My apologies to Michael Feldstein - I seem to be posting his content verbatim - primarily beacuse it says so much that is necesssary to be said, he says it well, and it is what I would like to have said! In this entry we meet the dilemma facing today's Faculty - the networked sand is shifting below their feet and authority and control are in question; can they cope with the rising tide of change? Michael says it well, and I'm happy to be the messenger here...
There have been a few interesting responses to the “Sisyphus Taught Videography” post. For example, in a comment on that post, MIDizen X observes that students can be the producers of the media:
We have a wealth of student knowledge and talent available to us, all we have to do is find a way to utilize them. For instance, regard what Ithaca College has done in this respect: all the material they’ve linked on their accomplishments page was created using student workers (graphics designer, programmer, still/videographer) and one, count ‘em, ONE instructional designer.
There are two issues here. The first is content production and the second is teaching of literacy. The fact that students can be able producers of content indicates (no surprise to anyone) that they are, in fact, often more highly literate in new media than the faculty. We can use that.
But to switch from Greek mythology to eighth grade philosophy, we have a chicken and egg problem here. Don’t faculty members have to have some idea of what they are evaluating, of what they are trying to accomplish with these student productions? And doesn’t that, in turn, require faculty to feel a need to learn this stuff? Alex Reid, whose blog post inspired my original musing, hits the nail on the head:
The real challenge here is an epistemological one. The existing model assumes that knowledge is relatively fixed. Once you get your PhD, you’re pretty much good for life. Yes, you have to stay current in your field, but the changes are incremental and vertical within an ever-narrowing degree of specialization. With the infoscape, we are looking at exponetial and horizontal change in a proliferating network of associations. Managing that kind of information flow requires different skills.
This is a tough one. The trick is to understand how that authority operates in a different infoscape. Once upon a time, academics had to accept the appearance of libraries on campus. It wasn’t easy, and now everything is happening much faster. Essentially I see the necessary change this way. We used to think of disciplinary education in terms of mastery: you rise to become a master in your field; you have control over your context. Now we must think about education as providing an expert perspective, a unique set of methods from which new knowledge can be produced.
This is the crux of it: Defining knowledge and authority. Once you crack this nut, faculty can begin to contemplate the possibility that textual literacy need not be privileged over other forms of media literacy, and that the fundamental locus of academic authority is moving under their feet. (And by the way, if they get this, they will also begin to get wikipedia.)
The best way I know of to experience this new world in a positive way is to blog. To experience a trackback-induced blorgasm is to understand a new kind of authority. To watch blogrolls shift and technorati scores change is to experience the nuances of that authority. And to engage in a cross-blog conversation is to participate in that structure.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Educational Use of Social Software
An article on social software in the Academic Commons provides an overview of a number of social software tools and suggestions about how to use them. The author, Joe Ugoretz , is also interested in exploring what may happen if we fail to embrace social software...
UK Survey Shows Moodle on the Rise
IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005.
• In the four years from 2001 to 2005 the percentage of universities and colleges without a VLE declined from 19% to 5%.
• While the average number of VLEs in use at a university of college remained nearly constant—1.64 to 1.77 per institution, statistically insignificant—it appears colleges are tending to implement fewer VLE systems.
• The use of proprietary VLEs—those with fee-for use licenses—declined from 93% to 57%. The largest decline was IBM’s Lotus products. It would have been WebCT if it had not acquired by Blackboard Inc. and combined with the increase in Blackboard’s market share.
• The software products most rapidly gaining market share are Moodle, Bodington, and Microsoft’s SharePoint.*
• The use of open source systems increased from zero to 11% with 8% of that increase from 2003 to 2005.
At the same time the number of locally-developed VLEs in use increased from 7% to 30%.
* The survey would not reflect the increased use of Moodle in Further Education. At the April
2006 OSS Watch Conference preliminary data suggested that 66% of further education
colleges were using Moodle.
• In the four years from 2001 to 2005 the percentage of universities and colleges without a VLE declined from 19% to 5%.
• While the average number of VLEs in use at a university of college remained nearly constant—1.64 to 1.77 per institution, statistically insignificant—it appears colleges are tending to implement fewer VLE systems.
• The use of proprietary VLEs—those with fee-for use licenses—declined from 93% to 57%. The largest decline was IBM’s Lotus products. It would have been WebCT if it had not acquired by Blackboard Inc. and combined with the increase in Blackboard’s market share.
• The software products most rapidly gaining market share are Moodle, Bodington, and Microsoft’s SharePoint.*
• The use of open source systems increased from zero to 11% with 8% of that increase from 2003 to 2005.
