Most of you will know one of my long term projects has been to help share online learning resources across BC and beyond. One of the main stumbling blocks to effective sharing has been the diverse (divisive?) environments in which the material are produced/housed/assembled (at last count there are at least 5 major flavours of LMS in our 26 institutions, as well as sundry other ones and non-LMS approaches as well).
I’ve always held that a top-down “standards” approach isn’t the answer; not only is my project not big enough to compell that kind of change, I am thoroughly sceptical of any of the current standards-based approaches to actually work across all of these LMS. Plus for any “solution” to be adopted, it needs to reflect local realities and priorities at institutions, and be seen to solve local problems before it (or at least, as it) solves the ones of sharing outside the institution.
Add to this the fact that I am loathe to highlight only solutions that would simply further entrench LMS-based solutions or that don’t take into account the learning we’ve all been doing about the role of openness, or the new approaches which social software and other loosely-coupled technologies can offer, and we faced a quandry. How to frame a meeting that brought up the issues, highlighted the common pain points, and ALSO presented both LMS-oriented and other approaches to learning content/learning environments?
Thanks to a suggestion from Michelle Lamberson, we decided that framing the day around the conceit of “Learning Content Strategies” was the perfect way to bring all of this together (seems obvious now, but we struggled for a while for the right frame.)
After a very brief intro from me, we kicked off the day with an hour long discussion of common problems and challenges around learning content. I facilitated this, getting the discussion going with a set of questions that people answered using iClickers. (As an aside, while I recognize lots of potential problems with clickers, I was frankly blown away by how well the iClicker technology itself worked. Truly simple to use and functioned flawlessly.) It felt to me like a good start to highlighting some of the common problems people are facing and laid the groundwork for the rest of the day.
The next step was to showcase work of a few institutions around the province who, in my experience, have developed different approaches to developing content indepedant of their LMS environments. Katy Chan from UVic, Enid McCauley from Thompson Rivers and Rob Peregoodoff from Vancouver Island University all graciously shared with us some insight into their content development processes and the factors that shaped their choices. The important thing that came out of this for me is that none of these approaches is the “right” one, just the “right” one for their context – they ranged from standalone HTML development, to industrial XML production, to Macromedia Contribute, and each had its strengths but also possibly its complications. It’s a tradeoff, you see, like any choice. But they certainly gave their peers in the audience lots to think about.
After lunch I trotted out my dog and pony show, highlighting some of our offerings from BCcampus as well as launching the new Free leaning site. I still live in hope that some of these offerings will resonate with our system partners (a boy can dream) and already there seems to be some renewed interest, which is heartening.
The afternoon was given over to a completely different set of approaches to the problem. Like I said, while the vast majority of our institutions use LMS as their primary online learning platform, that is not the future, or at least, not the future I hope for, so we wanted to expose people to some approaches already happening in the province that are outside the LMS, ones that used loosely-coupled approaches or “openness” as an enabler.
First up was Brian Lamb and Novak Rogic from UBC, and I’m pretty sure their demos of moving content to and fro using WordPress, Mediawiki, their fabulous “JSON includes” and “Mediawiki embeds” techniques left some jaws dropped on the floor. A hard act to follow indeed, but Grant Potter from UNBC did a great job, showing off their own work with blogs and wikis for shared and distributed content development.
Finally, since all the presentations to date had been from a somewhat “institutional” perspective, I thought it important to get an instructor up there to show what a single person can do with the current technologies, and who better to do so than Richard Smith from SFU. Worried though he claimed to be about following @brlamb and co. on stage, he needn’t have – his session was a blast, showing off many web 2.0 tools that he uses with his students. I think some of the biggest value from that session was challenging the notions of the handhel instructor, of the assumption that media must have high production values to be useful, and that this tech is just for “distance” learners. Richard basically made the case that he is able to offer more than 100% seats in his class by always having remote and archived materials for the students. I’m pretty sure this turned more than a few heads.
In the end, my nicely laid plans for orderly rountable discussions were thrown out the window, and I tried as best I could to facilitate a whole room discussion on the fly. I think it went pretty well; we tore through many of the real challenges people face, from single sign-on to copyright, offering some new ways to think about these and identifying what I hope are some things we can keep working on together as a province.
