LORNet Conference – Pre-Conference Workshops

Note to self: The start of November is a bad time to launch a new system if you also want to attend conferences 😉

So while I have no time to be away right now, I am lucky to be spending this week in downtown Vancouver with a good portion of the academic world’s best minds in the field of learning object networks research.

I am not going to even try blogging the conference. My boat anchor of a laptop’s wireless doesn’t work (2 weeks and counting until brand-spanking new laptop arrives!) and I’m a lousy typist to begin with. Instead, here’s a brain dump of questions the first few sessions triggered for me or quotes that roused me enough to write them down:

– if the metadata field isn’t mandatory, don’t even ask for it
– what is the equivalent of a ‘playlist’ for learning objects? Is it the re-aggregated form (lesson, course) or something else? (and how do we get the information? how do we build the last.fm of learning objects)
– handles/unique IDs *are* in fact an important issue (and URLs aren’t the solution for them, but neither is any system that requires manual work to create the handle).
– need to find out how people (mainly instructors at this point) make evaluative judgements on the potential usefulness of a learning resource? what do they base it on? how long do they actually take in making these judgements?
– identity management is *the* major nut to crack for the next tsunami of innovation to break (web 3.doh?!)

Sorry if these don’t make any sense to anyone but me (do they make sense to me?) Wish you were here 😉 – SWL

Connexions ‘Rhaptos’ Software Released

http://rhaptos.org/

The folks at Connexions have released the software that powers that site as open source code, so presumably you can now run your own instance if you wanted. Connexions is neat in that it shows a working example of learning content as XML being re-aggregated and re-skinned. For me the challenge with its particular implementation is in how the content is created – the Word-to-CXML convertor has got to be a great improvement over asking faculty to hand-code XML (where but at a Science and Engineering school could you even begin to get away with this), but it still strikes me as a barrier to the approach. That said, 115 courses/2000+ modules is nothing to sneer at, so clearly some users are willing to use the current set of tools on offer through Connexions. It should be noted too that the paradigm for reusable content has always been more reusers than original authors, and in this regard, reusing content in other contexts once created in Connexions seems reasonably straightforward.

Tools like eXe offer some glimmer of what an easier to use tool to author learning content that was also XML might look like, but I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. Some will no doubt rejoin about the virtues of RSS in this regard; again, I remain interested but unconvinced. Not of the virtues of XML or of the traction of RSS for syndication of content, but unconvinced that it represents the solution of how to easily author learning content in a format that is then easily findable, re-aggregatable or re-presentable (which I take to be the problem at hand, but maybe I’ve misunderstood). Structured blogging? Again, maybe.

I know that in my own project, our first attempt to get an approach working that made use of an XML database as a backend failed. Our second attempt, which went into pilot last week, uses The Learning Edge. It doesn’t deal with XML-native content at all, mostly because no one has any for us to deal with. It focuses on dealing with what people do have – all sorts of HTML, Word docs, powerpoints, PDFs, Flash movies. It tries to assist with re-use (the ‘re-aggregating and re-presenting’ above) by integrating a WYSIWYG authoring environment directly with the repository that allows people to drag and drop existing content into new collections. We will see how it works. I am definitely not holding it up as the way to do this either; in general I remain unconvinced (and exhausted) by the entire enterprise, and mostly just want to go off and play my bass. – SWL

Any B.C. or Alberta-based users of LAMS? Atutor?

If you are currently using or planning to use LAMS or Atutor and are located in B.C. or Alberta, please let me know. I am currently scouting out integration opportunities for our repository software, and these two are potential ones that have come up, but I need to know if its of any value to my current stakeholders (no, I’m not planning a takeover of Alberta; we have colleagues there who are also implementing the same repository software). – SWL

Correction – NO New Round of B.C. Online Program Development Funding Announced

http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2005-2009/
2005AE0065-000834.htm

This is mostly of interest to any B.C. readers (and even they will probably hear about through the normal channels) but one of my employers, BCcampus, has just announced another round of funding through the Online Program Development Fund.