At the same time the number of locally-developed VLEs in use increased from 7% to 30%.
* The survey would not reflect the increased use of Moodle in Further Education. At the April
2006 OSS Watch Conference preliminary data suggested that 66% of further education
colleges were using Moodle.
Making the Case for Open Source
Michael Feldstein has an excellent entry on stating the case for open source:
Campus Technology has a strong backgrounder on Open Source that could be useful for educating your stakeholders. It covers the basics--and a few not-so-basics--in very clear, simple terms. In the latter case, I’d like to highlight just three of a handful of fine points that the article brings forward. First, one critical strategy to consider is “aggregating support costs across institutions so that ongoing costs of running the software can be shared.” In other words, the more organizations can collaborate on support, the better Open Source generally looks in terms of total cost of ownership. The economy of scale reduces the significance of any support cost differentials that may exist. Second, the future value of Open Source on campus is really going to be unlocked via loose coupling:
A typical workflow within a college eLearning environment today might look something like this: A faculty member creates a Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint document as the basis for a student assignment. The faculty member uploads the document into the Blackboard Content Repository and makes it available to her students through the Blackboard Course Management System. Students create their own Microsoft Word documents and submit them to the faculty member, still within the Blackboard environment. The student also saves a copy of the assignment and submits it to his LiveText ePortfolio system. All of these interactions may be accessed from a university portal application, or they may each require a separate entry and authentication scheme.
Now consider an alternate workflow. The faculty member uses OpenOffice to author the assignment and saves it to what appears to be a network drive on the faculty’s desktop. In reality, the network drive is the faculty’s space in a Fedora-driven content repository – providing functionality such as version control and collaborative access. The Fedora system also serves as a universal document repository from which content is drawn into the Sakai course management system. As the student completes the assignment and uploads it into Sakai, the student’s work is automatically added to the Fedora repository, where it can be referenced from OSP (the ePortfolio system integrated within Sakai), or through collaboration tools used in conjunction with other students.
Campus Technology has a strong backgrounder on Open Source that could be useful for educating your stakeholders. It covers the basics--and a few not-so-basics--in very clear, simple terms. In the latter case, I’d like to highlight just three of a handful of fine points that the article brings forward. First, one critical strategy to consider is “aggregating support costs across institutions so that ongoing costs of running the software can be shared.” In other words, the more organizations can collaborate on support, the better Open Source generally looks in terms of total cost of ownership. The economy of scale reduces the significance of any support cost differentials that may exist. Second, the future value of Open Source on campus is really going to be unlocked via loose coupling:
A typical workflow within a college eLearning environment today might look something like this: A faculty member creates a Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint document as the basis for a student assignment. The faculty member uploads the document into the Blackboard Content Repository and makes it available to her students through the Blackboard Course Management System. Students create their own Microsoft Word documents and submit them to the faculty member, still within the Blackboard environment. The student also saves a copy of the assignment and submits it to his LiveText ePortfolio system. All of these interactions may be accessed from a university portal application, or they may each require a separate entry and authentication scheme.
Now consider an alternate workflow. The faculty member uses OpenOffice to author the assignment and saves it to what appears to be a network drive on the faculty’s desktop. In reality, the network drive is the faculty’s space in a Fedora-driven content repository – providing functionality such as version control and collaborative access. The Fedora system also serves as a universal document repository from which content is drawn into the Sakai course management system. As the student completes the assignment and uploads it into Sakai, the student’s work is automatically added to the Fedora repository, where it can be referenced from OSP (the ePortfolio system integrated within Sakai), or through collaboration tools used in conjunction with other students.
LMS Operating costs
Jim Farmer has posted a slide stack (in PDF format) on the economics of interoperability. There’s a lot of good general stuff here about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and interoperability issues from a business perspective, but 90%+ can also be read to apply directly to the LMOS concept.
Here are some highlights:
To begin with, it’s important to understand how small the resource pool is to solve instructional technology problems. Colleges and universities, on average, spend well over 60% of their IT budgets on administration and only 20% on instructional technology. And we know that, on average, $6 out of every $10 (or 60%) of any IT budget goes to maintenance. That means the total average IT budget for instructional technology devoted to something other than just keeping the lights on is 40% of 20%, or 8% of the total IT budget.
