This NITLE sponsored event was one of the best conferences I've been to.  It was small and everyone came from similar envrironments to mine, so I found myself saying, "me too" a lot or asking people who seemed to have overcome certain obstacles how they went about it.  My overall impression of the conference was that a lot of people were somewhat dissatisfied with the way most course management systems worked. Someone in the audience mentioned that they hated the fact that this word "management" was tied to learning. Can we or should we be managing learning? And yet, there's a real need to manage our workloads and learning management systems tend to be good at that. At most of the schools, there was only one person dedicated to working with faculty on technology in their teaching. If a CMS that's easy to use is okay, then we often shuffle them off to that with help documents in hand rather than spend lots of time developing a web site or something else.

Another issue that came up related to "managing learning" was the way that the layout and functionality of most course management systems might force faculty to teach in a certain way. Many in the room, I think, wanted to allow great latitude in letting faculty teach the way they felt was best. Some of these systems seemed to restrict what one can and can't do. And this is probably the main reason many have considered or are using open source alternatives such as Sakai or Moodle which allow you to customize the layout and add on your own modules to suit your needs.  The proprietary systems like Blackboard and WebCT allow little customization and assume a kind of "one-size-fits-all" mode of operation.

I think many people were also focused on helping people use their existing systems. There was a lot of discussion about running workshops and generally helping faculty use the system to its greatest potential. Adoption seemed to be hovering, as it does for us, around 25-30%.  There was a general desire to increase adoption, but most people didn't have a lot of ideas for how to do more outreach and training. Some people seemed to be good at this, especially when they had large staffs. One group, who implemented Sakai, had a faculty advisory committee who helped them determine how to develop the system and also how to approach training.

Another issue that arose was how to connect course management to Web 2.0 technologies. For those who don't know about Web 2.0, here's a good explanation.  Web 2.0 basically is all those tools you hear about that are generally "social," like Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Many faculty had abandoned course management systems because they weren't allowing them to leverage these tools for teaching. There was also a bit of discussion about the desire for CMSs to become more like the web 2.0 tools, in look and feel as well as functionality. Most of us were pretty hard on the look of most course management systems. They're clunky and compared to most other web sites look pretty out of date. 5 or 6 years ago, this was acceptable. Now, our students expect much slicker design and functionality.

One of the more interesting panels was the faculty and student panel. The students were pretty hard on the LMSs and especially the faculty who didn't use them or didn't use them well.  One of them suggested that we'd spent a lot of money on this software but hadn't really discussed effective use of them.

For more thoughts and notes about the conference from myself and others, see the technorati tag lmslac2006.

technorati tags:lmslac2006, coursemanagement, learningmanagement

Whitman has an emerging technology group. Sakai implementation was their first project. Blackboard adoption was stagnating.

Faculty concerns:

• student login problems
• issues with digital dropbox
• changing content
• limitation with equation editor

Did a cost comparison of upgrading to enterprise and started looking at other options.

Why Sakai?

• provided the right features
• sustainable
• timeline was similar to Whitman's
• familiar
• good cost

Joined the educational partners--$5000/yr for three years. Lent credibility to their project.

Technical prep:

• ran a usage survey
• test instance
• tested features
• joined the partnership
• knowledge requirements--what staff do we need and what skills needed

Rebranded it and brought in web developer to help reskin it.

Moving forward to expand the pilot. Managed to import courses from Blackboard. Helped build that tool. Also helped improve the discussion board. Hard to integrate with the SIS. On the hardware side, built in redundancy, connected to storage network. Total hardware budget $18,500.

A lot more buzz around Sakai than there ever was with Blackboard. Established a faculty advisory committee. Helped with the feedback process.

