Building Adaptive Paths In A Blackboard Course

by carlos on April 8, 2011

Defining Branching Paths

For the purpose of this essay we’ll define adaptive paths as:

Branching paths, in the context of building online content, is defined as the techniques necessary to create branches of content depending on one or more criteria given by the content creator to create multiple paths for content mastery.

At it’s simplest level a branching path can be as simple as:

  1. Student goes through module 1 with a 100-point assessment (quiz) as the last element of the module
    • The student gets 100 points on the quiz and moves on to module 2.
    • The student gets between 80 and 99 points on and goes through a to module 2.
    • The student gets between 60 and 79 points on the quiz and moves to a refresher module before taking the quiz again.
    • The students gets below 60 points on the quiz. The student will be sent back to module 1 and asked to take the quiz again after reviewing the material.
  2. Subsequent modules can branch in a similar fashion as much or as little as needed to meet the learning objectives for the course

Why should we care about branching?

In online courses it is important to ensure that content was mastered before students can move onto more advanced content that, perhaps, builds on content from prior modules or courses. How do we do this if we can’t look over a student’s shoulder and ensure that they have mastered the content and that they are ready to move on. Sure, the students can always go back and review the content but I strongly believe that we can do better and Branching Paths are one way in which we can support the students.

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Learning to work together (Possible Long Term Project)

by carlos on May 13, 2010

For the longest time I have wondered why we can collaborate and work together developing material that will benefit our students more than anything. Since I started working on Higher Education back in 1998 I’ve realized the following:

  • Faculty and the institutions where they work still fight over content ownership:
    • If the instructor owns the content then it’s easier for her to release it under creative commons or similar license.
    • If the school owns the content then releasing content to a wider audience becomes a matter of school policy that is negotiated between the school and the Faculty Union.
  • There is no culture of sharing. Despite the fact that content repositories or reference libraries like Merlot have existed for more than 10 years how many people really use them?
  • With few exceptions there tends to be a culture of competition rather than collaboration within academic departments.
  • Because of the lack of sharing culture there are no tools that make it easier to share content. Even when the LMS (Learning Management System) does provide the ability to share content it is fairly limited and does not serve the purpose it was originally designed for.

So the question becomes: How do we provide a tool or set of tools that will facilitate collaboration between faculty within school and across institutions with different infrastructures? With schools suffering of diminishing budgets and more pressure for faculty it makes sense to offer tools that will make the collaboration easier and more effective. We also have to consider that a lot of schools are moving from proprietary LMS such as Blackboard to other LMS such as Desire to Learn, Sakai or Moodle.   Having developed a migration program between WebCT Campus Edition 4.1 and Vista 4 it is not an easy process and faculty will most likely reject a complete course rebuild if they have an option. Newer LMS applications like Blackboard Vista or Campus Edition  (legacy WebCT products), and I assume others as well,  make it extremely difficult to get content out of the system and making it very hard for faculty to use the same content on institutions using different LMS and/or content management systems. IMS Global Learning Consortium has developed multiple standards for content interchange and interoperability:

  • Course Cartridges allow for complete course transfer independent of the LMS being used to create the content or the one moving the content to.
  • Quiz and Test Interchange allows the exchange of question banks and assessment instruments between Learning Management Systems.
  • Content Packaging is a more limited form of the Course Cartridge that allows the migration of Learning modules as smaller packages.

The biggest bottleneck for creating interoperability tools Thu, the rationale for such a tool (or set of tools) is as follows:

  • We have technology that will allow us to move content from one LMS to another one or from one course to another within the same LMS
  • Smaller chunks of content can be moved with LMS content packages or SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) packages that can be used independently of the underlying LMS or as stand alone players.
  • Publishing content can be done without the need to access an entire course and can be presented in multiple formats such as PDF or HTML as a way to provide tailored content to students.

Here is where I need some help. I’ve come up with some use cases for the tool (or tools) but need feedback whether I’m being realistic and if this is something worth pursuing. The use cases are:

  • An instructor who owns his course content moves from a school using Blackboard to a School using Sakai and needs to move his courses from one system to another one without rebuilding the course.
  • The same instructor teaches multiple sections of a courses and rather than crosslist or combine the sections she wants to teach them separately to prevent technical issues.
  • An instructor wants to use the content he has created online as the textbook for the class but doesn’t want to reformat it for print because it is too time intensive.
  • Two instructors want to collaborate in developing an accounting course but they use different LMSs. Rather than use either of the LMSs on their campuses they settle for a neutral way to build the content that can be accessed from either system
  • A large university or university system wants to stimulate collaboration and save costs from course developments, also ensuring that large courses are consistent across sections or campuses.

