• email (gmail)
• contacts
• instant messaging and presence
• calendar
• document creation, storage and sharing
• websites

Google Apps for Education

All of our 200,000 or so students will be able to use the applications, which will also be made available to staff later. Email accounts will be provided under the my.open.ac.uk domain. We’ll also be looking at whether to bring on stream other applications as they are integrated into the Google Apps for Education suite.

Meanwhile email provision for our 8,000 Associate Lecturers will be brought into line with other staff and they will be given an account with Microsoft Exchange, accessible online or via email applications such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

Growing numbers of institutions are now adopting cloud-based systems such as Google Apps for Education, particularly in the US. The arguments for hosting your own student email are becoming increasingly weak when it can be done externally for free, or at least much more cheaply. Google will provide a service level agreement with higher levels of availability than we could achieve ourselves. In addition there are other services included such as instant messaging that we don’t currently provide to students but could help them to connect more with each other.

These systems will increasingly start to compete with some of the features of learning management systems / virtual learning environments such as Moodle and Blackboard. They provide a higher level of individual control for students and potentially remove some of the administrative burden from the university. Google’s recent integration of their Groups application in the the Google Apps for Education suite is going to present us with some interesting questions such as:

• What would be the additional maintenance issues for us in turning on that functionality so that any student can set up a forum e.g. dealing with inappropriate comments, flame wars etc?
• Should Groups be a space for informal collaboration with formal teaching taking place in Moodle forums?

Another area for investigation is the use of Google Apps as an eportfolio system. Our initial research has shown that it would work for some of the key aspects of eportfolio provision such as the storage of documents under the control of the user, the exporting of these so they can be taken with them through life, and the creation of templates for the collection of structured data for a variety of purposes. We still need to work out how we can freeze or export eportfolio content where it is being for formal assessment.

Working out the balance of what needs to be hosted internally and what can be better done in the cloud is set to become a huge and ongoing debate for educational and other institutions. Lots of interesting issues and work ahead.

1. University leaderships will have to take responsibility for driving the use of new technologies throughout institutions.
   That can be done in a variety of ways as we’re trying to facilitate at the Open University e.g. awareness raising and professional development, enhancing systems, and developing strategies and procedures which promote and remove blockages to the adoption of elearning.
2. Students should leave university with a competent mastery of online modes of communication and information transfer.
   This means there will be no scope for degree programmes (and therefore probably individual courses/modules as well) which do not incorporate online communication and media. To what extent they will have to do so is the unanswered question. It’s all too easy to pay lip service to the use of online content and communication without fundamentally changing the traditional mode of delivery e.g. by adding a forum or uploading some Powerpoint slides. The next one might help:
3. Information about how technologies are used in each course will be available to students as they choose their options.
   Many course descriptors already include details of teaching methods and the use of technologies. It’ll be interesting to see whether students will be presented with such information in a consistent way across institutions to allow them to make the informed choices envisaged by the report. For a really informed choice students would ideally be presented with details such as:
   • What types of online communication tools are provided and how are they expected to be used?
   • What assessed collaborative activities are involved?
   • What is the balance of synchronous / aysnchronous collaborative activities within the course?
   • What kinds of online content are made available and how are they expected to be used?
   • How much time are you expected to study online and offline?
   • What are the hardware, software and internet connection requirements?
   • What assessments will be carried out online?
   • What kind of eportfolio facilities are provided and how are they expected to be used?

   And then for an even more informed choice:

   • How did students on previous instances of this course evaluate their use of the online elements of the course?

   And wouldn’t it be great to be able to answer the killer question (pretty much impossible to answer of course because of the range of factors involved):

   • Does the use of these technologies enhance the overall learning experience, the results and job prospects of the students taking this course?

