Author: sleslie

Educause Study on Faculty Use of Course Management Systems

There doesn’t seem to be anything that surprising in this study, “Faculty Use of Course Management Systems” by Glenda Morgan, the learning technology analyst at the Office of Learning and Information Technology of the University of Wisconsin System (at least not in the key findings document available for free on the web – you have to pony up between $750 and $1500 USD for the full study).

Faculty claim that CMS adoption is driven by the need to address a pedagogical problem, yet when questioned further reveal that it really seems driven by the need to manage the administrative problems of large classes… Faculty use grows once they start using it, but those who don’t say they find them difficult to use. Still it’s good to get some numbers behind one’s own anecdotal observations.  

One point of interest – the study reports that 16% of faculty surveyed limited their use of CMSes because of problems their students reported. Which reminds me of this story, about a raving criminology student…

– via [Online Learning Update]

The Virtues of Virtual – ACM interview with Abbe Mowshowitz

From Ubiquity, a journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, an interview with Abbe Mowshowitz, the person generally credited with originating the term ‘virtual organization.’ Anyone in the workplace during the past 15 years will recognize the forces he is describing. More freightening, yet IMHO no less accurate , is the future he describes, one of ‘virtual feudalism’ where 

“Being short of money, central governments will continue to shift responsibility for social programs to local government, without regard to the availability of funds. The US government will reduce grants to the states, without at the same time reducing the states’ responsibilities for health and welfare. The states in turn will have revenue shortages, and shift the responsibilities to the counties, cities and local communities. The local communities will be stuck with the burdens but they won’t have the funds or the taxing authority to handle the problems. This shift is just one implication of the growing shortage of government revenues accompanying fundamental changes in the political economy. Resources are being placed out of reach and government is playing a shell game. In the near term, probably nobody will pick up the slack. That means reduced funding for education, for health insurance or for programs like Medicaid and Medicare. More people in the United States will fall outside the scope of these programs and there will be a higher proportion of people without educational opportunities, without medical insurance, and without pension plans. As in earlier periods of history, people will turn to private enterprise to ensure their welfare and security, and the authority of government will diminish.“

Sound familiar? 

See also excerpts from his book, Virtual Organization: Toward a Theory of Societal Transformation Stimulated by Information Technology at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book/a_mowshowitz_2.html. – SWL

Interview with Wisconsin’s Chair of the Task Force on Course Management Systems

This was published about a month ago but I just found it today. An interview with Kathy Pletcher who chaired the task force for the University of Wisconsin’s choice of a new course management system. The outcome of this was of much interest to many in the field as it was a fairly well document and rigorous process that ended up selecting a relative newcomer, Desire2Learn, as their final choice. Lots of good tidbits on their process:

“The evaluation scheme was 10% for general requirements, 65% functional and technical requirements, and 25% cost. On a scale of 10,000 points Desire2Learn received 9,700 points.“

97% !! We are seeing similar results in other RFP processes we have been privy too through edutools. This is not an endorsement, just a statement that people are starting to pay attention to this smallish company from Guelph, Ontario. – SWL 

WebCT releases Vista 2.0

“May 7, 2003 – WebCT today introduced WebCT Vista 2.0, the latest release of e-learning’s premier academic enterprise system, with new features that simplify course development for faculty of all experience levels and accelerate campus and system-wide e-learning deployment. WebCT Vista 2.0 also includes an expanded set of Web services interfaces…”

This may have already done the rounds as the news release came out May 7th, but I’ve been offline since May 1 so thought I would post it anyways. I am interested to get my hands on this new release to see if they in fact have made any major changes since the initial release. Since the 1.X release only went through 1.1 and 1.2 in less than a year, my sense is that the version leap to 2.x was driven more by the marketing department. – SWL 

– via [Edutools News: Course Management Systems]

Making instructional content more accessible

“EASI, (Equal Access to Software and Information), is offering a new series, cosponsored by WCET, of synchronous 60-90-minute online events on how to make online instructional content more accessible for learners with disabilities. The series is free to WCET members.”

A post from my colleagues at WCET – if you are in the States there is a fair chance you are a WCET member, and I recommend the courses offered by the EASI folks. – SWL

– via [Edutools News: Course Management Systems]

Zope and IMS Content Packages

Quote: “ContentPackage provides ZOPE with the ability to import IMS Content Packages and turn them into Zope objects (see http://www.imsglobal.org).”

Well this bodes well for the future. Has anyone heard from the eduzope folks lately – for a while it seemed like it was going to be vapourware, and then I checked back in a month or so ago and saw so release stuff, but in general it seems to have been quiet. Must check back in – SWL

– via [Serious Instructional Technology]

Building the Infrastructure for Sustainable Educational Transformation (what is OKI and OCW)

George Lorenzo at Educational Pathways has a nice write up on OKI and OCW – in fact that’s how I found the piece, via a reference at the end of Rob Reynold’s piece on open source CMSes to ‘OKI and OCW Defined.’

But what I want to know is why OKI have never posted an equally as straightforward explanation on the actual OKI site which is to my mind a model of unclarity. I recognize that there are some subtle concepts at work, but the number of times I’ve had to explain the difference between OKI as an architecture and the various systems (CHEF, Stellar, LON-CAPA, etc) that will be reference implementations, to people who should know better…sheesh! – SWL