Hi Niall,

These principles seem sound enough to me. We developed a set of principles about one-and-a-half years ago, which has a clear overlap with yours. Check out our Dutch document on “Principles for a personal learning and working environment for the Open Universiteit Nederland“

Hi Steven – thanks.

Hi Emma, hmmm, I’ve been trying to learn Dutch / Flemish by osmosis by following Dutch and Belgian tweets but this document might be a tad challenging….

Yes, one thing I’ve been thinking about for Elgg is whether or not it’s possible to create accounts that allow comments only – so, you can have posts etc. that are visible to a group only, if members of that group are also external they can comment on a post etc., but can’t create something. Also, presumably, if you had a system whereby non-institutional accounts had to be invited by institutional account holders, unless a student has a sideline in Viagra sales, (though can’t see that would fund anyone through a degree!) – hopefully will minimise unsavoury characters!

(Disclaimer: These opinions are mine alone and may well be diametrically opposed to those of my employer! Also, this is a really long reply. Just something I felt like writing a response to after the end of the working day here… Sorry.)

I agree with most of the principles, but do have a few issues.

The biggest is with Principle 1 – online collaborative content development. It’s not clear: are we talking about *courses*, University-produced content, or student-produced content? I’ve got answers for both…

With the first, is there evidence that our academics actually want to, or need to, engage in online collaborative content development? Our Structured Content system is based in Word [despite a heavy, complex layer of XML on top] purely because there was extreme resistance to alternatives. And we have our work cut out to make everyone use that consistently.

At that point, it seemed that our authors would be happy to use any content development environment we ask – as long as it’s Word. I don’t believe that’s likely to have changed much. Movement on this kind of process issue is even slower than our development efforts…

Content creation here is big on control and workflows and I don’t see that changing – there doesn’t seem to be any demand to say ‘okay we’ll get rid of this whole process and a couple of authors will just slap up whatever, not bother to get it edited, and post it online’. (We can of course offer that if courses do want to produce more immediate material, e.g. via a course-team blog on the course site.)

I often explain the Structured Content system to people. When I tell them there’s absolutely no way to edit course material live on the website – they have to go back to the source Word document [psst: you can actually download the XML file and edit it from that, but don’t tell anyone] and work from that – the response is universally positive. They’re really pleased that the editing process can fit within existing University structures and workflows.

Personally I think it would be pretty cool to have a little ‘edit’ link on each page where you can pull up a nice little JavaScript xml editor and tweak the content of that page. But except me… er and maybe the OpenLearn project… nobody actually wants that.

There’s also little evidence that online collaborative content creation is desired for students. Few courses are even using the wiki, and yes it’s perhaps both a little basic and a little hard to use (with usability improvements planned soonish to deal with the worst parts). When I met students who’d been using the wiki, there was considerable support for a view that they would prefer to use Word – not the fancy newest online collaborative version, just Word. I don’t know how widespread that view is, but I suspect ‘very’. That may be partly due to the way courses design activities – but again, that’s something that will change slowly if at all.

Many years ago as part of Lyceum we developed one of the first true synchronous document collaboration systems, which I think was pretty great (and I’m not the one who actually coded that bit!), but nobody used it except the one not very successful course it was designed for.

So I don’t think online collaboration to develop ‘University’ content is feasible or particularly desirable in the short term, and I think online collaboration on content for students – beyond what you basically achieve from a forum with the odd attached document file – is not necessarily something students want either. (And a lot of students are pretty resistant to collaboration in general because it means somebody else can mess you up..!)

Next, Principle 6. Nobody currently uses mobile devices to access our material. (Yes I have the stats to back this up – and as far as I’m aware, most of our systems work perfectly well on the iphone [I may be wrong in which case this number is invalid], so it’s not that they can’t use it if they want. We’re looking at 0.1% and probably most of that is people who work here trying to see if it works on their iphone..)

My opinion is that people do not want to read textual OU course content on their mobile phone. They don’t want to do online assessments on their mobile phone. They mostly don’t even want to watch videos on their mobile phone – especially when those videos are part of course content and integrated with the text they don’t want to read and the assessments they don’t want to do.

And larger mobile devices are going to improve to the point where (so long as we are reasonable about screen size requirements) there isn’t much difference with a ‘real computer’ – netbooks (which you can now easily get with cheap pay-as-you-go 3G connections that supplement wi-fi for OU material anywhere, any time) and MIDs are examples of this.

In other words I think principle 6 should be:

Appropriate content is provided in mobile-specific formats.

It could be useful to provide certain information (tutorial dates and locations?) in a form that’s accessible via mobile devices – and I don’t mean iphones, but your average 3-year-old phone with a rubbishy WAP browser. And it might be useful to provide some information via SMS messages too.But OU course content? The kind of mobile devices people might want to access it on can now, or soon will, read it.