   All this could certainly be useful to students when selecting courses to study. Arguably unless we can include much of the above this cataloguing exercise will achieve little. Providing such detailed information consistently across the courses within one institution will be challenging but I believe worthwhile. Even without the benefits to students it would be useful for institutions to develop a comprehensive picture of the extent and types of elearning being carried out. Across the sector? That would be interesting and would require a standardised data format and a way of aggregating information from all institutions. Another wee challenge for us.

Initially I took this in a light hearted manner and even sent a jokey message to it saying it had better watch its step or I’d shave it off. The person behind this identity however then followed around 38 twitter users, all of whom looked like they were in the UK elearning community, and began to send a series of bizarre tweets.

I have just been at the JISC CETIS Conference in Birmingham for a couple of days and was approached by several people with greetings such as “hello your beard”. All of these people had been convinced that it was me behind this new character, a fair assumption when it carried my picture and linked to my blog. All thought it was bizarre behaviour, and one person I spoke to said he had actually wanted to avoid me at the conference because he thought I’d gone mad.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out who is behind the account and I did take some satisfaction from blocking this part of my anatomy from following me, and reporting it for spam. After mentioning the incident to a few people the number of people followed by the account was strangely reduced from thirty-eight to one. In some ways it’s fairly innocuous, and has given some people a laugh, but it’s made me think about a few things. Twitter has become an increasingly useful tool for finding out about innovations, developments and news of the things you’re interested in, and for networking with a wide range of colleagues. It’s enabled people to build their professional identity and blend this with information about what they do in their personal lives. This combination of the professional and personal helps to make the medium more engaging.

It’s also risky. Living aspects of your personal life in the public arena makes a new, more insidious form of identity theft possible. This isn’t grabbing your credit card details and your date of birth. It’s using an image of your face, inventing a name which you could plausibly have come up with yourself and then gathering together a few aspects of your personal life and character which are in the public domain instantly to create a new you. Anyone the character follows is then inclined to believe unquestionably that it is you.

The situation in my case has been fairly harmless but it makes me question just how much of my private life I should expose in this way and just how vulnerable one’s twitter persona is to impersonation. Someone with a grudge against you could potentially wreak havoc with your professional identity and cause real damage to work and personal relationships. For the time being the advantages of the medium outweigh the risks as far as I’m concerned but I’ve noticed a number of valued Twitter contacts leave recently and there are of course various celebrities such as Stephen Fry who are tempted to quit.

VLEs have traditionally been based around the course/module as the unit of organisation. Any other form of structure such as a superstructure (eg a degree which combines a number of modules) or a substructure (eg a tutorial group) can be difficult to set up. At the Open University we have now produced a module for Moodle called Shared Activities which allows a student or any other user of the system to set up their own forums, shared blogs or wikis and invite any other VLE user to join them. Other tools could easily be added to the list in the future.

I cannot stress enough how fundamentally this changes the underlying assumptions of what a VLE is. The institution still sets up course web pages, uploads content, specifies learning activities and assessments and provides formal tutor groups with the right students (and tutor) having access to them.

But now individual students can also form their own study groups or use the system for social networking purposes with others in ways that they decide. There is no need to get permission or involve an administrator in setting up a blog, wiki or forum – just a requirement to click a box saying you agree with the terms and conditions and will be responsible for moderating the forum etc.

It has taken more than a year since this system was built to get it released at the University. There have been concerns about the loss of control by the institution, and also procedural, legal and support issues. However finally the reservations have been overcome and the system is available to all students and staff on the VLE. One reason to offer the system to staff as well is so that they can set up their own shared activities with other staff and become familiar with how the VLE works, thus potentially gaining ideas for how these tools could be used for teaching purposes.

If you’re staff or a student on the VLE at the Open University you should now be able to set up a shared activity. Please note that currently no user support is offered.

If you run Moodle elsewhere you can download the Shared Activity Module for Moodle.

Associate Lecturers at the Open University can use these tools but if they want to do so for teaching purposes there is a separate procedure to follow.