Well, just goes to show you you should never trust news releases. I’ve just been informed that this news release dated September 19 is actually referring to the last round of funding that was first announced in late 2004, that it took a year for the press release to come out, and that no new round has been announced. Boy, do I feel stupid!! I think they call this ‘premature blogulation’ – SWL

ECAR Students and IT Study: CMS Chapter

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ers0506/
rs/ers05065.pdf

It would be easy to make too much of this chapter from a recent ECAR report on Students and Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control, and Learning, as it seems to paint an overall positive picture of student experiences with CMS. In the highlights it states that of students who report having used a CMS in one of their courses, 75% reported a positive or very positive experience.

A deeper look reveals, however, that the respondents were reflecting overwhemingly on an experience of using a CMS in a blended or mostly f2f situation, and that much of what was viewed as positive was focused on CMS’ ability to facilitate somewhat administrative tasks, like accessing syllabi, course notes and grades. – SWL

More on the new behemoth – Timing, Open Source and Interoperability

So I’ve had a bit of time to digest the <a href="http://www.blackboard.com/webct/"big announcement yesterday and process what I heard on the analyst call, as well as see some of the feedback from around the edtech blogosphere. Here’s some more thoughts:

Timing and Rationale
First off, let’s put aside any euphemisms about this being a “merger” of equals. This was an acquisition by the largest player in the market (Blackboard, with $90 million in licenses last year) of its next biggest rival (WebCT with approximately $30 million last year in licenses). The offered price allows WebCT’s venture backers to recoup their investment (approx $120 million) with a decent return, far better than they were going to see anytime soon from the 5% operating margin that WebCT was turning at the time of the acquisition. Blackboard has been turning a profit plus is cash rich after it’s IPO, and with that and its line of credit, was in position to take over WebCT.

And the timing does make sense, in retrospect, in relation to WebCT’s recent release of CE6. Very few customers of their existing CE4 product have had time yet to do the upgrade. Sales for Vista have I think not been as good as hoped. So WebCT CE4 customers, expect some vigorous sales calls from Blackboard folks in your near future. BB hopes to convert many of these customers to its platform, and for those it doesn’t, it can still profit from sales of CE6 licenses without having to invest much by way of development in the near future. It will be surprising if there is anything much more than a few bug fix releases of WebCT CE6 before the new behemoth platform emerges.

Open Source
When challenged with the threat of “open source” both Blackboard (and WebCT in the past) have made incredibly vaporous statements in the past about how they are “open systems” if not open source, in an attempt to stave off interest from their customers in open source options. No doubt they will continue to do so, and Bryan Alexander’s right, we are likely to see more FUD coming from that camp. But on the analyst call yesterday they did come off as relatively nonchalant about the open source threat, and unfortunately not all of that is posturing.

Undoubtably, there are existing and future customers who will choose to go with the likes of Moodle and Atutor. Maybe if some of the bigger schools would weigh the value of ease of use and pedagogical flexibility more heavily than IT concerns we’d see even more adopt these two and for them to get the respect they deserve (I know, I know; look I’m not levying this claim, I’m just reporting what the common perception is, rightly or wrongly).

But for now at least, the promise that has been held out for those ‘bigger’ institutions has been lately from Sakai, the ‘enterprise’ open source CMS. And in my eyes this is the real tragedy here. In theory this presents the perfect opportunity for Sakai to shine and come into its own, to convert a ton of both BB and WebCT customers. Certainly, David Wiley seems to lament it not having showed up on a recent RFP in his state. Well true enough, I can understand David’s frustration at it not even showing up in the competition. But in reality it would have had to be an RFP so heavily weighted to business concerns at the expense of current functionality for Sakai to have stood a chance. You may hate the vision of online learning that CMS represent, but if you are trying to compare apples to apples, I just can’t see how the current release of Sakai measures up to these loathed commercial competitors.

