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© Michael Feldstein for e-Literate, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments

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This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

Vance Fried may change the conversation about the costs of higher education. Critics of higher education have repeatedly pointed out the costs of higher education—often referring to tuition and fees—have increased faster than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Higher education has claimed education is “labor intensive” and students and their parents pay only a portion of the cost of instruction. All are true.

Fried, Professor of Management at Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, developed a “pro forma” business plan for a residential undergraduate college. The results yield an annual full cost of instruction of $7,376—60% less than current baccalaureate and 50% less than masters institutions.

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This is a new Sakai.

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© Michael Feldstein for e-Literate, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments

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This is a guest post by Andrew G. Booth and Brian P. Clark for On the Horizon series on distributed learning. Professor Andrew G. Booth, a National Teaching Fellow, is Professor of Online Learning in the Faculty of Biological Sciences in the University of Leeds where he has deployed the Bodington System to support online distance teaching, primarily of Bioinformatics, in partnership with the University of Manchester. Prior to this appointment, he was Director of the Flexible Learning Development Unit, where he headed the team that developed the Bodington System and was one of its original authors. Following a period as a comedy writer for radio and television, and then 10 years as a lecturer in physical chemistry at the University of Sunderland, Dr Brian P. Clark is now a developer/tutor for the online MSc Bioinformatics at the University of Leeds teaching modules in the bioinformatics of protein structure and molecular modeling.

Our position in the learning environment debate can be summarised by the following statement. As well as students being able to create their custom learning environments, we believe that it is important that teachers, too, are able to create their custom teaching environments.

The VLE has been a useful and effective device in university education and it is not yet time to abandon it. One viewpoint that we do share with many, though, is that the monolithic VLE doesn’t offer the flexibility required to support education in today’s fast-moving technical arena. We are currently developing a Service-Oriented Virtual Learning Environment (SOVLE) that is composed of a set of pluggable resources that have Web application front ends and Web service back ends. The latter can provide programmatic access to services using client-owned technology.

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This is a guest post by Glen Moriarty, PsyD, for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Glen, who is CEO of NIXTY, has served in several executive and academic positions. He co-founded and led Scholar360 for several years. He is also a licensed psychologist and educator who has taught at the doctoral level. He has published and presented on eLearning, psychology, and technology, and is a member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the American Psychological Association. Glen lives in Norfolk, Virginia with his wife, Nicole, and their twins, Colin and Madeleine.

“Don’t fight the Internet.” Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google

“Fight the Internet.” CEO, Major LMS Company

Learning management systems (LMS) have solved many problems by providing a way for people to learn in an online context. The suite of tools that are commonly associated with the LMS (SCORM, file-sharing, test managers, gradebooks, collaboration tools etc.) has brought real value to institutions, educators and students. Despite this progress, however, there still remain several problems that obstruct the LMS from reaching its full potential in a distributed learning landscape. These difficulties largely arise from a hesitancy to develop learning management systems that leverage the Web 2.0 strengths of the Internet.

The above quote attributed to a CEO of a Major LMS company is not a real quote. It is just used as a bit of hyperbole. Major LMS/CMS companies, however, have taken several steps that suggest this is their tacit approach to dealing with Web 2.0. Clearly, this tendency to resist the Web is unsustainable (Christensen, Johnson, Horn, 1997). Academics, businesses, and programmers need to collaborate and find ways to harness the Web to facilitate access to open educational resources.

My paper will explore the opportunities in moving to a Web 2.0 global learning environment. My goals are to highlight how OpenSocial, Open ID, and OpenCourseWare can be leveraged to amplify learning for people and institutions around the globe. NIXTY, a forthcoming Web 2.0 platform, is utilized to illustrate how different components can be implemented to facilitate open education.