In Japan more people access the Web from phones than from PCs (see Techcrunch article) and there are reports (see eg Wired) that a large proportion of Japanese are content with just a cellphone and don’t even want a PC. I find web browsing, even with the iPhone’s excellent user interface, clunky. You can zoom in on parts of the screen with ease but all that moving about to try to get to grips with the entire contents of a web page is tiresome.

Sites formated for mobile devices like that of the BBC are far more satisfactory, and we are currently doing something similar for course websites at the Open University. This is great for administrative aspects of courses such as checking your exam results or course calendar but much of our learning content is in the form of long texts. I am particularly interested in whether it is feasible to read large amounts of text from the relatively small screen of your iPhone or Blackberry. To this end I started reading a book using the free Stanza application on my iPhone. Here are my initial thoughts:

Advantages of reading texts on smartphones

1. You can have a large book (any number of them actually) always available in your pocket / handbag, converged with a device you need anyway (your phone) so you never need either to remember it or to carry about an additional object.
2. You can use small periods of time, such as waiting for someone, waiting for public transport, sitting in a traffic jam (not sure if that’s illegal) which would otherwise be wasted to make progress with your reading.
3. It is easier to hold the device in your hand than to hold a book and simple to turn the pages with a tiny flick of the thumb. I don’t like to bend the back of a paperback book so am forever holding the thing at an odd angle, bending my eyes round corners. Hardback books are heavy. I have no such problems / weird behaviour with the cellphone.
4. In contrast to reading on a computer, the smartphone is always on so there are no tortuous waits while the thing boots up.

There are of course many advantages to digital texts in general as opposed to paper, such as:

1. They’re instantly downloadable, infinitely replicable and have miniscule distribution costs.
2. There are already many thousands of books available for free.
3. They can incorporate hyperlinks to other relevant resources.
4. With the right software you can click/tap a word for an instant dictionary definition.
5. You can incorporate discussions relating to parts of the text.
6. You can highlight and annotate parts of the text – both persist and can be edited and shared easily. Write on a book and it’s hard to amend and of course irritating for other readers.
7. You can optimise the font size, contrast of colours etc.
8. Diagrams and images can be zoomed in on.
9. You can integrate videos, animations etc with the text.
10. An e-book doesn’t clutter up your house.

But it’s not all roses. You probably like books if you grew up with them like I did and here are some reasons why they’re better:

1. Browsing around a bookshop is an almost vice-like pleasure.
2. The tactile nature of paper and the pleasure at touching these old-fashioned physical objects just won’t go away.
3. The screen size of a smart phone is smaller than a book. I’m not sure if this is necessarily a bad thing, though you’re forced to “turn” pages much more frequently.
4. You can have several books and assorted pieces of paper viewable at once. Not so easy on a mobile device.
5. Paper doesn’t become unusable when its battery runs out. Nor do you have to be a slave to electricity supplies.
6. Books look good on your bookshelves.
7. Open University students like getting books through the post and may feel they’re getting less for their money if there’s nothing physical to show for it.

As people become more comfortable with reading from small mobile devices they will inevitably buy fewer books in the same way they’re buying fewer CDs and more mp3s. The price differential is likely to be huge. Paper books are certainly going to remain available for those who wish to pay for them. For those comfortable with reading from mobile phones it may seem an unnecessary luxury to spend £10 on a paper book when you can have the electronic version instantly in your pocket for £1 or less. Whether I (and the rest of my generation) can ever be completely comfortable reading in this way remains to be seen but I’m certainly going to persist with it. And for relatively small chunks of reading I have no doubt that this is going to be a popular way to learn.

£27.99 / $44.99 Packt Publishing A sample chapter is available.

I was recently sent a copy of this book for review. First published in May 2009, Moodle 1.9 Multimedia is one of a series on the popular learning management system / virtual learning environment published by Packt which includes titles on Moodle administration and course development. In fact, while badged as a book on Moodle, it could almost have been entitled How to do a whole lot of whacky things that Moodle can’t. A relatively small proportion of the book is actually about Moodle at all.

