My A.T. Still University Experience : educational technology

Open Educational Resources and Open Learning Management Systems

SteveFoerster — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:10:00 GMT

“Alternatively, let this be a call to arms to develop [open educational resources] broad enough and deep enough to make situations like this moot in the future.” — CWE

So for the last few days I've been talking about the present and possible future of Learning Management Systems (LMS), those online classroom systems with which eLearners quickly become very familiar. And before that I touched on the reasons why open educational resources (OER) are useful, not just because people don't have to pay to use them, but because they can be adapted by anyone for any purpose without payment or permission.

The need now is to find better ways to fit all the pieces together. My friend Wayne Mackintosh, the founder of WikiEducator, remarked recently, “Education is an act of sharing knowledge freely. So where are all the free education materials that we can adapt, modify and reuse without restriction? Why has humanity taken so long in achieving a free knowledge base for us to share for the common good of education and society? Why are the majority of our global population under served when it comes to education?”

Fortunately this is happening. For some time now there have been efforts to build free educational resources, but now there is effort not just in developing content, but also in making it easier for fellow educators to use. I think one of the best ways to facilitate this, and it's something we're not doing that well yet, would be to put together packages of free educational content that fit seamlessly into Learning Managment Systems. I'm especially referring to Moodle, as it's the dominant open source LMS.

This isn't an original idea. Pearson, the academic publishing giant, bought an LMS called eCollege, and their strategy for marketing it seems to include making it very easy to drop in pieces of Pearson's vast supply of content. Indeed, many textbook publishers have related content that they make available to instructors who can then drop it effortlessly right into their online courses. In this way they make both their own textbooks and their LMS more attractive, so that the odds improve that either or both of those resources will be adopted.

Those of us producing open educational resources should get better that this. For example, MIT gets a lot of attention for its impressive OpenCourseWare project. It's possible to access materials from nearly two thousand courses on their site. Wow! But it's one thing to make lots of content available, and another to make it easy for others to adapt to specific use. They do tend to make their courses available in a format that's easy to import into an LMS. But just imagine if everyone out there producing free content did the same thing, so that educators who were willing to try Moodle, or to try OERs, would know that each would work well with the other. By packaging that content in such a way, its value would be that much greater, and the appeal of the overall system would be multiplied.

I do realize that there are some who are doing this, like MIT. Sites like MoodleShare offer course archives that can be used as is. But we need more of this — a lot more! The better that content people and delivery people cooperate, the sooner we can fulfill the dream of a complete set of free curricula that can be used the world over.

Next up, is Harvard Extension School really Harvard?

Image courtesy of geishaboy500

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Will Google Erase Blackboard?

SteveFoerster — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:55:00 GMT

“A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” — Lars Rasmussen, Lead Developer on Google Wave

Yesterday I gave a reasonably factual, if admittedly opinionated, rundown of different Learning Management Systems (LMS). I've used most of them in one capacity or another, and Blackboard the biggest, with the problems that suggests, a few other commercial competitors are out there, the biggest left probably being Pearson eCollege, and there are a few open source alternatives, the most important of which is Moodle, which also happens to be my favorite.

Usually it's not a great idea to make predictions. If you do, then when you turn out to be spectacularly wrong there's evidence out there of what a terrible prognosticator you are. But this case there's something that I've been predicting for at least a year now, and that is that sooner or later, Google will be entering the fray of the LMS marketplace.

The reason I think they will is that they've made a very strong push to become integrated within as many schools IT infrastructures as possible. They do this by offering schools the ability to connect students accounts seamlessly with Google's email and applications services, Gmail and Google Docs. Especially when it comes to email, this is an enormous burden that they're lifting off of the backs of schools' IT departments. By doing this, Google accomplishes a number of things. They get students hooked on Google's email, one they're likely to keep using even after they graduate. They earn considerable goodwill from school IT departments. And they conveniently position themselves as already a friendly and reliable part of the schools IT plan, so that when they do release their LMS, schools are much more likely to feel confident about switching to it.

Interestingly, their latest offering, Google Wave, is already being called a possible LMS by some, such as Jeff Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education. This new service includes a variety of different ways to communicate, to store information, and to control access that might make it useful as an online classroom. But it doesn't include the sort of student records infrastructure that would be necessary for most schools to consider it as a replacement for mature systems like Moodle or Blackboard.