Lessons:

• administrative buy-in important
• work closely with faculty
• transparency and frequent communication
• get involved in the sakai community
• ask for help from the community
• lobby for features
• don't have to be able to code to contribute
• don't bombard people with tools--just select the ones you need
• don't customize core pieces

Costs

• partnership--$5000
• pilot server--$4,500
• hardware--$18,500
• conference--$3,000

Staff requirements:

• about .5 fte for project
• documentation and training is taking up most of time

Benefits

• customizable
• predictable costs--as opposed to the bb increases
• large community to rely on
• collaboration with faculty--can talk to them and really meet their needs rather than having to tell them, I'm sorry, Blackboard doesn't do that

technorati tags:lmslac2006

Using some building blocks. They've integrated the library reserves and a facebook. They've also purchased the same blog package that we use.  Wikis are a part of that package.

Intellectual extension:

• what is it to teach a course in the digital age
• summer pedagogy workshops
• in the morning discussed education theory
• had a panel of faculty who were doing interesting things
• tried not to limit them with the tool
• open lab in the afternoon to work on their course
• offered stipends and lunch
• online is between the in-class and the outside-of-class interaction
• What faculty say:
  
• The content is changing--not just text
• used web resources
• didn't have to lecture as much
• encouraged participation

Communal extension:

• using it for peer writing tutors
• coastal science institute for k-12 teachers
• closed community model
• limited public accessibility
• add accounts
• no self-joining option

Support

• institutional support
• partnerships with faculty, dean's office, and library
• training
• standard training, plus information sessions
• faculty learning from other faculty
• created a Blackboard site for faculty with training content
• communication and feedback
• went to faculty meetings to talk about what was going on
• evaluation
• asked questions of faculty and students, both open and closed-ended questions
• one thing they did was build a building block to display courses in reverse chronological order
  

technorati tags:lmslac2006

Now we're listening to Barry talk about a NITLE sponsored moodle site for those using moodle to share information. This might help ameliorate some issues people have with the whole open source model.  Plus, many of us are trying to solve the same problems; there's a lot of redunancy. We can even do this with other LMSs.

Some of the things we can work on:

• Integration
• ERP connection
• registrar
• library
• digital assets
• continuity
• more heads looking at the problem

Moodle has a rapid development cycle. Share information about 3rd party add-ons. Shared development for modules. Work on policies like copyright and ferpa.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

Right now we're discussing student and faculy perspectives with a couple of faculty and students. Based on research in teaching and learning, we need to foucs on new ways of teaching. The students are different and need to be taught differently. Today's students want active learning, collaborative learning, civic learning, and use of technology.

Research on learning:

• Active and learner-centered
• Teamwork and collabortive
• metacognition and transfer
• community and engagement

New student and faculty roles

• Student is responsible for uncovering
• Teacher is facilitator

How the LMS fits

• Support for active learning
• Empowerment through communication
• metacognition
• community

Problem-based learning

• muddy problem
• clarify questions
• chart course
• collect data
• evaluate results

Instead of lecturing, he is using these projects. Most of the content gets delivered via this project rather than via lecture. It occurs to me that K-12 has been moving in this direction for years.  Using reading reflections with question prompts to make sure they're doing the reading and coming to class prepared.  Also does knowledge surveys to see where the students are. These are not graded. Captures data about knowledge before and after the class. He can break this down by student or by question. I can think of lots of people who'd like a tool like this. I don't think Blackboard can do this.

LMSs can be used to support active learning if you think about it.

Paul Miller is trying to capture some of the issues that have been raised.  He's mostly talking about writing and peer response. Comments on the paper and the comments. Learned more about the students' assumptions about writing by looking at the comments. I like the idea of grading comments. Faculty change is glacial.

Alex is now talking about his perspective.  He uses Blackboard. He uses IM and email, but doesn't have his own blog or anything. Likes having access to the syllabus. Feels ambivalent about putting powerpoint and notes up. Lots of different ways to disseminate information. Professors use different methods.  Bryan's daughter is right. Blackboard is damn hard to use. A lot of has to do with how the faculty use it. They leave the defaults.

Ryan echoes much of what Alex says. Something that he said really struck me. He said that we spent a lot of money on this software but didn't really think about how to effectively use it. And I thought, wow, he's right, we've never had the discussion about what this powerful tool could and should be used for.

