Reports of the demise of the VLE/LMS are greatly exaggerated

Posted by niall on September 9, 2009

The Association for Learning Technology’s annual conference currently underway in Manchester included a well-hyped session called “The VLE is Dead”. The debate included a number of well-rehearsed viewpoints on both sides of the divide between those who would like to do away with institutional learning systems and those who see them as essential (if perhaps a necessary evil). They’re essentially the same points I’ve been thrashing out with Tony Hirst, Martin Weller and others over the past few years.

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.

Category Categories: Architecture, Web 2.0 | 7 Comments »

Principles for future VLE/LMS development

Posted by niall on May 8, 2009

A group of us met earlier in the year from my office and from Learning and Teaching Solutions at the Open University to discuss some of our ideas around the future development of our Moodle-based VLE/LMS. Out of this discussion emerge, I think, some principles which could be taken into account when looking at new functionality. I offer these not as absolutes at this stage but am keen to hear what others at the OU and elsewhere think about 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.

Category Categories: Architecture, Moodle, OU VLE, Policies | 13 Comments »

Opening up the Open University online

Posted by niall on April 27, 2009

I’ve just been at a workshop with my colleagues Tony Hirst, Ross Mackenzie, Martin Weller and others looking at how the OU’s virtual learning environment could be enhanced by closer integration with other systems elsewhere. This could work both ways so that:

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.

Category Categories: Architecture, OU VLE | 2 Comments »

HEFCE’s new strategy for e-learning

Posted by niall on April 7, 2009

The Higher Education Funding Council for England has issued a document called Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology: A revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning. Naturally I was interested to see what they are recommending. Various other studies are quoted which demonstrate the benefits of elearning, and there are references to a few learning technologies:

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.

Category Categories: Adoption, Policies, eAssessment | Comments 1 Comment »

How your tutor can turn into your boss

Posted by niall on March 10, 2009

Jo Coldwell, Associate Head (Teaching and Learning) in the School of Information Technology at Deakin University in Australia talks about an initiative led by her colleague Annegret Goold to develop a parallel virtual organisation called United Enterprises. Students have to apply for jobs at this virtual organisation and then take the role of an employee, finding that their tutor suddenly becomes their boss. The experience is designed to be as realistic as possible; while plenty of assistance is available as students, they find that life can be a bit tougher in the workplace with their manager expecting different standards of behaviour and use of more professional language.

Jo Coldwell on Simulating the Workplace [10:00]

Learning Innovations Podcast by Niall Sclater is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at sclater.com.

Category Categories: Course design, Podcasts | No Comments »

Can open educational resources continue during the global slump?

Posted by niall on February 25, 2009

OpenLearn’s external funding has all but dried up, but the Open University sees enough value in the initiative to keep it going. With funding from the Hewlett Foundation the initiative was able to convert 5,400 hours of current course materials and a lot more archived course content into open educational resources, available freely to anyone with an internet connection who wants them. There are many other such initiatives funded by Hewlett, Mellon and other charitable foundations. What I want to know is: have we reached the tipping point for the OER movement yet? How many of the OER initiatives will fall by the wayside when the funding dries up? Are they a luxury we can’t afford in universities where budgets are currently being squeezed?

Stephen Downes looked at some models for sustainability and I thought it would be worth revisiting his models to see if they were still viable.

Many US institutions rely heavily for their funding from endowments, and Downes proposes that an endowment model might provide a mechanism for the ongoing funding of OER projects. However with interest rates at unprecedented low levels and an uncertain outlook for other investments in the current global economic climate the endowment fund would have to be immense to create an adequate income stream.

This downturn in the World economy may also negatively affect the viability of a donations model where a non-profit foundation requests and receives funds to maintain the OER initiative. Wikipedia is funded on this basis however it is able to run its operations with minimal staffing and relies on many thousands of volunteers to create and maintain a website which, though hugely comprehensive, is far less complex than the range of materials considered to be OERs.