The book is aimed at teachers and trainers who already have some experience in the use of Moodle. Certainly having a basic understanding of the concepts of a VLE would help to get maximum use out of it. It is a hands-on, practical publication which will be most useful in schools and situations where the teacher is very much concerned with creating their own teaching content. However it could also be of interest within further or higher education settings by educators who wish to create more imaginative courses and are interested in seeing what tools might be available to them, even if other development staff are employed to create the resources and integrate them into the VLE.

The book is also claimed to be for students and you could imagine a copy left around the classroom being of interest to some of the geekier kids in the class.
To be able to get maximum use out of all the tools you’ll need a good relationship with your Moodle administrator who will be required to change a few settings to enable the integration of some of the multimedia content.

Within the covers is a veritable treasure trove of free applications for creating and editing multimedia content, some of them downloadable, others usable directly over the Web. There are comprehensive and clear instructions on how to use the programs, and as part of the narrative which holds the book together, short sections on how to integrate them into Moodle for presentation to students.

The book has a broad definition of multimedia and describes applications for capturing, creating, manipulating and storing images, sounds, video, animations, screencasts, cartoon strips, slideshows, floorplanners, mindmaps, interactive timelines and interactive maps. At the end it strays into interactive classroom applications including text chat, shared whiteboards, shared applications and audio and video conferencing, though 13 pages devoted to synchronous conferencing is scratching the surface – and it’s debatable whether chat and shared applications constitute multimedia.

From a learning point of view there are a few ideas on activities which can be provided for students using the various multimedia elements but these are fairly minimal and this is more of a “how to” book than one brimming with educational ideas. However the accompanying Moodle website gives some good indications of how the multimedia content can be integrated into learning activities.

Readers are given tips on how to take good photos and enhance them using the popular open source image editing software The Gimp. They are shown how to make screencasts using Jing and comic strips using Strip Generator. The online application Slide is suggested for creating slideshows and the website Imeem for storing songs and creating playlists. Audacity is recommended for editing sounds and Windows Movie Maker for videos. There is even an application called Mogulus explained for creating an online TV station. When Google Docs and other applications such as Google Maps were introduced I really began to question why this book was called Moodle Multimedia however some of these applications are so good that they do need to be mentioned and Moodle can of course be the front end system for the student which brings all the pieces together.

Fernandes describes how to add multimedia to questions in the Moodle quiz engine and also how to use a couple of other interactive quiz systems with Moodle. There are also a few tips on how to assess multimedia content produced by students themselves.

Many of the Web 2.0 applications suggested by the author allow the storage of the resulting content online and the reader is presented with the choice of whether to upload the content to the Moodle site or simply link to it from Moodle so it is embedded within the course but held elsewhere. The pros and cons of these two approaches could perhaps be better explained however there is a section at the end detailing a few issues around the selection of Web 2.0 software, copyright issues etc.

In summary, this is a useful and practical resource about tools for creating, editing and storing a wide range of multimedia content. It is more about multimedia than about Moodle and the majority of the book would be relevant and of interest to users of other VLEs too. There’s perhaps not a lot that can be said about multimedia within Moodle anyway because it is basically an empty shell, crying out for the imaginative resources you will now be able to create using the applications described in this book.

Steve Wheeler kicked off by suggesting that the term VLE is wrong for a start, that we are talking about content management systems and that they don’t promote learning. Sure, the name is not perfect, but it does describe a particular toolset, designed with learners in mind. VLEs do offer the ability to schedule a range of learning activities and make tools available rather than just manage content.

I have always felt that learning systems are basically “learning neutral” and are at the mercy of the learning content and activities which are made available through them. If Steve sees no valuable learning taking place in VLEs then is that due to the lack of imagination of the teachers using the systems he knows? There are innumerable examples of imaginative, engaging and effective learning experiences taking place in schools and colleges via VLEs (as argued by James Clay later) – and many well-documented examples in higher education.