The discussion afterward was interesting as well, with lots of people trying to figure out how best to use LMSs and to get faculty and students to embrace it more wholeheartedly.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

As Scott is talking--very fast--I'm thinking he's trying to straddle a delicate fence. On the one hand, he wants to allow a kind of freedom in education and get away from the idea that we can manage anything. On the other hand, his position requires him to think about bigger picture issues--connecting different pieces of technology together.  He has to think about security, etc.

Tight vs. loose coupling of pieces. Loose vs. hard-wired. Hard-wired is a more of a commercial model. Leaning towards an open source model.

What's next? Elearning frameworks. Think about netgen faculty.

NITLE is using LMSs as a collaboration tool. The tools that they develop within them are usually built to enhance collaboration.  Discussing Marratech. Includes a whiteboard and other tools, like application sharing. This seems similar to the Learning Times application I've used. I can't remember the name of it.

The tool includes an API so you can integrate it with other things.

Alex Chapin is now talking about all the various web tools that we're using and they're in what he calls "integrated stacks."  He shows a continuum of publication from wikis to archives. Wikis and blogs are evolving content while archives are more stable. We need to support content granulation and organize it however we want and aggregate it however we want. He's showing Segue, the cms that Middlebury uses. This sounds a lot to me like Google Pages, and it makes me think, we're building all these things, but if Google already has it, shouldn't we use that instead? What's the benefit of building our own tool?  It's a nice looking program though.  Alex just answered my question. They want to use the authentication system. I followed up by asking if any of the material is public.  The material is made public by default and then at a very granular level, faculty can decide what's public and what's not.  You can see some examples by going to http://segue.middlebury.edu and clicking on Course Web sites.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

Bryan, Kathleen, and Jason Brown

This is going to be a great ride. Bryan is talking about his 11 year old who is tech-savvy though not a techie per se. She has trouble with LMSs with is like the web of the 90s which she has no familiarity with that style.

Blogs and wikis are not new technologies. Web 2.0 is like fight club. The first rule is there is no Web 2.0. Key component is microcontent. Web 2.0 is social. It's about open content, open access and standards. This can be descriptive or prescriptive. Network constructivism--content built upon by others. Perpetual beta--always adding features.

Collaborative writing projects--wikipedia. Wikinews. Blogs. Content chunks. There are stable urls for everything. Distributed conversations. There are 50 million blogs. The social object, i.e. a picture in flickr. Flickr has 100 million images. Need an object to connect around.

Tagging or folksonomies. Museums using it extensively.

AJAX. Microcontent and mashing it up.

RSS.

Are LMSs Web 2.0 compliant? Somewhat. What pieces of Web 2.0 can we bring into LMSs? The world is heading in the direction of Web 2.0. Take advantage of existing content. Make your own stuff. Host your own blogs.

Whatever you think about it, we have to start talking about these things.

Now Jason and Kathleen are showing work they've done on one of Kathleen's courses. Implemented c-panel to make it easy to install secondary applications like WordPress or Drupal. Kathleen states that she's going to be a fly in the ointment. But there are definitely things she likes some things about LMSs. Designed for faculty, not students. Need to move from course management to learning facilitation. Needs to be about interaction, move toward social software. I'm totally with her. LMSs are mainly information management systems, deals primarily with administrivia and while that's an important feature, it's not the only thing. The discussion board feature was used by 76% of the students but only by 36% of the faculty. Kathleen suggests that the discussion forum should not function as substitutes, but as enhancements to the liberal arts classroom.

Class requirements have to be very clear when you're using a new tool. She has a blog and a wiki. She's using the blog for individual assignments and the wiki for a collaborative writing project.

For her, the audience element is very important. There are risk. You have to give up a little control.

Discussion. Ellen from Bates seconds the use of Web 2.0 tools increasing student participation through a kind of competitiveness.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

This is about consortial issues in educational technology.