A membership model is also proposed, where a consortium of institutions funds the OER initiative, hopefully leading to sharing of costs. There are successful examples of such groupings such as MERLOT, where member organisations contribute to the costs of maintaining and developing a repository of OERs. One of the major benefits of OERs is the branding and reputational potential for the institution which may be lost if efforts are subsumed into a wider membership organisation. On the other hand participation in organisations such as the Open Courseware Consortium is arguably a useful way for the visibility of individual university iniatives to be increased. Overall though, significant funding from each institution will still be required to increase and maintain the OERs.

In the conversion model consumers of free content are converted to paying customers. Many social software sites utilise this model so that the majority of users can use the system at no cost but those organisations and individuals who find the service vital to their business or lives are prepared to pay for additional services such as support or advanced features. Flickr is one example and Twitter is another site investigating commercialisation possibilities. Building commercial services around OERs to generate income may indeed be one of the only ways for institutions to justify the continuation of OER initiatives.

The contributor-pay model requires producers or commissioners of content to pay for the cost of making it freely available. Downes mentions the Wellcome Trust, which spends £400m producing nearly 3,500 papers each year, requires research funded by them to be made available freely and is prepared to pay considerable amounts of money to ensure that this happens. Meanwhile the Spanish Government is investigating a similar policy of open access to the results of all research funded with public monies and it’s likely that public bodies will follow suit around the World. This model may be appropriate for publications which require no maintenance however OERs can’t remain static and it’s unlikely that funding OER projects in this way will be sustainable.

A sponsorship model where sponsoring institutions raise their profile through logos or advertising does have potential, though intrusive advertisements are likely to be resented by users of OERs. To maximise the usefulness of OERs they will need to be able to be remixed by educators elsewhere who may of course use the opportunity to remove commercial advertising. Advertising and sponsorship is simply not going to provide the levels of income required.

The institutional model is the dominant current model for sustainability and includes all the major initiatives such as OCW, OpenLearn and Connexions. Here an institution assumes responsibility for the ongoing maintenance of the OERs after initial funding from an outside body is reduced or ceases. This will require considerable ongoing funding and can only be justified if there is an acceptance that the costs are outweighed by the benefits. If OER development practices are viewed as a additional responsibility for faculty they are unlikely to be sustainable. They may therefore have to become an integral part of teaching responsibilities and the educational mission of institutions with their production recognised in promotion and tenure processes. See Stacey and Smith and Casserley.

Also listed is a governmental model where governments provide funding for OER developments. In the UK, JISC is about to fund a programme for the creation of OERs. However such initiatives are often designed to fund the development of the resources with less thought given to their sustainability; governments are less likely to commit resource to the ongoing maintenance and development of repositories of OERs. Maybe the Worldwide recession may provide the impetus for this with funding for the development of teaching materials being withdrawn from individual institutions and pooled for the centralised or collaborative development of OERs, maximising the government’s return on investment (though also of course making the materials freely available to competing nations).

Finally, Downes mentions partnerships and exchanges where institutions exchange their expertise in OER production and the OERs themselves. This is a pooling of resources in a similar way to the governmental model but arranged by the institutions themselves rather than being imposed from on high. It has the potential to increase the range and quality of OERs but still requires substantial ongoing financial commitment from the institutions themselves – currently in short supply.

In reality none of these nine funding models will be sufficient to maintain the majority of the current OER initiatives which are based in a single institution. Where organisations wish to maintain the momentum of their OER programmes they may need to draw on a range of external and internal funding sources and to weave the production and maintenance of OERs into their institutional fabric so that they’re not seen as an additional burden. At the OU procedures and systems are being put in place for formal course materials and OERs to be created simultaneously so that there is minimal additional overhead for the production of the open materials.

Category Categories: Content | Tag Tags: open educational resources | 3 Comments »

Large Scale Educational Podcasting

Posted by niall on February 5, 2009

In the first of a series of podcasts about learning innovations, I interview Mike Richards, course chair of a new OU course planned for Autumn 2010: “My Digital Life”. This innovative course teaches programming principles without students having to type in any code – instead they use a drag and drop environment developed at MIT called Scratch. Also every student is supplied with a hardware toolkit containing a microphone, light meter, temperature sensor and motion detector.