What I am proposing is a web-based tool written in Ruby on Rails that provides facilities to create Course Cartridges and Content Packages (including all required XML and auxiliary files)  from content created on the system or created via third party tools and added to the system. The content added to the system can also be output as standalone material either as Adobe PDF suitable for printing or HTML suitable for web access. Additional tools can be added without major difficulty due to Ruby on Rails’ flexible architecture

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10 Business Lessons I Learned from Playing Dungeons & Dragons

by carlos on July 7, 2009


Submitted by Esther Schindler on Sun, 07/05/2009 – 12:26.

 

Throughout my 20s and 30s, I played D&D and other fantasy role playing games at least once a week. Doing so did more than teach me the rules of combat or proper behavior in a dragon’s lair. I gained several skills that truly did help me in my career.

Note that by “Dungeons & Dragons,” I don’t mean necessarily the very structured fantasy world made famous by Gary Gygax. I played in standard D&D and other created-worlds (such as Harn), but mainly I played in independently-created universes, at the whim of a particular dungeonmaster (DM).

I got real jobs as a result of playing D&D, one of them directly. One DM hired both my husband and me after we’d played in his universe for five months, because D&D is a great way to find out how someone solves problems and copes with stress. However, in this post I’m not talking about people-networking but rather gaming skills that map to real life. After coming up with a short list on my own, I asked the three primary DMs in my life for their suggestions. I’m grateful to Bill, Ivan, and (especially) Steve for their help. Which probably is an outgrowth of the first lesson….

  1. Feed the DM. Gamers laugh as they say this (and slide the veggie tray in the DM’s direction), but it’s important to treat those in power with extra kindness. The DM is busy rolling dice for your battle with the monster, while simultaneously responding to a scribbled private note from another player (“My character Rumin Bard is stealing gold from the cleric’s saddlebag”) and preparing for an interaction at an upcoming crossroad your party hasn’t reached. If you take care of the DM (or your manager), perhaps he’ll be kind to you. Or to your character. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.) Or he’ll answer silly questions sent to him by e-mail, 25 years later, because he continues to be your friend. (In feeding the DM, it helps if you can cook.)
  2. One spell, used well, can be more powerful than an entire book full of spells. I first met Ivan when he showed up for a game in Steve’s standard D&D world. Ivan drew up a first-level wizard character who had almost no hit-points and only one wimpy spell: cast an illusion. Whereupon Ivan’s character cast an illusion of a 5th-level illusionist… and proceeded to run that powerful “5th level illusionist” through the rest of the game. Years later, Ivan played in a play-by-mail dungeon (yes, children, we did those things before e-mail) in which the DM permitted custom spells. Ivan’s “swap” spell seemed Mostly Harmless: Transpose a 1″ cube of anything with another 1″ cube of anything. Whereupon Ivan set up a magical FedEx business (for very short messages) and a sideline of an assassin-business (swap a square inch of heart muscle with anything else; who could tell that murder was done?). This taught me to get everything possible out of the tools at my disposal. It also taught me to expand my notion of “What do I have, and what can I do with it?”
  3. It’s better to out-smart an orc than to fight one. Young D&D players get into the game because they want an endless repetition of “Find a monster. Kill it. Get its treasure.” But your character (and career) can get hurt that way. If instead you set up a situation in which the orcs think that they were attacked by the goblins, the orcs will blow up the goblin castle in retaliation. That leaves your party to walk through afterward, picking up the spoils (and the experience points). “Let’s you and him fight” is a very effective business strategy… or it’s far safer for you, anyway.
  4. “I’m the DM. I’m not there.” D&D players often turn to the DM to ask for information about the universe. (“Is the person offering me this three-headed dog trustworthy?”) The DM often doesn’t know, or he isn’t telling; just because he puts something in your path doesn’t mean you need to trust it, accept it, fight it, or buy it. Experimentation without investigation can be very painful; learn to ask questions. Steve didn’t ask a single clarifying question about the beautiful fairy-fly before he decided to catch it… and it burned a hole straight through his character’s hand. Don’t rely on assumptions, particularly in a world (or an office) you don’t know. It’s the wrong assumptions that kill you. (Particularly in computer consulting contracts.)
  5. The best quests require a mixture of skills in the party. Find new friends and cultivate ancillary skills. That pesky little hobbit thief may eat you out of house and home, yet sometimes he comes in pretty handy. This is the point of all those tedious “diversity training” exercises from your HR department; perhaps the message would get across better if they talked about the apparently-weak wizard and the bard with those amazing negotiation skills.
  6. Simple and internally consistent is more fun than random. My dungeonmasters assure me that, while all players are “chaotic neutral” no matter what their characters’ allegiance might be, the fastest way to upset the game is to be completely erratic. (Well, next to running out of food.) I like to think that most software developers understand this point, and then I see evidence to the contrary.
  7. You create your own traps. If you fall into a habit, the universe will bite you. One player had a “standard door-opening procedure” that rarely was effective, but John did the same thing every time. Another player regularly became “party leader” by bullying in the name of leadership; based on Ron’s longtime behavior, the DM set up an irresistible scenario that Ron fell for… and his character barely escaped. (Ron never realized it was his own human weakness that inspired the trap.)
  8. Treasure is not always what you expect it to be. Both a rock and an egg hold hidden treasures if you know how to craft or care for them. Thought and creativity tend to win out over immediate return.
  9. You don’t have to read all the books, but a modest description of the beast you are about to face is better than facing a daemon and trying six dozen spells before finding the right one. (If you live that long.) Do not eschew documentation. Learn from others’ mistakes — or from your own. Draw a map as you go. It is easier to avoid the pitfalls and to find that hidden room the next time through.
  10. When selecting a weapon or tool, bigger is not always better. Unique weapons tend to identify the heroes in the room.