Steve claims that VLEs promote homogenised content and that this one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate for students. Perhaps his institution has the budget to create individualised content for each student depending on their preferences and learning styles. Mine doesn’t. Or maybe all his students are happy to pull together their own list of appropriate learning resources and activities from around the Internet and to form their own groups to study together jointly. Most of those in my institution would not be and they relish the carefully crafted learning content and activities provided for them, which they can supplement with further individual research as required.

For Steve, VLEs prevent students from discussing with others outside the University. There are undoubtedly scenarios where valuable learning could take place by connecting with individuals with shared learning interests via the Internet from around the World. What normally brings students together though is the common purpose of studying a syllabus and taking the same assessments at the same time. It is certainly irritating to be constrained by the licensing policies of commercial VLEs, where you cannot easily integrate groups of non-registered students into discussions however open source solutions have no such restrictions.

Graham Attwell is anti-VLE because he is anti-formal education and he launched his usual attacks on the mass education system, based on a standardised curriculum. If you come from this standpoint then a VLE does indeed replicate many of the undesirable, closed aspects of the formal education system, locking out those who have not registered on courses and funnelling predetermined content into them. A “personal learning environment” comprised of multiple pieces of freely available social software neatly fits the anarchic educational world view, but in my view we will need VLEs for as long as we have formal education with groups of (increasingly fee-paying) students, facilitated by individual tutors, studying a common curriculum for specified periods incorporating rigorous formal assessment processes.

James Clay took a pragmatic approach, despite being billed as the VLE man. No-one thinks that VLEs are perfect but when used appropriately they can provide a framework and guidance to the student and help staff who lack confidence with multiple social networking sites. Nick Sharratt argued that the VLE is not yet complete but that it is necessary and it is our responsibility to demand enhancements so it does meet our needs. He suggested that users expect reliability, predictability and consistency across courses. Well, we’ve had “the VLE is more reliable/unreliable than free social software tools” debate many times so perhaps it’s pointless to revisit it but I just have to point out that I’m finding the current performance of Facebook is making the system unusable and we would rightly be slated if the VLE was as slow to use….

From the recording, I recognised the dulcet Liverpudlian tones of Chris Jones in the audience. He argued that the VLE sits in an institutional framework and is not just about learning. VLEs are indeed very much about the administrative aspects of formal learning and that’s why they’re not going to go away. Nick asked how you can use a social network for learning without knowing who your fellow students are, for example. Whether VLEs are any good at facilitating effective learning as well depends on the imagination and skills of those creating the content hosted by them and the activities facilitated by them. Meanwhile, denial-of-service attacks permitting, social networking sites and free learning content go from strength to strength for those with the time and inclination to engage with them.

Principle 1: The VLE should facilitate easy online collaborative content development. The systems are not currently in place to make this easy – and they need to be enhanced.

Principle 2: The VLE must recognise the needs of specific subject areas and business needs. Areas such as maths, languages and continuing professional development courses have unique requirements for displays, technologies and formatting which need to be catered for.

Principle 3: The VLE must be able to allow access to a variety of users. Employer engagement in particular will require increasing access from outside the university and there are various other types of user which require access.

Principle 4: We need to assess continuously whether we have the right balance between “control” and “freedom” in the use of the VLE by staff and students. A compromise needs to be reached between allowing users to have sufficient levels of access to VLE facilities and maintaining the quality of our learning content, activities and support.

Principle 5: The integration of external tools will be continually evaluated. While the University considers an in-house VLE to remain essential there are facilities such as email provision which may be better outsourced.

Principle 6: The OU VLE should be visible on a wide range of channels. All student facing systems should be accessible and easy to use on mobile devices as well as on desktop PCs and laptops.

Principle 7: All textual content should be stored in XML format where possible. This will help considerably with repurposing for delivery on other platforms eg paper, e-books and mobile devices.