So time will tell whether Google really gets into the LMS market. Even if they don't, however, Google Wave has a plugin architecture that supports third party expansion of its capabilities. Perhaps if Google doesn't move fast enough to build an LMS, someone else will use their own service to do it for them. Stranger things have happened!

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Should Universities Consider Erasing Blackboard?

SteveFoerster — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

“Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.” — Brent Simpson

Recently Ashford University announced that it's ditching Blackboard, the most commonly used system for delivering online courses. Called a Learning Management System, or LMS, these sorts of systems are the ones you as an online student log into and through which you do you class discussion and similar activities.

Blackboard has dominated for quite a while, especially considering that the industry isn't all that old. A few years ago they shored up their dominance by buying their largest competitor, WebCT. Earlier this year they announced they were repeating this move by buying yet another competitor, called Angel Learning.

Their rapid growth hasn't been effortless. Along the way their technical support has earned the scorn of many Blackboard administrators. And their system doesn't come cheaply. Schools that use the more comprehensive systems that Blackboard offers will easily pay over one hundred thousand dollars per year in licensing fees. Wow!

Even with their healthy appetite to gobble up their competitors, however, they are far from the only LMS available. Ashford is moving to a system that was called eCollege, which has since has been bought up by academic publishing behemoth Pearson. There have also been a number of open source systems developed, which means systems that are free for anyone to use, copy, modify, and adapt to meet their own specific need. The two most often cited open source alternatives are Sakai, which was developed by a consortium of universities, and (by far the more often used) Moodle, an independent project which was founded by Martin Dougiamas as part of his doctoral research.

I'm familiar with most of these different systems. I was a Blackboard administrator for nearly three years, and while it has a useful array of features, I can testify as to the difficulty one can have with their technical support. Before that I used to train new online students how to use eCollege, and thought it pretty well designed, especially the expanding/collapsing discussion board feature — I can see why Ashford liked it, and I hope Pearson doesn't mess it up. As a student at A.T. Still University, I've used WebCT, although by the time I got to try it it had already been melding with Blackboard for some time.

And then there's Moodle. This one is my favorite for many reasons. Obviously, I appreciate that it's open source, and there aren't ridiculous fees involved just to get one's hands on it. I like the design of its courses, where the main page of a course can be laid out like a clickable syllabus, and students never have to root around to figure out what they're supposed to be doing in any given week. I like that it's easy to develop and teach courses in it, which I've done as an adjunct faculty member for LCOOCC. And I especially like that there's a whole ecology of third party support and consulting providers that have grown up around it.

You see, a lot of times one of the objections raised about open source software is that there's no central company that offers support for it. I like to think that in Moodle's case this is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Whereas with Blackboard one is stuck with them whether they bother to respond to pleas for support or not, with Moodle, if your provider is unresponsive you can replace them with another. If for no other reason, this should give university IT departments cause to take a look at ditching someone who charges six figures but often can't be troubled to pick up the phone.

Next up, part two, where I speculate whether everything I just said in this post might be swept away by a wave from a certain company whose name rhymes with MacDougall.

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Are Electronic Textbooks Worth It?

SteveFoerster — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:31:00 GMT

“Today convenience is the success factor of just about every type of product and service that is showing steady growth.” — Charles G. Mortimer

While the concept isn't new, I've been reading a lot of buzz lately about electronic textbooks. I keep hearing how they're becoming more and more popular with online programs, and even being used with classroom-based learning. Interestingly, in all my years as a student, I have never been assigned an electronic textbook. I finished my Bachelor's online, then did a Master's almost entirely online — in educational technology no less, and now am doing a doctoral program online, but no e-textbook has been part of my experience.

The thing is that I'm not sure I'm sorry about that. There are good and bad aspects to e-textbooks. Not everything about them is great. One drawback is that they can be difficult to read for those of us who would rather go through long stretches of text on actual paper rather than by clicking through screen after screen of text. I suppose I might just be an old fuddy-duddy here, though, as I understand some people are just fine reading forever on a screen. Put another way, my dad used to print out email to read it, and my kids won't print anything, so maybe I'm just in between them.

