Invitation to WCET-led ePortfolio Software Research Project

http://www.edutools.info/ePortfolio/notice.pdf

Over at Edutools, where I spend at least half my life, we have been quietly trying out a new model for researching ed tech software and helping people get up to speed on different technology issues. Last year we ran the model for the first time while looking at various Learning Object Repository technologies. We’ve just run the same project a second time, the results of which will be released publicly later this year at the WCET Conference in New Orleans.

In essense, the new model we are trying out is to create a small group of similar type partners (so far we have dealt mostly with state-wide systems and some larger institutions) to jointly investigate a particular type of educational technology using the Edutools comparative analysis model. The challenge is obviously coming up with a common set of systems to look at, as well as a common framework for comparing them given differences amongst the partners. Luckily, each time we’ve run it there has been more accord than discord, and in fact the partners truly seem to appreciate each other’s interests in packages they had not previously considered and on features they hadn’t seen as key.

The other part of the project is to bring the partners together to share their current experiences trying to implement these systems; typically they are all at an early stage (hence the value in participating in the project) but have all done some planning work, and find it valuable to learn how others are tackling the issues. This year we also brought in people from the previous year’s project to speak on what they had achieved in the past year, a hugely valueable set of lessons. Finally we bring in a number of guest experts to speak on topics of the groups choosing – this year it was Ed Walker bringing us up to speed on standards adoption and plans for the future, and Clifford Lynch on whether multiple repository needs could be met through a single system. The irony for me is that while the comparative ‘reviews’ are ostensibly the raison d’etre for the project, the partners are finding as much, if not more, value in the interaction amongst themselves, and with the guest experts. It’s become as much a process of getting more familiar with the domain and its issues as it is about chosing software.

Which brings us to the above item – this fall we (WCET and Edutools) are partnering with the Electronic
Portfolio Action Committee to run this type of engagement, but this time looking at ePortfolio systems and issues. It is great to be doing this in partnership with EPAC as they bring consderable expertise and experience to the issue of ePortfolios. If this sounds of interest, please contact Russ Poulin at WCET at the numbers provided for more information. – SWL

“Monoliths,” APIs and Extensability – A presentation on the past and future directions of CMS

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/CMS_overview.ppt

I was very fortunate recently to deliver the above talk to a CMS task Force at UBC on the overall lay of the CMS land. It seems relevant to share it here, especially in light of a recent post by James Farmer on integrating open source pieces with WebCT, and the great follow up by Michael Feldstein.

I think Michael’s read is mostly accurate. As I try to lay out in the presentation, CMS have evolved as a series of “wrappers” around a set of applications, and there were good reasons for this innovation (it was an innovation when it began 10 years ago) in terms of handling scale and providing some stable service across all or many departments in a post-secondary institution within a limited budget.

But this model, which does tend towards monolithism, is now 10 years old; in part because of rapidly maturing alternative models (service oriented architectures and distributed applications development environments in general), in part because of pressure from customers to allow more pedagogically-driven choices in their tools, and in part because of challenges from Open Source and elsewhere, all of the CMS, be they commercial or open source, are moving, some slowly, some more quickly, towards increased extensability and interoperation with other tools. This is in my mind an undeniable trend, and the issue for organizations is not if this will happen, but instead a question of how best to obtain the core services and acceptable level or “service” while increasing the amount of flexbility and choice for instructors and students, and at the same time not increasing the cost (and hopefully decreasing it if you’re really adept).

I don’t think the commercial CMS companies are going away, at least not anytime soon. There are still many organizations (often small ones, but not always) for whom more sophisticated ‘elearning architecture’ approaches, “best-of-breed,” or the choices (and demands) facilitated by open source are not (yet, maybe ever?) realistic choices. There is value in providing a set of tools (however limited you might feel these tools to be) in an integrated environment that can with relative ease tie into other parts of your infrastructure and for which you need to hire application administrators, not developers, to run. But even those customers want more freedom to make choices, and the CMS companies know this and are trying to mediate it without cutting off their own nose. But it’s also clear that they are under fire, and that many institutions will have the wherewithal to adopt or create what Michael terms a “Learning Management Operating System” into which they can insert, or on which they can build, different application choices and approaches. As I read it, the impetus behind OKI, and to the extent to which it embodies openly agreed upon APIs, Sakai, is a step in that direction. Michael’s predicition of a timeline (about 5 years) also seems about right; it will take a while for the implications of this approach to flow through and for the various systems needed to implement it to mature to the point where each implementation is not a large software development initiative of its own. But it is coming, and it will change the landscape of these systems considerably. – SWL

Executing Learning Objects, Resurrecting Sharing and Reuse

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/LO_gunshots/
lo_gunshots.html

I was fortunate to instigate a workshop last week as part of the BC Educational Technology Users Group spring workshops in Merritt, B.C. The workshop was on “Practical Tips for Reusability and Interoperability.” In keeping with themes I laid out earlier on this weblog, I began the session with a formal execution of the term “learning object” which you can see at the link above (feel free to reuse this – maybe if it’s played enough times the term will finally die off). (more…)
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U of T’s CMS Selection Consultation Process

http://www.utoronto.ca/cat/services/lms_rfp.html

Early this year the University of Toronto issued an RFI to select an organization-wide CMS. This site is part of the public documentation of the process. The results of the faculty and student surveys are of particular interest to me – in some places there seem to be a slight disconnect (say between the facultys’ and students’ perception of the need for quiz and test support) while in others I feel rather vindicated by the results (in particular, the overwhelmingly lackluster demand for PDA and mobile device access to the CMS.)