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© Glen Moriarty for e-Literate, 2008. | Permalink | 16 comments

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This is a guest post by Nathan Garrett for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Nathan is two weeks from being an PhD Candidate at Claremont Graduate University, where he has been going to school since 2003. He pays bills by working as an Institutional Researcher at Woodbury University. Nathan researches various aspects of educational technology, and currently maintains the Folio wiki/portfolio add-in for the Elgg social networking system. He lives with his wife Corrie, son Silas, daughter Rose and a pet cat in Burbank, CA. Blog: http://conversation.cgu.edu/garrettn/weblog

Is this our modern course management system?

Sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, and punching buttons in a Pavlovian manner works for educational technology nerds like myself. It’s an efficient way to transmit information, but it doesn’t provide the rich education that liberal arts colleges promise. A college diploma is more than a set of facts; it is a maturing of the entire person through a conversation with other people, theories, and disciplines.

Studio education is used in many design disciplines as a way to bring students into a discipline. Making learning public, these disciplines give us a model for the next generation of educational technology. Rather than worrying about peer learning “leading” to cheating, why don’t we think about its power to engage and inspire?

Social software like blogs and wikis work. Claremont Graduate University has been using Elgg, a social software system, to support courses for the last two years.

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This is a guest post by Dr. Ian Boston for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Dr Boston holds a first degree in Engineering and a PhD in parallel computing. During the early 1990’s he parallelized grand challenge applications in science and engineering. After a frenetic period of multiple startups in Silicon Fen, as a founder, angel investor and board member he returned to the University of Cambridge to become CTO at CARET. The University of Cambridge joined the Sakai Project and over recent years has contributed greatly to its development. Ian was honored to be awarded one of the first Sakai Fellowships and speaks regularly at Opensource meetings in the US, Europe and Australia.

The online world has realized that connections and communications are capable of leveraging greater efficiencies and delivery than application silos. This movement started with the scaling requirements driven by the growth curves of the large internet startups like Amazon and Google. Strangely web technology has not changed much for 10 years but we have all started to realise that the web is a simple place where bytes on the wire is all that we are communicating.

Distributed web applications became possible in the late 1990’s, informed by the numerous parallel distributed applications in science and engineering. Although there are challenges in employing wide scale parallelism and distributed architectures, the discipline leads to loose coupling. The loose coupling allows development teams to communicate with one another through standards and interfaces, and allows the skills mix within those teams to compliment each other rather than being in conflict. The absolute key to success with this style of application and development is sophistication through simplicity; as there is plenty of complexity available to overwhelm all stakeholders.

These dreams are not just dreams, over the past 8 months we, at Cambridge, have been practicing this approach and seen the benefits.

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This is a guest post by Jutta Treviranus for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Jutta established and directs the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) at the University of Toronto, a centre of expertise on the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology. Jutta has led a large number of national and international multi-partner research networks (including The Inclusive Learning Exchange (TILE), the Canadian Network for Inclusive Cultural Exchange, the Network for Inclusive Distance Education, CulturAll, Stretch, Fluid and the Barrierfree project), that have led to a range of broadly implemented technical innovations that support inclusion. She has helped to develop pivotal accessibility legislation, standards and specifications internationally (including W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, IMS Global Learning Consortium AccessForAll and ISO 24751). She is also a member of a number of key advisory panels and task forces (e.g., Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, Pan-Canadian E-learning Strategy, JTC1 Special Working Group on Accessibility). She is the principal investigator on the Fluid Project and on the Board of Directors of Sakai. Jutta holds faculty appointments in the Faculty of Information Studies, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute, at the University of Toronto.

Poor or inconsistent design and development of the UI is widely recognized as a systemic problem within academic community or open source projects and the major impediment to more widespread adoption. This problem is also a barrier to innovation – to improving pedagogy, research and administration activities within academic software. There is widespread agreement that the greatest need for innovation in this field is in the area of human interaction and support for more effective academic workflow. Cumbersome, problematic UI development processes and UI frameworks within community source software projects make it very difficult to contribute innovations.

