VARK EXAMPLES:

VARK EXAMPLES:

Available online at: http://digitalenterprise.org/index.html

School: North Carolina State University

Philip’s Comment on Managing the Digital Enterprise Course:

Visual

The site has links to guest speakers using streaming video that can be viewed either by Realplayer or Quicktime. Dr. Tony Driscoll, IBM an executive in residence at NC state university from IBM was the speaker on one interesting realplayer video I watched and listened to. (Available online at: http://digitalenterprise.org/seminar/odriscoll.html ). The topic of the video was the “Promise and Peril of Wireless e-Business: A Cross-Industry Overview”. The video quality was not perfect on my windows 98 with a 56k modem computer. However, the quality and timeliness of the information more than compensated for this. The beginning of the listings for these “webcasts”, as Rappa calls them, can be found at: http://digitalenterprise.org/seminar/webcast.html

Aural

The streaming video mentioned under visual had audio included, of course. The sound quality was not the highest quality, but that probably has more to do with my computer system and dial up modem than the production quality. The sound quality was still very understandable. As long as one is interested in the subject matter, they will probably continue to listen. This provides another option of learning timely and relevant subject matter for the visually impaired and those with an aural learning style or preference. It also provides variation for the rest of the learners who want to take advantage of this.

Read/Write

The course has a 15 modules with various readings, and thus provides more than adequate supply of materials for the Read/Write oriented student or learner.

Kinesthetic

Multiple Intelligences

Interactivity

Assessment

Accessibility:

The site provides an easily identifiable link to a text version at the top left hand corner of every page I visited. I tested nine of these text version pages, and all were Bobby 508 conditionally compliant, depending on user checks.

The graphics version did not fare as well on Bobby interpreted section 508 compliance. There were 17 instances without alt tags for images, 2 instances of needing to explicitly associate form controls and their labels with the LABEL element, and 1 instance of Include default, place-holding characters in edit boxes and text areas. There were also numerous user checks necessary to make the page compliant. A test of the graphic version of the schedule page revealed similar compliance problems. The graphic page on intelligent agents contained a similar number of compliance issues, but most could be very easily fixed. They were caused by not having alt tags for images.