So what did I miss? Add your own D&D-to-life lessons in the comments.

 

 

 

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Research Interests and What I Want To Do For My PhD

by carlos on May 28, 2009

As someone who has worked in education for the past 10 years I believe that we are approaching a revolution. 

  • Blackboard just bought their third competitor since 2000.
  • Books are getting more and more expensive.
  • It’s getting harder and harder to keep content and text relevant to our students
  • Our students are becoming more and more computer savvy and technically proficient. Even more so than our faculty

These are symptoms of a larger problem.

We are not  teaching our students in a way that maximizes their learning experience and we can’t really figure out why we are not reaching them effectively because as adults our perception and use of technology is different than the perception and use of technologies by those people who have grown up with it..

My research interests in the field of education deal with learning communities and community building, remixes and mashups in education, how can we build better tools for our teaching and learning; How do we leverage the virtual to better work on the real?  and How do we apply ethics to our online research?

Learning Communities and Community Building

The most engaging and exciting definition of community I have come across is from Mindstorms, Seymour Papert’s early 1980’s book on learning and technology. Papert writes:

I recently found an excellent model during a summer spent in Brazil. For example, at the core of the famous carnival in Rio de Janeiro is a twelve-hour-long procession of song, dance, and street theater. One troop of players after another presents its piece. Usually the piece is a dramatization through music and dance of a historical event or folk tale. The lyrics, the choreography, the costumes are new and original. The level of technical achievement is professional, the effect breathtaking. Although the reference may be mythological, the processions are charged with contemporary political meaning.

The processions are not spontaneous. Preparing them as well as performing in them are important parts of Brazilian life. Each group prepares separately– and competitively– in its own learning environment, which is called a samba school. These are not schools as we know them; they are social clubs with memberships that may range from a few hundred to many thousands. Each club owns a building, a place for dancing and getting together. Members of a samba school go there most weekend evenings to dance, to drink, to meet their friends
.
During the year each samba school chooses its theme for the next carnival, the stars are selected, the lyrics are written and rewritten,the dance is choreographed and practiced. Members of the school range in age from children to grandparents and in ability from novice to professional. But they dance together and as they dance everyone is learning and teaching as well as dancing. Even the stars are there to learn their difficult parts. (Seymour Paper, Mindstorms, Chapter 8; emphasis mine)

How do we apply these concepts in an educational setting?