For a number of reasons UI development in these projects is commonly left to programmers, with little input from skilled designers. It is frequently tackled at the end of the development process. Components of the UI are often developed redundantly, inconsistent across applications and inadequately tested and refined. Architectural frameworks for the UI are also inconsistent, redundant and poorly thought out.

Another challenge faced by community and open source software projects in academia is that they must address the needs and preferences of a very diverse group of users and constituents. These differences arise from institutional preferences (including branding); conventions of an academic discipline (e.g., math vs. English); cultural or linguistic differences; differences related to age, role or perspective; different teaching and learning approaches; and differences related to disability and environmental constraints. Although it is acknowledged that a consistent UI across tools and functions would greatly improve the user experience (especially when using an ever-increasing set of tools), it is very difficult if not impossible to agree upon a single UI design.

The Fluid Project attempts to address these challenges by providing a UI architecture that supports UI transformation at runtime for individual needs and preferences or during configuration for institutional preferences. This transformation is made possible by a rich, living library of reusable UI components that have been tested for usability and accessibility. The architecture and UI components work across platforms and applications. Thus each user can have a consistent, personally-optimized user experience across tools. In addition Fluid provides a toolkit of user experience design resources. Fluid is an international project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in its second year (http://fluidproject.org).

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© Jutta Treviranus for e-Literate, 2008. | Permalink | 9 comments

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This is a guest post by Patrick Masson and Ken Udas for the On the Horizon series on distributed learning environments. Patrick Masson is currently serving as the Chief Information Officer for The State University of New York, College of Technology at Delhi. As CIO, Mr. Masson provides oversight, leadership and vision for the college’s Campus Information Services including enterprise/desktop applications, technical centers and labs, server/systems administration, network & telecommunications, online/distance learning, the campus print shop as well as user support such as help desk services. Dr. Ken Udas has served as the Executive Director of Penn State World Campus since August 2006. He has assumed leadership roles in online and distance education since the mid-1990s. In addition to distance education administration and leadership, his professional interests include educational access, open educational resources, and internationalization of education.

We have fantastic roles in our organizations. Borrowing terminology from the 1980s, we are “intrepreneurs,” which granted, does not sound as interesting as being entrepreneurs, but still, not so bad. We are branded internally as change agents in what is turning out to be one of the most dynamic areas (online learning) in a rapidly growing part (educational technology) of a changing sector (higher education). We are embedded directly in the culture and practice of higher education, initially invited to provide insight and define direction; assuming programmatic and operational authority. These are large institutions, with all of the trappings of formal, nested organizations, and all of the traditions of large, established, public universities. Both of our organizations have plenty of legacy, pride, and brand loyalty, which taken together help provide a form of cultural cohesion that managers in many other organizations work very hard to achieve. They are things that we value, while also recognizing that they can impede the institution, particularly if the organization considers itself rather successful.

According to the organizational chart, we sit closer to the top than the bottom of our organizations, but are clearly in the middle of the “value chain.” Personally, we both feel and behave as if we operate at the organizational fringes, but in reality, it is not true. We support practices and activities that are not necessarily consistent with the culture and processes we have inherited, and in both of our cases, there are expectations that we will instigate change to accommodate a perceived future, even if that future can not readily be defined. Within our institutions there is a sense of urgency as emerging technical practices and educational activities challenge the traditional academic processes, even its culture, one of centralized authority, top-down decision-making and long-term planing: these are the proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) and Web2.0 tools, the evolution of the Learning Management Systems (LMS) to the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and on to the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and the publication of not only Open Courseware but Open Educational Resources (OER). While we both serve in critical, central parts of the organization, where our degrees of freedom can feel quite narrow, but our potential impact is significant, those in our position can play vital roles in helping our institutions recognize then adopt these new approaches… but only if we change the way we do things.

This should be easy, right?

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Read the rest of Distributed Learning Environments and OER: The Change Management Challenge (276 words)

© Michael Feldstein for e-Literate, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments

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