Podcasting seems a bit old-fashioned in comparison with these innovations but what caught my attention about this course was the fact that 40-50 podcasts are being recorded from around the World to form part of the course content.

Mike Richards on Large Scale Educational Podcasting [13:32]

Learning Innovations Podcast by Niall Sclater is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at sclater.com.

Category Categories: Course design, Podcasts | No Comments »

Why everyone will have an iphone within two years

Posted by niall on December 26, 2008

I’ve been avoiding Apple devices since around 1996 when I decided that having both a Mac and a PC on my desk was getting ridiculous. While Macs were in many ways better than Windows-based machines they were clearly losing the adoption war. The arrival of the iPod failed to win me back, perhaps because they were so trendy. Instead I bought a Sony Walkman. The more recent appearance of MacBooks in meetings in front of their smug owners increasingly put me off the brand. But last week I had my road to Cupertino experience. I bought an iPhone. I’m now a convert, a neophyte of Steve Jobs. Here’s why.

User interface
The interface is superb, a positive pleasure to use. The applications have a minimum of functionality appropriate for a handheld device. Navigation, rather than being problematic is intuitive and includes satisfying effects like the rebound when you get to the end of a list. Doing away with the need for a stylus was a masterstroke and I’m now finding the on-screen keyboard easy to use.

There is some room for improvement: writing this blog post using WordPress is a awkward; navigating round the GPS application is not straightforward. These issues are not however insurmountable.

Convergence
This device brings together so much functionality that there really is no need for anything else to clutter up your pockets and in many situations you’ll be able to dispense with a laptop now. This must mark the death of the PDA too. My MP3 player is now unlikely to see the light of day again. I’ll not be investing in a GPS now either. I will still however need a separate compact camera or SLR with me at times though but only because photography is a bit of a hobby.

Connectivity
Finally I have almost ubiquitous web access on a screen that makes it viable, particularly if the site is formatted for mobile devices. Where a wireless LAN is available it can connect to that, otherwise 3G connection speeds are pretty good. Even my “net generation” daughter was bowled over that she could watch YouTube videos ok it as we drove through the English Lake District. Best of all, due to a mistake by my ISP we currently have no broadband for several days over the Christmas period. In this household that is probably worse than running out of heating oil. The iPhone at least allows me continued if somewhat limited Internet access.

User evangelists
I have heard so many people say how much they love these things that this was one of the main factors in me purchasing one. It is very easy to impress people by demoing them and I really should be on commission…

Replacements
Within two years most people will be replacing their mobile phones. It will become increasingly pointless and difficult not to get a new device with this kind of functionality.

Why I’m actually wrong and not quite everyone will have an iPhone

These devices are pretty inaccessible for people with some visual impairments or mobility issues.
There are of course other 3G phones in the market and competitors will produce machines better than this pretty quickly.
iPhones are more expensive than some other phones and in the UK you’re forced to sign up with one supplier only: O2.
It’s irritating to have to load the iTunes software onto your PC to get the phone functioning at all (though it did install easily and works well) and there are continual attempts to get you to sign up with the iTunes store. I have resisted these so far but will be forced to do so if I want additional software.

Will I be able to learn from my iPhone?
Learning providers are going to have to start providing their LMSs/VLEs and other websites in mobile friendly formats. Small easily digestible chunks of learning content, quizes, videos and podcasts all make sense through this medium and the possibilities for interaction between learners and for user-generated content are massive. It has taken me quite a long time but I’ve been able to write this blog post fairly easily using a device which I can already feel is going to cause me separation anxiety if I lose it.

Category Categories: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Summative online assessment: disaster and triumph

Posted by niall on November 26, 2008

I’ve just spent two days at the e-Assessment in Practice Conference at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham. I felt a bit out of it not being in military uniform or being followed around by a dog but it’s been a good opportunity to get back into the area of eassessment.