Building communities is never an easy exercise. It requires building trust and “social capital”, or as Tara Hunt calls the “whuffie factor.” It is no longer enough to establish yourself as the authority in your class, it has become a more open community and what Tara says in the video below applies as much to education as it does to business-based communities.

I have always seen people emerge as leaders in online courses, people who lead, and sometimes monopolize, discussions and who act as the leaders of a class. One area I am interested in researching involves motivation for online students. How can we leverage the anonymity and other aspects of online environments and communities to create learning communities that are more like Samba Schools than the traditional western classroom.

Should we create cohorts for our courses, degrees or programs that last more than 1 semester? Do the cohort model lend itself to undergraduate students as well as to graduate programs?

Who owns the content of an online course? This can be taken in two different ways: Who owns the content created by an instructor: The University/School where the instructor worked or the instructor who created the content? This is a deceptively simple question when content can be moves from place to place without much work but it needs to be addressed in an equitable way if quality content is going to be produced and used.  The other question is one of privacy and ownership of the content exchanged between the members of a learning community.  Can/should we remix the content from one learning community on another?  Do students react differently to other people using their content?  How does the right to privacy interact with the open content, copyright and fair use?

Collaboration must expand beyond the borders of a single segment. How different would things look if we had collaboration at the K-20 level rather than between people at a single educational segment? One thing that has always bothered me is the way that different groups use Learning Management Systems… Why can’t we all agree to work together so students will have one kind of experience throughout their educational career?

Remixes and mashups in education

How can we build better tools for our teaching and learning?

In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data or functionality from two or more sources into a single integrated application. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source. (Wikipedia)

One of the things that has always bothered me is that we, as educators and as regular users, have tons and tons of resources available but we have to go to hundreds of different places to get the information we need. What if we could allow students to build their own learning environments? Or even better, build them as collaborative projects between faculty and students?

We have stayed for far too long in the same model of building educational content in general and online content in particular; that needs to change. In my higher education experience one of the hardest things to do is for faculty to lower their defenses long enough to truly realize the value of collaboration, enabling remote technologies and the intersection of the two.

How can faculty be creative if they reuse the same content year after year after year? What happens to students who can get easy access to evaluation material from prior terms? How can we ask our students to be creative if what they see is the same thing that their friends saw when they took the course two semesters ago?

What do faculty do when they need to get ready for a new semester? Restore the section of the course from the last time they took it so they can make changes to it.  How can we improve the process of course development?

As the video above shows, it’s time to build our own content and to leverage rather than depend on textbook publishers and other creators of content.  We know our students need to learn and the material is far easier to remix, mashup  or repurpose for different audiences if faculty retain creative control over the content.

Conxions may show us one way of repurposing the content, Merlot is a different one.  How can we build a framework for building mashups and collaborative workspaces without requiring the users to know programming or other complicated techniques to build a customizable course space? How can we leverage existing technologies

How do we leverage the virtual to better work on the real

Our students live in the intersection of the virtual and the real worlds. Students entering now as first year undergraduate students have lived all their lives with computers, CDs and DVDs, Internet, Web Browsers and more technology than the faculty teaching them.  Look at how much our students use text messaging and email, to name a few technologies available, and how little we do to leverage those technologies in our teaching and learning.

Virtual Worlds hold a special place and interest in my research.  As an undergraduate I spent time in the early text-based MUSHs (Multi User Shared Hallucinations) and MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented) looking at their cultural significance and people interacted on them.  There’s plenty of research literature in communication studies and anthropology from those early days1

The early environments were not necessarily limited to games. Some of the early examples include:

  • Micro MUSE: An early experiment in virtual world building for education
  • MOOSE Crossing: MOOSE Crossing is a research project developed to create an interactive learning environment for kids. It is geared for kids 9 to 13, but all ages are welcome. MOOSE Crossing is designed to help kids practice creative writing skills while learning to program. It allows children to meet and work with other children from all over the world. MOOSE Crossing aids in the development of imagination, self-motivation and basic object-oriented programming skills.2
  • Media MOO: is a professional online community for media researchers. It is a place to come meet colleagues in media studies and related fields and brainstorm, to hold colloquia and conferences, and to explore the serious side of this new medium.3
  • Tapped In: is a Web-based learning environment created by SRI International to transform teacher professional development (TPD) for professional development providers and educators. Tapped In enables providers to offer high-quality online professional development experiences and support to more teachers cost-effectively. Through Tapped In, educators can extend their professional growth beyond courses or workshops with the online tools, resources, colleagues, and support they need to implement effective, classroom-centered learning activities.4

We are starting to see the same streams of research from Virtual Worlds such as Second life. Lots of communication studies, sociology and anthropology5 are beginning to explore these new environments where we live our lives.