Differences in infrastructure--different LMSs, different server setups.  Mellon grant for $665,000 with the following goals:

• expanded courseware support
• faculy workshops
• training a student production team
• creation of multimedia library resources

Expanded courseware support:

• created centralized system that everyone used
• redundancy
• streaming media server
• course request system
• partial sis integration
• password dissemination and reset utility

New support team:

• centralized support for all schools
• dedicated staff
• student production team
• various IT staff of The Claremont System

Question for myself: so someone from Pomona calls one place and someone from C-M might answer their question?

This project was faculty driven. Provide many levels of support.

Sponsored workshops which were attended by 437 people.

• pedagogy
• webct
• microsoft office
• macromedia dreamweaver
• geographic information systems
• online research
• digital imaging

Question: how did you get faculty to attend? what incentives did you have?

Answer: demand existed and paid them $150 for full day and $75 for half-day. opportunities for collaboration.

Student Production team--40 students!

• scanning
• pdf creation
• ocr
• streaming audio and video
• video editing
• (ack changed slide!)

Students need to have interest in technology. Need to be committed. Worked in other computing areas and so that provided even more expertise in those areas.

Digitized material is archived in the library--that's a cool idea!

Now the faculty perspective.

• Can't change what they're doing pedagogically (I find this a little sad).
• Help faculty do what they're doing better.
• access to class resources all the time

Presenting class material

• this is the main purpose of an LMS
• content is stable
• all communication is electronic
• supplemental readings
• links to web resources
• copies of lectures

Me: I know LMS's are a place to present course material, but to me this just replicates the "sage on the stage" model of teaching.

Use New Tools

• changing the pedagogy
• online quizzes
• drop-box for papers--use feedback tools including voice

Some other things one can do

• after-hours classroom
• need to learn the etiquette of online communications
• chatrooms
• facilitate group projects

I think this part of the presentation probably represents where most faculty are.  They're using slighly more than the basics, filling the shell with content, but not integrating much else. Which is fine.  I'm just trying to push the envelope a bit. 

It's interesting how existing structures within institutions affect how one pursues a new program. I like the way they enforced excellent work from the students.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

Would offering online courses compromise the liberal arts mission?

Does an online course flow out of the mission? Two words stand out: excellence and residential.  Also, in Hope College's extended mission statement, there is a phrase about the use of information technology.

Pilot program: challenged chairs to put one course online. Students were taking courses elsewhere and wanted them approved, many of these were online.

Looked at transfer credits. In 2005, for example, there were over 1000. Many of these courses are general ed courses, "throw-away" courses. Liberal arts colleges view these as foundational and important.

I have to say, this is very much an administrator's view of things. An online course might recapture revenue, keep the students within a coherent program, etc.  Where is the student learning?

Offered a handful of courses online over the summer. Transfer credits went down.

Assessment: enrollments were high; students gave good feedback. Students need to be self-motivated. But they miss classroom interaction. Love the convenience and flexibility. Can study at their own pace. Also easy for faculty to see the participation level of students and bring lagging students back into the fold.

Evaluations of faculty were very good. As a faculy member, he loved it. Could work at home, etc.

Upper-level administration really liked the program, primarily because it generates revenue.

Discussion: Mission creep? Does the success canibalize the other missions of the college? Does this change the face of the institution? The program is quite tantalizing. Is faculty training mandatory? What about students? What's more important, perhaps, is teaching them how to effectively teach in an online environment. (Yay, Andrew, I totally agree). The increased contact with students took a lot of time, but was likely extremely beneficial to the students. And finally, did the students learn more in depth, differently than a face-to-face course? No quantitative data, but seems like it was better, just informally assessing it.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

I'll blog this one session at a time. Instead of summarizing too much, I'll do what I usually do in my head, which is think of questions, comments.

The richness of your institution is behind a password if you use a LMS. That's really an interesting thought and one of the reasons I'm pursuing Open CourseWare.