Helicopter

Two of the presentations dealt with issues around large-scale summative eassessment ie big groups of students lined up in rows doing online tests under exam conditions. Bill Warburton and Helena Knowles from Southampton University were running an ambitious summative assessment pilot where students from satellite campuses in places such as Winchester were bused into the Southampton to sit the exam. Bill talked about the military-style planning for the large cohorts of students, testing of the workstations in advance, training of the invigilators with eassessment staff on hand to assist them… The preparation was meticulous for the first assessments.

Then disaster struck.

A flood meant that the data centre was knee-deep in water which took out some of the servers and the networks. Several of the eassessments had to be abandoned. All that planning, that bringing around of the skeptics…. the learning technologist’s nightmare. But Bill still seems to be smiling (perhaps through gritted teeth), still has a job, and Southampton will be continuing to take the pilots further.

At Manchester University, the push came from the University President who was so concerned about the institution’s poor results in the National Student Survey that he saw online assessment as a key way to enhance feedback to students.

Julie Andrews was tasked with coordinating much of the eassessment activity at Manchester and, like Bill at Southampton, found summative assessment an order of magnitude more difficult to organise than the formative assessments she’d been providing to students up till then. There were so many things to organise: seats allocated to students as they walked in, passwords required to view the exam paper, the Respondus LockDown Browser used so that students could only access the test, paper copies of the exam paper and answer sheets available in case of failure…

Some extraordinary statistics back up Julie’s claims that Manchester’s foray into summative eassessment has been exceptionally successful. For Julie, the increased numbers of students in recent years have meant that providing individual feedback on assessments is well nigh impossible – this way the marking and feedback are instantaneous. Most impressively though, there have been massive improvements in exam performance and hugely reduced student dropout. Other factors to do with the course have remained fairly constant so Julie attributes the improvements entirely to the use of eassessment.

And Manchester is used to rain. They had no floods to disrupt the eassessments; just once in four years has Julie had to resort to the paper-based backup procedures.

Category Categories: eAssessment | Comments 1 Comment »

What is a virtual world anyway?

Posted by niall on November 26, 2008

Relive08 conference in Second Life

Is an online gaming environment a virtual world? Can a virtual world be purely text-based? One of the best presentations at last week’s #relive08 conference was by Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins who spent half an hour with us distilling two years of her research in classifying virtual worlds. She has identified four main criteria:

Persistence: a virtual world can’t be paused and exists whether or not a user is logged in.
Multi-user: it must be populated or have the potential for population.
Avatars: a user can create an agent which performs actions such as fighting, expressing emotion or simply moving through a space.
WAN: it is facilitated via a wide area network with the potential to be large and global rather than local.

Intellagirl started to study 150 virtual worlds which met these criteria but gave up after 75 as she had the evidence she needed. She developed a classification scheme for virtual worlds based on 10 facets emerging from her research:

Dominant content form (text-dominated / image-dominated / mixed) – while we’re getting more familiar with environments such as Second Life, Intellagirl, clearly considers that a text-based system can still be a virtual world.
Dominant user to user communications form (text / voice / mixed)
Stigmergy (stigmergic / non-stigmergic /conditional) – one example of stigmergy is an ant’s ability to leave a trail behind it which others can follow. In World of Warcraft you can’t manipulate the environment in this way; in Second Life you can.
Object ownership (private / public / conditional ie sometimes an object can be shared, other times it can’t)
User identity formation (static / conditional / free)
Access (public / fee / limited or private)
User relationship with other users (competitive / conditional / collaborative) – Second Life would be on the collaborative side (Intellagirl has never had an orc jump out from a bush and try to kill her in Second Life…)
User to environment relationship (competitive / conditional / collaborative)
Access to groups (private or invite / public / none)
Number of groups you can be a member of (many / one / none) – in gaming communities you are have to have a connection to one stable group only when the environment is trying to kill you…

It then becomes possible to classify for example World of Warcraft against Second Life and at a glance you can see that these are very very different kinds of environment.

Intellagirl's virtual world classification

Category Categories: 3-D Worlds | No Comments »

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