As educators we must explore these new environments in a way that goes beyond what we are currently doing. Looking at Simteach’s Second Life Education Wiki it appears that all that people are doing is moving the classroom itself to an online environment. How can we build a Second Life environment that resembles a Samba School rather than a regular classroom?

How do we apply ethics to online research?

Everyone has either a written code of ethics or a commitment to a code of conduct; the problem is that all these codes of conduct were developed when the Internet was little more than an academic toy for computer scientists at schools who had the resources or contacts to install the necessary hardware and software.  Now it is different, with the Internet more and more a part of our everyday lives we need to rethink our ethical frameworks to account for the differences in the online world versus the real, face to face, world.

Some of the things that need to change are our research methodologies when working online. From the way we obtain permissions and verify identity to how we conduct participant observation, while taking into account the additional restrictions online environments place on researchers,  and the way we report our findings. Building such a framework is not easy6 but new frameworks should be created to make it easier for students and researchers to work safely and ethically.

  1. See for example: ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/, http://www.ibiblio.org/dbarberi/papers/mud/, ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/academic/computer-science/virtual-reality/papers/ and http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/papers/muds/. [↩]
  2. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/moose-crossing/parents.html [↩]
  3. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/mediamoo/ [↩]
  4. http://tappedin.org/tappedin/web/about.jsp [↩]
  5. Particularly Boelstorff (2008): Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press [↩]
  6. See:  Bruckman, Amy (2006). Teaching Students to Study Online Communities Ethically. Journal of Information Ethics 15:2, 82-98 for a case study of ethical training for online researchers. [↩]

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Where are we going with our LMS

by carlos on May 19, 2009

Disclosure: I work (and have worked for several years) as a contractor for Blackboard in the Ask Dr. C service.

Disclaimer: The views represented here are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Blackboard or any of my past employers.

Blackborg, Resistance is futile

Found the image above through Laura Gekeler’s blog after hearing about Blackboard’s acquisition of Angel, a rival LMS provider and, after Blackboard bought out WebCT, one of the top 5 vendors in the Learning Management System market.  Besides the obvious anger and frustration with this whole event there are other questions that I think need to be asked for the sake of the students, who are the ones who get the short end of our educational technology “efforts.” Let’s face it, Blackboard’s customer service leaves a lot to be desired.  It is one of the reasons why schools have left Blackboard or chose a different product to begin with; case in point, California State University, Long Beach who moved out of Blackboard Learning System due to dissatisfaction with the support they received and the software itself. They are just starting a migration to Angel and now Blackboard buys up the company they are moving to so back to the same company that they have moved away from. I guess I’m feeling the hit harder because I started working with WebCT back in the prehistory of the 1.2 beta days. While they were not the best days (like learning why our license for the Windows version of the 1.2 beta software was free) and a lot of on-the-job learning they were also the days when the community was a lot more tight knit and the developers of the software were a phone call away.  Blackboard on its own and later with all the acquisitions it has made never had that feeling.  We’ve always struggled with their support organization; not the individuals, they’ve all been average or above, but more with the culture of the organization: as an organization Blackboard has a long way to go to become the customer-centered company that they need to be. The main worry I have about Blackboard eating up its competitors (WebCT and Angel so far, I expect more to be bought out over the next few years) is the lack of innovation and competition to keep Blackboard and all other LMS vendors honest and continuing to improve their products; since they are number 1 in the market I don’t feel that R&D is going to be one of Blackboard’s top priorities regardless of how much they pride both Blackboard and Angel. Blackboard’s development and engineering teams have not finished providing parity with WebCT’s Vista and CE 6 on their new product; and now they have yet another codebase written with a completely different philosophy of what learning should look like; the challenge is much bigger; I wouldn’t be surprised if this proves to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for BlackAngelCT’s customers. Michael Feldsteein’s article (Three Tests for the ‘New’ Blackboard) and Laura Gekeler (Why HigherEd is rejecting Blackboard) reflect some of my fears and concerns. Blackboard has lost what little good faith and trust it had with higher education; to put it bluntly, Blackboard got too big for its own good and showed that the weaknesses that were in the original Blackboard company have only become worse since the mergers and acquisitions.

