How Should The eLearning Toolkit Be Used

The eLearning Toolkit is intended as a guide aiding instructor’s own decision-making. Pages seek to introduce tools - what they are, what functions they serve, and how they might support teaching and learning. Tool reviews can be used to inform individual judgement regarding the suitability and appropriateness for adoption.

Where applicable, pages indicate if the tool is centrally supported by Western and how campus-based support resources can be accessed. Adoption of unsupported tools is at the discretion of individual faculty members, under the recognition of their responsibility to ensure the protection of student’s personal identifying information.

The eLearning Toolkit is designed for discoverability of new tools and technologies for teaching and learning. It is separated into the following sections:

Find eLearning Tools

In this section you will find an index of potential eLearning tools that you can use. They are organized in three different ways: In an alphabetical list, categorized by type of tool, and separated to show only centrally-supported tools.

Achieve Specific Outcomes

Explore tools organized by intended teaching goals or student learning outcomes.

Discover eLearning Ideas

Connect to a range of eLearning ideas and resources that may inform or support teaching in a digital context.

Terms

Throughout the Toolkit you may come acorss the following terms related to eLearning.

  • Centrally-Supported Tools: Support for these tools is provided by Western Technology Services. Centrally-Support tools in the toolkit are indicated with a purple Western crest and are indexed on the centrally-supported tools page.

  • LTI: Learning Tool Interoperability. A technical standard for connecting tools to a learning management system. Some tools have an LTI integration available. For more information, visit 1edtech.

  • LMS: Learning Management System. Western's LMS, OWL, is currently migrating from Sakai to Brightspace.

  • OWL: Western's learning management system, which stands for Online Western Learning.