Besides, I realize that there are a lot of conveniences that go along with electronic textbooks. It's possible to search for a word or phrase and instantly find it anywhere in the book. It doesn't take up any space on your shelf. Some of the newer ones can grade their own quizzes to help you study. And assuming you're already taking your laptop or other e-book reader with you, there's no more weight to carry. Try doing any of that with books make from paper!

But what ought to be the best part of electronic textbooks should be the price. Many times a digital version costs less than the same book in printed form. But even then, are we as students paying too much? Textbooks are obscenely overpriced to begin with, and getting a small discount doesn't make up for that. But sometimes we don't even get that. One school recently announced the option for students to buy their textbooks as digital copies rather than printed ones, and the incentive was that for the digital versions there was no shipping charge. That's it? What about the cost savings from not having to print a big bulky book? Fellow student, you and I do not see the savings.

What's even more interesting is that it might not hurt publishers' bottom lines even if they gave the electronic version of their textbooks away for free. A recent bit in the Chronicle of Higher Education talked about research that shows that even when publishers make the electronic textbooks freely available, sales of the print versions of the same book stay strong.

So how about it publishers? If you're getting your thirty pieces of silver, can't you cut us some kind of a break?

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Another Way to Deliver Distance Learning

SteveFoerster — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:11:00 GMT

“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.” — Kurt Lewin

Many times over on the forum, we're asked to compare the different experiences of what it's like to take courses online from different schools. But usually there aren't a whole lot of differences. Most schools deliver courses using something called a "learning management system", or LMS, which basically means a web site that keeps track of who is enrolled in which courses, and provides a standard set of features to each course, things like a place to put documents like the course syllabus and other handouts, a way to link to external resources like audio files and videos, and a place to have bulletin board style class discussion where only those in the class can participate or see.

Most schools that offer distance learning these days do so through an LMS like this. A.T. Still University does, as did all of the other schools that I've attended online. There are a very few exceptions, schools that offer independent study or correspondence courses, but they typically are institutions that started that way before the rise of the popular Internet, and are simply still doing things the old way.

That's why I thought it was interesting to read recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education that Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey is adding something new. TESC serves a lot of American military personnel who are trying to earn a degree even while deployed overseas, and they found that their students weren't always able to keep up with their coursework not because of a lack of time, but because they did not have reliable Internet connectivity. TESC has responded to this by developing special courses that are sent to students on a flash drive, those little storage devices like the one shown here. The flash drive contains all the course materials, and also additional tools like media players, and even a free office suite, a set of tools called OpenOffice which is almost exactly like Microsoft Office except for being free.

The idea is that the student, armed solely with this flash drive, has everything he or she needs to learn what they need to know to pass the all-important final exam. The student doens't even need to have his or her own computer, since everything necessary is on the flash drive, the student can take the drive from one computer to the next, doing work whenever an opportunity arises.

At the end of the Chronicle article, I thought it was interesting that some commentators thought that this is a step backwards. They said that a course on a flash drive is no different then an old fashioned pre-Internet correspondence course. And to some extent that's true, but I don't see that as a bad thing. The lesson of the last few decades is that higher education has finally realized that different students have different levels of access when it comes to technology and time, and that as the education experts, we ought to be able to develop curricula that can help student learn what they need to know in many different circumstances, not just an old fashioned classroom. Now, some may ask, what about academic quality? But these students must pass the same final exam that students preparing in other ways must pass in order to get credit. The bottom line is whether or not the student can demonstrate mastery of the material. If so, then credit is given, no matter how the student learned that material. To me, that makes this high tech correspondence course a giant leap in the right direction, not the wrong one.

As a final thought, TESC was initially inspired to develop these courses because they wanted to find a better system for military personnel. As an educator with a special interest in the developing world, however, when I saw what they had done my first thought was that it would be very well suited for those parts of the world where people have access to computers and the Internet, but only intermittently, like through telecenters and cybercafes. American institutions aren't always very good at thinking internationally, especially when it comes to the developing world, but I hope TESC and schools like it are considering this gigantic opportunity.

Next up, meet Dr. Roxanne Shanté.

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