Where does this leave us?

We can’t just ditch an LMS, for most schools it has become mission critical, right there with ERP and other business systems. In my own limited experience, the demand for LMS will only increase with the tidal wave of people seeking to retrain in light of the economic crisis. The market is shrinking so that the options are becoming less and less appealing.  Those of us whose schools may have selected Angel or Desire2Learn (occasionally known as Desire2Live) are concerned with having to go back to Blackboard or facing the uncertainty of a possible injunction against D2L that would prevent sales and support of the D2L products. Open Source alternatives such as Sakai or Moodle were not there the last time I looked at them. They also incur costs that are not readily visible.  Sure, you don’t spend money on license like you do for BlackboardAngelCT, D2L and the other commercial vendors but that money is spent in the LMS just the same: programmers, DBAs (shared with other DB-backed projects or not depending on the size of your school) and the faculty and support staff initial retraining and ongoing training on the new features and the education of faculty and students about all the awesome new tools and functionality that you have introduced to your highly customized Learning Management System.

Possible solutions

One bright possibility is to emulate the work of Seneca College in Canada where a team, lead by Santo Nucifora,  has actively worked on enhancing and expanding Blackboard Academic Suite to better suit the needs of their constituents. Stanford’s School of Medicine used Campus Edition 4.1 as a portal to resource built primarily in house. About 7 or 8 years ago, when I visited Stanford for a job interview,  I remember in horror hearing how they would put PDF files of entire medical course manuals for students to print and use throughout the semester. With the benefit of time, I can see that perhaps it is not as crazy an idea as it sounds.  Perhaps the LMS should only provide basic functionality such as user tracking, log in and others and let each school build their learning environments as they see fit with whatever internal and third party content the school needs at any given point in time.  The question is: Can we do something like that with a commercial LMS? Perhaps the best solution is to step away from a monolithic Learning Management System and really start building learning communities rather than courses. Projects such as Merlot (http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm), Conexions (http://cnx.org/) point us in the right direction. Learning any time, any place is more than just a theory, it needs to happen now. We have the technology to do mashups and remixes of content, why not apply that to education? Why not embrace the samba school concept as expressed by Papert and others at the Media Lab? Why not move away from the rigid classroom metaphor into a more flexible ‘Web 2.5’ metaphor where all we need to have to learn is in front of us; where learning happens in community rather than in isolation and, most important to me, where the learning is evaluated based on what people really learned and not how well they crammed for a test.

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Where do schools fit in Cyberspace? Part 1: Open Access and Open Content

by carlos on July 22, 2008

Recent conversations with ConversationAge in Twitter, reviewing presentations done from community colleges and my own fears regarding technology adoption being misrepresented as attempts to take over the traditional roles of a Library or, worst of all, the university itself. In researching for these posts, I’ve discovered that it’s not just universities that are facing radical changes, K-12 schools are also facing the challenges of using new technologies within the framework of the state curriculum standards.

This occasional series will be divided into the following parts:

  1. Open Access and Open Content: Access to Information
  2. Distance Learning versus Face to Face: Geographically dispersed student populations and the number of students in each class
  3. Community as a foundation for learning: The kinds of learning that we are providing for students and their adequacy
  4. How does technology help? The role of technology in the education world
  5. One k20 system undivisible, with creativity and freedom for all: Why we should all work together, from K to graduate school
  6. Conclusion: The reinvented university where are we going and how do we get there

Open Access and Open Content

Information is power and defining who controls that access is going to be key for the future. If a faculty member writes a paper, should she submit it to a peer-reviewed journal published by a for profit publisher? Should the paper be published in an open-access journal (whether peer reviewed or not) or should the faculty publish the content herself?

This becomes even more troublesome when we switch from research publication into the realm of course publishing. Who owns the course? Is it work for hire or the faculty’s property? What if we use material that originated from a proprietary source?