But wait, what’s that you say – “but it’s open source, it will grow and and bloom as more people adopt and develop it.” Well, maybe. Hopefully. Last I heard, the soft money didn’t have too much longer to go and there look to be only a couple of instances actually in production. And maybe someone from inside that project can comment to the rest of us how many developers who are not funded through that soft money, and who are outside the “core schools,” are actually contributing code back into the core project right now. ‘Open Source’ at its best means more than just ‘source code availability.’ I will leave it at that lest I spark a religious debate. I do truly wish that project well, as monoculture in elearning is not a good thing. But I speak from personal experience in saying that adopting software solely or primarily because it is open source, and not weighing heavily enough its fit to functional requirements and one’s own capabilities for rectifying that lack of fit, is a fatal mistake in software acquisition and development..

Interoperability and Open ‘Standards’

This is the piece that really gets my goat. IMS has been around since 1997. The Content Packaging, QTI and Enterprise specs (the ones I take to be of primary concern when it comes to CMS portability) are now all at least 5 years old, if not more. And yet all of us, yes US, the adopters, implementers and purchasers of CMS, have given the commercial CMS a pass on these. (SCORM is a different story here, but unfortunately it’s never really applied that well for the higher ed sector, nor for the CMS that service it).

It’s not totally our fault – yes, the specs were a moving target for a long time. Yes, compliance testing likely means a load of liability insurance that no one can afford. Yes, there are good reasons to accept that the specs need to be able to be extended to accommodate things they couldn’t do in their original incarnations.

But we’ve accepted all of these excuses and what do we have? Instead of content interoperability and portability between systems, we basically have vendor lock in, the very thing the freaking specs were supposed to help avoid! And that just got a world worse too with this consolidation. David Davies has it exactly right when he says that “BigCo vendors were cautious about embracing interoperability too vigourously.” But who the heck thought they were ever going to adopt these voluntarily? Say what you like about the military and SCORM, but there are a whole lot of LMS that spent money to conform to that specification, and we know they do because there is a test you can run to confirm this, and there are procurement folks who insist they prove it before they are awarded a contract.

</end of rant>

Wow, I must have been bottling a lot of stuff up over the last few months of not posting to the blog. At least that’s the excuse I’ll give to anyone I pissed off with this write up! Anyways, that’s my limited view of things. Good luck! – SWL

More on WebCT aquisition by Blackboard

On the analysts call the first piece of work that was identified to bring the two products closer together was unifying an API for the Blackboard and WebCT.

So, what does that mean for things like the IMS Tools Interoperability Profile? Well, seems to me like the new unified API becomes a de facto ‘standard’ that will be even harder to displace for any of the more open approaches to integrating 3rd party tools into CMS. – SWL

HOLY $#@! – Blackboard and WebCT to merge

http://investor.blackboard.com/
phoenix.zhtml?c=177018&p=irol-newsArticle
&ID=767025&highlight=

Well, there goes any claim to being an insider! Just found out about this a few minutes ago and had no idea it was in the works. I believe this is true as I am sitting on the analysts conference call right now. You kind of knew something like this had to happen, but still it’s profoundly shocking now that it has, especially as WebCT is just pushing WebCT Campus Edition 6 out the door in the last few months, which meant it was no longer supporting 2 code bases. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it was referred to as an ‘acquisition’ a number of times, which seems really like what it is. – SWL

RLG-NARA Audit Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories

http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20769

Via David Mattison comes this interesting link to an effort to establish a set of guidelines for determining whether a digital repository can be certified as a trusted location for digital collections. Note that ‘repositories’ are being used here very much in a library-centric way, and that these may or may not apply to the same degree to learning object repositories, but some interesting things to learn from and expectations to live up to (you mean you don’t want the whole collection to magically disappear in 3 years time? Damn, wish someone had told me 😉 – SWL

P.S. Don’t get to thinking I’m blogging again – am still underwater with work and on a self-imposed blogging hunger strike (not sure what I’m protesting yet, I’ll think of something!) but these last two got me to post somehow.