disciplinary perspectives.”

However (and it is a big one) the site itself looks as if it was designed circa 1955 (not possible we realize that) and the content does not seem to have been updated for over two years.

There are however really good articles covering diverse topics. Subjects include pedagogy, strategy, human-computer interaction, technology, culture, resource management, organization, measurement and much more.

Find some, miss somewww.findtutorials.com

FindTutorials.com is a web index and search engine that searches for tutorials and online courses on the web. It features a huge categorized database (700 categories and about 4,000 tutorials) and allows you to search for free tutorials on practically any subject, ranging from photography to gardening to psychology. The site will guide you directly to written, certified tutorials carefully selected from all over the Web. There are gaps however. There are numerous courses on most aspects of IT (including lots on web design). When it comes to arts and humanities topics the content is pitifully thin. Worth a look anyway.

And finallyIn Plato’s Academy, he and a group of students were discussing the correct number of teeth for an adult, male horse to possess. Glaucon said that as a horse had such a small mouth it was obvious that there could be no more than 16 teeth. Thrasymachus felt that as a horse has a very long jaw bone it must have 64 teeth. Aristophanes exclaimed that a horse must have 32 teeth – eight at each side on the upper and lower jaw. The discussion became very heated and went on and on until Aristotle suggested that they walk down to the stables, pick one of the horses … and count the number of teeth.

Contact uswww.emeraldinsight.com

For a particularly interesting and useful site you could always try the Emerald one! And if you have any favorite (or otherwise) sites that you would like us to review on these pages, please drop us an e-mail and we will submit them to our reviewers’ usual rigorous analysis.