Internal and external needs are very different. How do you reconcile the needs of those two audiences? The interface of many LMSs are not so attractive.  Prospective students equate the look of the web site with the way your institution functions. If it's ugly and disorganized, then students think that your school is. Is that necessarliy wrong? Students look at the web site as a whole, so when department sites look different, that causes confusion.

The web developer who is now part of the Teaching and Learning side of things has been dragged into managing department web sites. Has tried to push that off on students. That model is not really working for him.  Trying to move departmental web sites into Blackboard, with a publicly viewable version. Aside: working with the PR office is sometimes painful.

Trying to automate the process and pull data from the student information system.  Certain pieces would be available to the public--department sites and on the course level, the syllabus. We've been talking about this for a while, and have been somewhat successful.  Of course, sharing our CMS with Swat and Haverford makes it harder for us to make Blackboard our web site.

Incorporated job ads into Blackboard.  That's pretty cool.  Now they have general classifieds in there.  Don't work in isolation, make sure you're not repeating efforts.

Now we're looking at the events calendar. Worked with a third company to connect organizations within Blackboard to the main events calendar. It occurs to me that we have a ton of separate applications that do similar things. It might be worth having more conversations with people on campus about how to allow different ways of doing things, but providing some centralized place to view things. Pulling data from different places.

Issues: A lot of independent republics--I love this phrase--which makes collaboration is hard. Technological vision doesn't always exist at the higher levels which makes it hard to bring balkanized groups together. When resources are scarce, there's a tendancy to stagnate.

Things to think about: there's a lot of information in your LMS that is valuable to an external audience.  Consider style plus substance.  You need buy-in.

Discussion: Portal systems or content management systems? They're evaluating content management systems now.

How do important projects get the attention of upper-level administration? Hope College's web site got picked up by web pages that suck which finally got someone's attention. I don't think our site would ever get close to that. What are ideas for "skinning" Blackboard or another CMS?  Hard to make the site look really, really great.

technorati tags:lmslac2006

Michelle is now talking about Library Thing (LibraryThing | Catalog your books online). This is an application I like, but haven't used very much.  It's a social bookmarking tool for books. The librarians in the room quickly got into a discussion about the value of some of the features for our own book collections--tagging and ranking. Ranking was out.  Most people did not see this as a useful feature for a library catalog. Tagging was met with more enthusiasm although the issue of control over the vocabulary did come up.  We mentioned Penn Tags (PennTags /).  Michelle mentioned that Library Thing might be useful for book groups. You can create groups around the book and discuss it via a discussion board. And that made me think that you could do that with a class and that you might get people from outside the class to join you, which might be very interesting.  Maybe I'll try this.

Susan Turkel is discussing issues related to library outreach and technology.  She first discussed the ways that technology helps with outreach.  Technology such as the RSS, blogs, connecting via Blackboard, email, and more are all ways in which librarians connect with their constituents.  However, there are challenges that technology creates for outreach. One of the biggest is the fact that all the databases have different interfaces and that can be intimidating to the people you're reaching out to.  There are also so many different resources that it's hard to know what to use.  People are asking about the use of MySpace and Facebook for library outreach. It feels intrusive somehow. Janet mentions that you could have a "character" account instead.

Now we're finding out how the library looks from the student perspective. She likes the subject portal (I do too!) and the lunchtime workshops (at Swat).  She thinks library instruction is most effective when it's attached to a class. Students are taught not to trust Google or Wikipedia or some of the other competing tools.  Students prefer to print longer items, but might read shorter items online.  Katherine mentioned that students would like to have course syllabi available via Tripod or some other web site. That led us to a discussion of OpenCourseware as one way of doing that and Liz Evans mentioned that they're looking into developing a similar capability within Blackboard.