I have so far not been able to track down anything public on the results of their RFI process, but this news item posted today on the Sakai site which states “Our intended long-range goal is to use Sakai as the educational platform for its more than 65,000 students and 6,000 faculty members. A pilot group of units (including FIS) have committed themselves to adopting it immediately and demonstrating its long-term viability in the U of T context” as well as the nomination of Jutta Treviranus to the Sakai Board of Directors seems like a strong indication of what the results might be. Expect more of these types of competitions to be happening in the next year as people are faced with license renewals and the need for large scale change management processes to facilitate product “upgrades.”- SWL

Moodle, Open Source, and the “Mission Critical” Bugaboo

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/
discuss.php?d=22640&parent=107125

One of the favourite weapons in the “Fear Uncertainty and Doubt” arsenal is the claim that such-and-such open source app is maybe nice, but not quite “enterprise ready,” not able to support “mission critical” computing. And certainly, in the realm of Course Management Systems, it’s one you will hear levied at all of the open source contenders. more…
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SUNY Learning Network’s Next-Generation Technology Strategy Recommendations

http://sln.suny.edu/pdfs/taskforcefinalreport.pdf

Over on e-Literate, Michael Feldstein shares this link as well as some back story to the above document, a report which lays out the goals, principles, and key functional requirements for a next-generation learning enviornment for SUNY Learning Network. It’s well worth a look and the principles it holds up are laudable. I was especially pleased of the use they made for the Edutools CMS comparative framework. They seem to have taken and used it much as it is intended, as a factual and non-evaluative description of current CMS functionality (and not as the prescriptive or evaluative document some folks have on occassion misunderstood it as). – SWL

Open Knowledge Initiative Delivers XOSID Specification

http://www.imsglobal.org/news.html

The specifications geeks in the crowd will want to note (and probably have already seen) this joint announcement by IMS and OKI that they have released an XML binding or representation of OKI’s Open Service Interface Definitions (OSID), previously only officially available as Java APIs. Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has written an article which as usual does an excellent job detailing some of the implications of this work. – SWL

LAMS integrations

While it’s already been picked up in various places, it seems useful to note some recent developments with the LAMS system as I am so far not aware of it getting any traction in Canada.

In addition to the recent announcement of some initial integration work between Moodle and LAMS (this walkthrough is a good place to start to understand how the two systems can work together), Oxford University also announced as part of the Tools Integration Project that LAMS had been integrated with the open source Boddington VLE. While Boddington may not have the installed base of Moodle, both of these bode well for the continued uptake of LAMS and for continued practical demonstrations of what using a learning design tool in conjunction with a CMS/VLE as delivery environment might look like.

Anyone know of North American institutions experimenting with LAMS or something like it? Drop me a line, I would love to know (I promise I will sort commenting out on this blog in the not too distant future). – SWL

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming

Hi, remember me? 😉 Finally able to come up for air and hopefully start posting again. The last 6 weeks have been absolutely nutty for me – in addition to running and completing an RFP for a learning object repository system here in B.C., I also completed a project to review 6 new LORs through Edutools. On top of that were 8 presentations ranging from ‘state of the CMS union’ talks to ‘practical tips on reusability and interoperability’ (more on all of these in the coming days) with nary a bit of reuse in the presentations themselves!

So without further adieu or explanations, on with the show… – SWL

FLOSSE Posse – Is the “Learning Objects” King Naked?

http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=
learning-objects-is-the-king-naked

<rant> Over on on the Flosse Posse weblog, Teemu Leinonen has posted a bit of a rant on the term “learning object.” I’m glad someone stepped up and said it. I agree, let’s kill off the word “learning object” and while we are at it, let’s throw “learning object repository” on the funeral pyre too. Both of these terms have led us thoroughly astray. “Learning Object” for their implication of some magical plug-and-play learnability that we’re discovering is mostly folly, and “learning object repositories” for the mistaken emphasis of the word “repository” on the container at the sake of the users and re-users and re-use, ultimately what I thought the motivation behind the whole idea was.

But my small fear is that in throwing out these terms, we’ll also throw out many of the problems they were supposed to be trying to solve – namely enabling learning content to be shared and found through means that were otherwise unavailable (e.g. searching on pedagogically useful terms that were either not directly part of the resources themselves, or else for resources that weren’t served well by conventional web search engines), and having formats for learning content that allowed it to be reused by as many systems as possible without major alterations (there are many more problems they were supposed to address, I know, but let’s leave it at that for now). I absolutely agree that the terms have gotten in the way, and have led us to propose solutions which seem to have forgotten some of the initial problems they were supposed to be solving. Actually, in the case of both “learning objects” and “LORs,” part of the issue for higher ed has been IMO in higher ed’s appropriation of the terms; we’ve assumed the terminology, but we’ve tried to change the underlying problems they were originally intended to address to suit the needs and culture of higher ed, and we haven’t done enough critical examination of the baggage underpinning the terms and original ideas to understand why this isn’t working).

So, firing squad, guillotine, maybe lethal injection as we’re now so civilized; I don’t care, but let’s move on from these terms and the 5 years (at least) of false starts that are associated with them. We likely couldn’t be moving on without having made these mistakes, but once made, repeating them over and over doesn’t suddenly make them right. </rant> – SWL