In all honesty, this meeting went as well, even better, than I had hoped. My goal was not to propose a single solution (as I do not believe there is just one solution) but to bring the problems to light, to get people to acknowledge they exist, and to give them a chance to see some different ways to deal with them, and talk amongst themselves. My experience with this group and with the ed tech professionals in BC in general is, give them a chance to talk and share and don’t be surprised at the number of collaborations and shared solutions that emerge. I have great hope that this is just the start of the conversation and of renewed efforts. – SWL
As you know, Scott, I thoroughly enjoyed spending the day talking content with my EdTech colleagues from around the province. Really happy to see this conversation evolve within our province. Also happy to see BCcampus play a leading/prodding role in bringing all of us together.
As for the clickers, I agree with you. I thought your use of them highlights how effective they can be in getting the feel for the room. I’ve been to many institutional meetings that often spend a lot of time doing the traditional roundtable – a useful act that often gives me specific things to bring up with colleagues when we break for coffee. But the clickers gave me a much broader picture of what was happening around the province and where my institution sat in comparison with them.
Scott,
Didn’t you folks implement SOL*R (The Learning Edge/Equella) in order to ensure that content wasn’t locked into a particular LMS?
Is that digital repository providing the access and sharing of “content” that you had anticipated?
Howard Davis
Howard, SOL*R/The Learning Edge is definitely part of our Province-wide solution, but it can only solve so many problems. If the stuff that is getting put into it literally doesn’t work in all of the systems we have in the province, then its availability in SOL*R is not overly useful. That issue was a large motivator behind the session, but as I tried to explain above, it can be the soole motivator for solving that issue; the reality is our project is not big enough to change whole modes of production in institutions. Hence the attempt to find local motivations for “clean content” (or simply open content) approaches. And truthfully, letting our system partners know once again what is possible and available in SOL*R was another motivator, but again, not how we wanted to sell this; it needs to work within the larger ecosystem of 26 institutions that already exist and have wildly differing needs.
Scott,
I hear you, but in encouraging a million SN tools to blossom, (yea!) how, from an administrative point of view, do we connect the diverse open sources to authenticate registered students, archive the course, etc.,?
I’m not suggesting that this concern is an argument not to use SN tools, and in fact my only good reason for using an LMS now is its integration with our SIS, but there are always administrative institutional issues that demand to be satisfied.
Actually, I’m much more interested in the rich learning environments we’re all now creating, but the admin concerns don’t come up very often, it seems, in the open learning discussions.
(RjDJ is amazing!)
Scott,
I was wondering how connected you are with the K-12 distance education community (I understand the MOE calls it distributed learning) in British Columbia? I ask because given that you are on the ground out there and have an interest in this area, I’d be interested to hear some of your thoughts about what is happening at the K-12 level out your way.
MKB
Michael, in BC K-12 is run under a totally separate Ministry than the Post-Secondary system. We occassionally interact with each other, typically around specific projects, but they are often two solitudes. I have been involved with both BC Open Schools and BC Virtual Schools (there are solitudes even within K-12!) on some learning content management initiatives they have launched, but typically their usage paradigms are quite different from post-secondary, the biggest differences being the standardization of the curriculum, the professionalization of teaching, and the relative homogeneity of platforms for their relatively small distance efforts.
Scott,
Thanks for the response, particularly as I was coming to this post kind of late. I’ve been chatting with one of the MOE folks in the K-12 realm and have been getting his perspective, which was actually one of the reasons I was prompted to comment on this entry was to get a different point of view from outside of that part of the MOE.
I was interested in your comment “standardization of the curriculum, the professionalization of teaching, and the relative homogeneity of platforms for their relatively small distance efforts.” I understand the first and last items (i.e., curriculum and platform ones), but what did you mean by professionalization of teaching?
Michael, as far as I know, all K-12 teachers have had to do a Teaching degree on top of their Bachelors, and in this they are exposed to a variety of pedagogical concerns and other practices of the “profession” of teaching. Contrast this with higher ed, which typically requires no formal training as a teacher other than the indoctrination of how the person has themselves been istructed in higher ed. Which is one reason why we see such dreadfully instructivist practices replicated over and over in higher ed. I might be wrong, but it strikes me that in K-12 we’ve always had the possibility of creating shift in the practices by introducing it (amongst other places) in Teacher’s College. But I could be wrong.
Okay, I understand now. I though you might be referring to a professionalization of distance education teachers (as opposed to just teachers in general). Makes perfect sense now. Thanks…
Keep it up man.,