Principle 8: Documentation should be good enough that course teams do not feel the need to write their own supporting notes around use of the VLE facilities. A proposed revised Computing Guide will address this issue which results in duplication of effort and the production of paper resources which go out of date quickly.

Most of these are probably relevant to other institutions too. There are other things such as ensuring accessibility, usability and robustness which we already assume; all the above are aspects we have not tackled systematically to date. Any thoughts gratefully received.

• Live data from other systems is integrated within OU course content, and
• OU learning content is more exportable into other organisations’ systems

Organisations are increasingly making access to large and useful datasets by providing APIs ie ways in which developers elsewhere can tap into that data. Many of our courses could benefit from inclusion of dynamic data within the course content. One example might be an economics course which looked at the progression of a recession. See for example the BBC’s animated map of growing unemployment in the UK which could potentially be incorporated in a course and provide a more up to date and engaging experience for the learner than a static resource if it was based on the latest data.

Martin Weller and Tony Hirst

Concerns were raised that including dynamic data sources from elsewhere in our courses is risky because of the services potentially being withdrawn, the data changing so that it is less meaningful or the data structures being altered. One solution would be to take a snapshot of the data at the beginning of the course so that students are accessing that rather than the live data. But does this remove the dynamism of the experience for the user? A way forward might be to provide both archived materials and live ones.

So why try to incorporate this data in course content and perpetuate the spoon feeding of students? Would it not be more in students’ interests for them to visit the website with the original data so that they learn how to navigate it or perhaps see other interesting materials while they’re there? Thanh Le pointed out that perhaps when two feeds are combined it makes sense to present the result locally otherwise with a single data source it’s better to send the learner to the original site.

There are pros and cons of both approaches but including graphs of live data feeds within course content does allow course authors to include commentary around the data, makes the courses look more current and avoids them going out of date so quickly.

We also looked at what could be exposed from the OU via APIs. Already quite a lot is available from OpenLearn, iTunesU and other systems with RSS feeds. One suggestion was that these should be combined and made accessible to other organisations/users using a single API.

My biggest concern is how to convince course authors of the relevance of all this. Most of them are struggling to find the time to engage with other aspects of elearning, let alone the techie world of APIs, RSS feeds, mashups and the like. We suggested that the Library needs to develop its expertise in the data sources that are out there – and to be able to suggest to course teams not only what they could use but how they could combine more than one feed together to produce useful applications for the learner.

• mobile learning and personalisation: learners expect to be able to use their own devices and to personalise institutional services
• eportfolio (though they don’t call it that): more learners will require a lifelong learning record which provides links to formal qualifications, facilitates reflection and helps to identify learning opportunities
• eassessment: some of the benefits are listed in the report, though there are no recommendations

Two of these, eportfolios and eassessment are already priorities for JISC which is also prioritising learning resources and activities, technology to support the administration of learning, teaching and assessment (a bit of recursion going on here) and technology-enhanced learning environments. There’s mention too of JISC’s and the Higher Education Academy’s pilots on open educational resources to examine how they can enhance learning and teaching. The Academy’s plans for developing an easily-navigable evidence base are discussed too – this would certainly be useful.

There’s also the age-old argument that the driver should be the enhancement of learning and teaching rather than the technology, and more strongly:

Innovative developments in technology will only be relevant if the enhancement of learning and teaching is the core purpose.

You can agree with this in principle but as I’ve argued before the technical innovations tend to come first and only then are their applications in education made possible.

All that is kind of by way of introduction to a list of strategic priorities and goals or benchmarks which institutions might try to achieve to meet those priorities. One example of a goal is:

Web 2.0 technologies are harnessed to support communities of learning and research

The danger with benchmarks like these of course is that they can turn into mere tickboxing exercises. Just about any university could tick that one but it’s meaningless without a sense of scale, impact and change over time. Nevertheless there’s a useful set of indicators in the policy which we’ll need to look at carefully to see if we can translate them into our institutional context, compare with other elearning benchmarking methodologies and add these dimensions of scale, impact and change.