Author: sleslie

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

Educause Quarterly Article: Changing Course Management Systems

http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm05/eqm05210.asp

This is one of those articles that ranks in the “could have been important but ends up being too anecdotal” category. The authors are right in pointing to course conversion as both a potential cost issue and huge concern in switching CMS. All one has to do is ask a collection of system administrators or educational technologists who support almost any of the major CMS and they will nod knowingly, or start frothing at the mouth (depending on whether they’ve actually had to do it en masse or not).

But this is one area where higher ed suffers greatly from diverging from the corporate training world – we have no equivalent to an ADL to provide certification of these products on IMS Content Packaging (the larger scoped SCORM never having taken off within higher ed, for good reason.) So we are left to rely on the self-reporting of the CMS companies about their compliance with the Content Packaging and QTI schemes.

For a while the story that the churn of these specifications was what caused the lack of consistent implementations seemed plausible, but increasingly, less and less so. And fair or not, it’s no small part of the reason why on the LOR front, people are increasingly resistant to the notion of trusting their content to the big CMS vendors, as they have yet to exhibit content exports from their systems that will work well in their competitors’ systems.

The irony of this article is that D2L, one of the 2 companies mentioned here, has in fact done a lot of work to be able to convert content from their competitors’ systems as part of their business growth strategy. So if this is the case in trying to convert to them, one can only wonder what it might look like going betwen some of the others. IMS CP got started as a spec shortly after the formation of IMS in 1997, and was an early goal for good reason. From the customers’ perspective, it represented a major risk mitigation strategy to adopting one of these large systems (at a time when arguably the entire domain space was still in a very nascent state). 8 years later, one has got to ask, has it worked? Has the risk been mitigated? Ask your CMS admins and content developers, I’m sure they will tell you what they think. – SWL

Educause Article – A Capabilities Approach for the Next-Generation CMS

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0533.asp

I’m sure lots of those disenchanted with the current crop of CMS will enjoy reading this piece by Van Weigel. Weigel suugests another approach to envisioning what the next-generation CMS might look like; what’s missing for me (and to be fair, this is just a chapter length piece, so it’s unfair to expect this as well) is the ‘how.’ If CMS don’t end up looking like this vision (or some of the other suggested alternatives) it will not be the first time ‘better’ technology visions haven’t won out over market forces. So how, given that the the latest available Educause Core Data survey states that 90% of institutions have adopted CMS (of which 75% are commercial ones), is the change to be brought about. Bit by bit, I suppose. – SWL