One reason that maintenance eats up so much is the cost of integration. Campuses increasingly want thier Course Management System (CMS) to integrate with their SIS system (to auto-populate class rosters and auto-report grades to the registrar), library systems (to integrate courses with e-reserves and other resources), a portal, an eportfolio, a learning object repository, and so on. (Note that these integrations are more than just single sign-on; there are other types of data being passed.) Traditionally, these integrations are wired up one at a time. Want to integrate your CMS with your eportfolio and your SIS? You need to write one connector for each of those two integration points. But if you want to integrate your eportfolio directly with your SIS directly, you have to write a third connector. The number of integration jobs increases almost exponentially with the number of application-to-application connections you need.
(By the way, an added consequence that Jim doesn’t mention in his stack is that vendors also are forced to spend increasingly large percentages of their revenues on writing connectors. That’s money that could have gone into improving the product as a learning and teaching tool.)
Now, consider that the average age of CMS’s at institutions is under four years, and that the migration rate to new CMS’s is about 12% annually (which, if that rate remains constant, means a migration roughly every six years). Migrations are expensive, and they take time. A heavily-utilized system may take as long as three years to go from initial migration planning to putting the last courses up in the new system. That means many institutions are undergoing some phase of CMS migration maybe 50% of the time. It’s more or less a permanent drain out of that 8% of the budget available for non-maintenance investment in instructional technology. With all of that, there’s little or no budget left to invest in fostering innovation.
What would the solution to these problems look like? Well, one possible solution looks a lot like an LMOS--lots of tools plugged into a central service hub (...broker...bus...whatever) via standard interfaces, with communication between tools choreographed via the hub. To begin with, it should lower maintenance costs by dramatically simplifying the integration code. Furthermore, being able to swap out functionality of the learning environment on a tool-by-tool basis should help break that 4-year migration cycle. As Jim says, “better service, lower costs--now.”
Here are some highlights:
To begin with, it’s important to understand how small the resource pool is to solve instructional technology problems. Colleges and universities, on average, spend well over 60% of their IT budgets on administration and only 20% on instructional technology. And we know that, on average, $6 out of every $10 (or 60%) of any IT budget goes to maintenance. That means the total average IT budget for instructional technology devoted to something other than just keeping the lights on is 40% of 20%, or 8% of the total IT budget.
One reason that maintenance eats up so much is the cost of integration. Campuses increasingly want thier Course Management System (CMS) to integrate with their SIS system (to auto-populate class rosters and auto-report grades to the registrar), library systems (to integrate courses with e-reserves and other resources), a portal, an eportfolio, a learning object repository, and so on. (Note that these integrations are more than just single sign-on; there are other types of data being passed.) Traditionally, these integrations are wired up one at a time. Want to integrate your CMS with your eportfolio and your SIS? You need to write one connector for each of those two integration points. But if you want to integrate your eportfolio directly with your SIS directly, you have to write a third connector. The number of integration jobs increases almost exponentially with the number of application-to-application connections you need.
(By the way, an added consequence that Jim doesn’t mention in his stack is that vendors also are forced to spend increasingly large percentages of their revenues on writing connectors. That’s money that could have gone into improving the product as a learning and teaching tool.)
Now, consider that the average age of CMS’s at institutions is under four years, and that the migration rate to new CMS’s is about 12% annually (which, if that rate remains constant, means a migration roughly every six years). Migrations are expensive, and they take time. A heavily-utilized system may take as long as three years to go from initial migration planning to putting the last courses up in the new system. That means many institutions are undergoing some phase of CMS migration maybe 50% of the time. It’s more or less a permanent drain out of that 8% of the budget available for non-maintenance investment in instructional technology. With all of that, there’s little or no budget left to invest in fostering innovation.
What would the solution to these problems look like? Well, one possible solution looks a lot like an LMOS--lots of tools plugged into a central service hub (...broker...bus...whatever) via standard interfaces, with communication between tools choreographed via the hub. To begin with, it should lower maintenance costs by dramatically simplifying the integration code. Furthermore, being able to swap out functionality of the learning environment on a tool-by-tool basis should help break that 4-year migration cycle. As Jim says, “better service, lower costs--now.”
LAMS open source authoring tool
LAMS is a revolutionary new open source tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides teachers with a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities can include a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration. Click here for an interactive demonstration of LAMS.
Blackboard Patents the LMS
Blackboard patents the LMS?! ... The US Patent and Trademark Office has apparently granted Blackboard a patent for...well...pretty much anything remotely related to learning management systems. As I read it, Blackboard basically owns the patent on any sort of groupware at all that is used for teaching purposes. This could have very serious consequences for both proprietary and Open Source competitors-- another nail in the coffin for open learning.
Educational institutions should take note - Blackboard is obviously out to control the marketplace, and control the automated learning system.
Educational institutions should take note - Blackboard is obviously out to control the marketplace, and control the automated learning system.
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