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement seeks to answer some of the above questions by making course materials (usually entire courses) freely available for use and to reuse in other educational materials.

What do we mean when we say Opencourseware?

According to the Opencourseware consortium:

An Open CourseWare web site is a free, publicly accessible, and openly licensed digital publication that offers high quality teaching and learning materials structured around courses.1

It is important to note that it talks about online courses. While an Open CourseWawre course may contain multimedia, video or podcasts, a podcast or a video by themselves is open content but not Open CourseWare.

Another thing that is important to notice in the above definition is that Open CourseWare is openly licensed. This gets around most of the IP issues by making it freely reusable (mostly though some of the Creative Commons licenses.  There still has to be an agreement between the university and the faculty member about releasing content as Open CourseWare, but hopefully, the use of a Creative Commons license will reduce the friction between releasing the content and keeping intellectual property safe.

Who has adopted Open CourseWare?

Initially it is easy to dismiss OCW as an American invention from schools that can afford the investment in opening up their educational resources. However, reviewing the membership of the Open CourseWare Consortium2 shows that OCW has become a world-wide phenomenon.

Just in the United State the following school are members of the OCW Consortium:

Open Content, sure, but Open CourseWare?

We need to be extra careful when using the term Open CourseWare

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Stanford University’s school of education both approved mandates for open access to scholarly publications. While we may argue whether scholarly publishing by itself constitutes Open CourseWare it definitely is a step in the right direction.

Another example of what may or may not be Open Courseware is the SOFIA Project led by the Etudes Consortium out of Foothill College. While they offer courses as units without charging for access, their insistence of using a single Learning Management System (LMS) concerns me. Is this a way to showcase Etudes NG (the LMS developed by Foothill) or as a true test of Open CourseWare

Justifying Open CourseWare

MIT provides a good justification for Open CourseWare in the article: Making the case for Open Courseware, particularly in the section describing the publishing process. There is a justifiable concern about time and monetary costs related to building Open CourseWare; it takes prior planning and a concerted effort by all people involved to produce Open CourseWare but once the model is in place, further costs can be reduced by economies of scale… Once the developers know how it to build the course, follow on courses should take shorter (see Rand’s Trickle Theory for a different take on this)

For whatever reason you decide to implement Open Courseware for your institutions, the benefits are likely to far outweigh the potential problems.

  1. http://ohana.mit.edu/ocwc/display/Meetings/OCW+definition [↩]
  2. http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=80&Itemid=160 [↩]

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Access is a right, not a privilege

by carlos on July 12, 2008

Two hypothetical (but based in actual cases) cases to frame the post:

A user is trying to do online shopping at a big retailer’s web site and the site can’t be used by blind users using screen readers. The experience is so frustrating that he gives up. Later he sues the retailer for lack of compliance with the American with Disabilities Act

Actual case: National federation of the blind, et at vs Target Corporation

A student has a vision impairment. He contacts the Disability Support Services center at her school and requests a large print version of the texts. For whatever reason the textbooks don’t get to the student on time. The student then sues the university because the delay was unexcusable and it made her learning process more difficult than it needed to be

Actual Case: Complaint to the Office of Civil Rights against San Jose State University

Whether you work in the education field or in industry, accessibility is becoming more and more of a concern for content developers and managers who have to justify the additional expense of making content accessible from the beginning or to retrofit existing content to ensure accessibility.

I have to constantly keep reminding myself that, whenever we work with technology, we can’t afford to take anything for granted; specially not accessibility. Although I’ve spent a long time working in academic support and training, I have not had much experience in working directly with students with disabilities. Talking to people who work regularly with Distabled Student Services has taught me quite a bit in terms of the technologies and processes needed to create material that is accessible to every student.

The video blow from Edutopia.org (http://www.edutopia.org/assistive-technology-enabling-dreams-video) provides a wider view of what it like to be a student with disabilities and what we can do to support their full participation in school and everyday life.

There are quite a few things that we as trainers, instructional designers, content developers and academic support staff can do to facilitate access to learning for all students. Some of the most relevant to me are:

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it provides a broader definition of what accessibility is and how we should address it.

On a lighter note: Everything I need to know about accessibility I learned from watching Star Wars presentation at South by Southwest 2008 provides another view of accessibility on web design.