Janet is discussing the issue of data management in terms of collecting digital material. Will we have enough space? How do we manage that?  A related issue is the collections, physical and digital, that many faculty have.  How can we help faculty better manage those collections and make sure they're useable by them and by others? Next, Janet discussed the issue of the way that librarians are viewed as scholars and colleagues in a way the IT people often aren't.  She wanted to stress that librarians should value that.  Then she moved on to talking about innovation and "just do it."  Are we stifling innovation with our infrastructure and should we be more nimble? The house of sand. Where are we now? What will the future of the library be? What's changing?  What do people expect from the library? How is a library valued?  Today's undergrads think they don't need a library.

technorati tags:technology, library, education

I've had several people ask if video from YouTube or Google Video can be downloaded. It's a common question everywhere as people have situations--like classrooms without internet connections--where they would like to show a video from these sites but are unable to because the video is protected.

Most of the options involve adding a simple plugin to Firefox (this is one of the many reasons Firefox is so cool). Here's one plugin possibility.

UnPlug :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

This site:

Around the Corner - MGuhlin.net - Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway. - Mignon McLaughlin

offers a variety of options, including one where you can just go to Keepvid.com and paste in the url.

technorati tags:youtube, google video, download

In "Unpacking 'I don't want it,'" Michelle Green examines why some people are resistant to technology. Although her study did not cover the educational environment specifically, I think it is relevant to the higher ed environment.

First, Green points out that many people who are adept at technology are what we would call lifelong learners. They enjoy learning new things and have an intellectual curiosity that is lacking in those who resist technology. Interestingly, my observations are similar except that many people I encounter who are resistant to using technology might be consider intellectually curious, but only in specific areas or about specific programs.

Second, she found that many found that technology was too complex and associated it with negative images from television and movies where technology in the form of computers or robots inflicted harm upon individuals or society as a whole. Many also had no idea what they could do with computers. They had very vague ideas of what they were capable of. Also, because many of the resisters were poor, they could not afford or did not want to invest in the top of the line equipment and therefore experienced many more problems than those who understood the value of having up to date equipment. I see this on occasion where individuals could not or would not invest in new equipment or software and then get frustrated when they continue to have problems.

Perhaps the most interesting finding was the nature of the relationship between those who are adept at technology and those who are not. Resisters or non-adepts tend to view adepts as having some kind of special abilities and almost magical powers. This leads them to believe that they cannot possibly learn to use technology. Further, resisters knew few people who were adept at using technology and so didn't have anyone to turn to for help. When they did have someone in their social network to ask for help, because they didn't fully believe in their ability to learn, they become reliant on help from their technically adept friend or family member to the extent that that person began to tire of helping them:

If a novice learner is too technologically needy, even compassionate embracers may tire.

Unpacking “I don’t want it”

This is one of the bigger problems facing many IT departments, including our own. Generally, it's not one individual who continues to ask for assistance, but many asking similar questions. While we always try to help, it is easy to become frustrated with people's inability or unwillingness to try to find answers for themselves, especially when answers are often available via online documentation or within the help functionality of software programs themselves. One thing this study makes clear, however, is that users that may be resistant to using technology are going to have difficulty finding documentation or worse, understanding it. The technical language used in most documentation assumes a certain level of knowledge and many people may not have.

The question becomes, then, how does one get someone who needs to use technology up to speed so that they can with a limited amount of frustration? Green suggests that adepts could do more to help alleviate the frustration that resisters may feel. Also, she suggests that there be more opportunities for novices and adepts to communicate with each other in a non-threatening environment, so that novices can see what technology as allowed adepts to accomplish and begin to be motivated to learn more.

Generally, IT workers are called upon when something is broken rather than when someone wants to learn something. It would certainly be to our benefit to reach out more (as I try to do in this space and in other ways). But it would also be good if our community called when they wanted to learn something more often and not just when they've reached peak frustration level. It's also important to understand that most of us did not learn the basics of technology use by going to some special class. We learned by just using it, trying things to see how they work, and by not being afraid of making mistakes. Much of what's being developed today has ease of use in mind, so while what's going on behind the scenes might have increased in complexity, what the user needs to do to use a system has gotten increasingly simpler. As Sam I Am said, "Try it. You might like it."

technorati tags:first monday, technology, education