Let’s try to keep in mind those things when developing new projects… your end users will thank you for it.

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A Sample Blogging Workflow

by carlos on July 7, 2008

In his post A Sample Blogging Workflow (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/a-sample-blogging-workflow) Chris Brogan presents a systematic approach to writing blog posts.

I particularly enjoy the way that Chris breaks the process of writing a blog post into goals, tasks and the tools used to do it. There are tools that I find essential that are not considered in the post such as Windows Live Writer. But overall the post is clear, concise and with plenty of easy to follow action items for the reader

Thanks Chris

Posted using ShareThis

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Towards a definition of community

by carlos on July 6, 2008

We always talk about building community for online courses or building a community around a web site our pet project assigned to us by management. But what do we really mean when we talk about building communities? This post is my attempt at defining what a community is. It is not complete by any stretch of the imagination… comments and suggestions for improvement are always welcome :)

Defining what a community is

Cloud of the author's friends in Facebook

Cloud of Facebook Friends

According to Webster’s Online Dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary) a community is:

  • b: the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly : the area itself <the problems of a large community>
  • c: an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location
  • d: a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons>
  • e: a group linked by a common policy
  • f: a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests <the international community>
  • g: a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community>

At the simplest level a community is a group of 2 or more people who share some common interest. There is little or no discipline and no rules. It is unlikely that this kind of community will survive long.

The next step in our effort do define what a community is is to take our group of people and further refine our definition by adding some elements that mentioned in other blogs and definitions of community here are some of the sources I use when refining the definition:

The definition so far:

A community is a diverse group people, who share some common interest and develop a meaningful relationship over time. The group meets in a specific place and work under specific rules; the group should, over time, develop a style and culture that distinguishes it from other similar groups.

If this definition is not enough, look at what Mohamed Amine Chatti wrote in his blog: http://mohamedaminechatti.blogspot.com/2006/09/what-is-community.html

If all these definitions of community, online or off, were not enough we continually have to remind ourselves that there are as many definitions of communities as there are people involved in all the communities that you can think of. As Lee Lefever states in his blog:

The problem with the word “community” is that it’s a word that describes a reality that cannot be shared by everyone. Community means something different to nearly every person and changes based on context.”

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000949.html

When we move our communities online we have to keep reminding ourselves that what we are calling communities are more about building relationships than it is about real communities.

Through the internet, real relationships in real business communities are enhanced and extended by allowing people to communicate whether or not they are in the same place at the same time. Through online communities, businesses and customers are able to enhance their real relationships, not replace them, and those relationships, once extended beyond the time and space of a physical, “real” business relationship, can extend the reach, community awareness, and knowledge of a business community – just like that first cave painting did for the cave person.

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/39482

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Learning out loud and sharing what we learn

by carlos on July 3, 2008

Clark Quinn in his blog Learnlets talked about Learning out loud (http://blog.learnlets.com/wp/?p=344) and how we all, as people involved in learning, should continually reflect upon our learning and share those reflections and the learning involved therein with other interested parties.

If learning is to be shared then it also should be promoted and it should be done in a medium that facilitates dissemination of that knowledge.   This has always been the place where I have a problem: If the reflections are the results of our own learning, should we invest the time, energy and resources in the public aspect of these reflections? How should we go ahead about doing it?

With a nod to Marshall Kirkpatrick, who first articulates these thoughts when he blogs about being a consultant, I’ve taken some of his ideas and worked them into what I think are more appropriate thoughts for the higher education market.

  1. Learn how to do cool new things, blog (well) about them and always be ready to collaborate with other interested colleagues. It’s amazing to me how much time and work collaboration and community can save
  2. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people, the old adage "if you have a question you are likely not the only one" is more true now than ever.  In my experience, education has become a specialized field where we are encased in one area… It has never hurt to  know as much as possible in your chosen field
  3. Make sure you deliver clear value to people who read your reflections.  It is one thing to own your reflections but if they are going to be shared they need to make sense to more than just you
  4. Share as far and as wide as possible (within reason). Conferences, user groups, social media, wherever you think you can make a difference, just do it

I’ve learned that the I learn best when I get to explain it to others. Social Media and the Internet make it even easier to do so

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