Principle 5:

The ‘outsourcing’ of email provision (and yes I know this is a fait accompli) is pretty crazy in my view. We don’t need to outsource email provision. We need to stop it. If any email provision is needed, it’s a simple forwarding system (ie so that people can use a nice @student.open.ac.uk address if they like), which we can very easily supply in-house, probably using a simple form on top of off-the-shelf mail software.

I also have concerns about integrating Google apps (let alone, gods help us all, whatever MS is pushing). What is the point of building an ‘integrated’ VLE with an even slightly coherent interface which is supposed to be ultra-simplified for our students, if we are not going to use it, or are going to integrate half the features from systems with totally different interfaces and principles?

I recently watched some videos from recent usability tests here and many of our students are a million miles away from the ‘twittering masses’ that some imagine inhabit the Web. They don’t know the word ‘blog’ and are still having trouble with scroll bars.

Nothing wrong with that at all – I mean everyone knows how to use some technology, for instance toasters, because toast is delicious. But who wants to waste time learning to use a computer? Computers are dull and they keep going wrong. They don’t make toast. Some people might think computers – and internet communication tools like those Niall’s post refers to – are in fact the best things since sliced bread, but we’re a tiny minority. 🙂

So I understand the lack of familiarity entirely and it really reinforces my view that we need to keep trying to make things as simple as possible (= with as few features as possible). In lots of cases, including things I designed, we’re a long way from that and we need to improve. I don’t think our systems will get simpler and more consistent by incorporating a diverse range of complex third party software.

But I agree with principles 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8. That’s pretty good going, right? 🙂

In fact we just finished a bunch of stuff (including the neat little integrated conversation-voice-recorder) for Languages in Structured Content which is absolutely principle 2 here, and I think it’ll really help to make it possible to produce good quality interactive language teaching material.

Can I make up a principle 9 which is that we should not implement anything at all, ever, as a result of cringe-inducing buzzword technology which may have managed to attract and lose a lot of venture capital, or fleece the gullible, but clearly have no practical benefit? I was amused/horrified to find that there is some consideration (albeit not much) being given to Second Life now – come on, that was two years ago, surely we should at least follow a more recent buzzword! Let’s go for Twitter, it would be kind of fun to see if our academics could write an entire course in 140 characters.

Oh, and more seriously, my principle 10 would be to let students have their say across all areas and in all cases – even if we might not like it. Perhaps this is part of principle 4, maybe just my opinion on that scale… I’d like to see student rating (active and passive/automatic) of resources and activities – if one piece of teaching material sucks, let them click to that effect, and let other students see that it only has a 1-star rating. If nobody bothers to follow a link, let’s show that publicly. Let’s make sure students can leave public comments all over our course material even – especially – if those comments are ‘this explanation is rubbish, but I found a wikipedia page which is much clearer, here’s the link’.

@Emma re BlackCT (boo, hiss, death metal etc): Even the open-source Moodle (hooray! angel choir sound, etc) which provides the basis of the OU’s VLE is ‘a world apart’ from some parts of Niall’s principles. 🙂 But not all of them.

@Niall re sharing content with anyone they like – it’s not just the ‘but why? people can use that anyway if they like’ third-party app integration, I’m pretty sure we also plan to support that through our existing internal sharing facilities once there is back-end support for email self-registration. I don’t really understand why it has taken so long to get that under way. Although I’m sure lots of people say that about things in the area I work in, too. 🙂

Niall, all,

I think to address your outlined principles (which I largely agree with) consideration needs to be given to systems design issues. This is because it impacts on the readiness of implementation of what you are looking for.

No offence to Martin D. but Moodle is monolithic and anarchic in its architecture. It is based on a very good one man PhD project that has now become overgrown. Too much of the code has embedded functionality that should be separated out in different modules with their own APIs.

If we were starting from scratch to design a VLE of similar functionality to Moodle and that enabled ready integration with other systems at the OU (or any educational establishment) then I would strongly advocate a distributed architecture. Some aspects essential in this in my view would be:

– A distributed architecture based on web services

– The complete seperation of the interface from the application (this is not the case in Moodle and is a major flaw imho)

– Content to be stored in a proper repository and indexed with standardised metadata. (Not the case in Moodle with stores content un-indexed in a course directory.)

This would enable: the effective use of content personalisation in response to course context and accessibility needs and preferences; facilitate mobile learning and enable flexible integration with other university systems.

There is an interesting by product of adopting this approach: the distinction between VLEs and PLEs becomes effectively blurred with both being implementable based on the same core software modules.

I hope to continue this discussion with you in-house.

Cheers,

Martyn

Just thought I’d add my two cents. I like the 10 points, mainly because it helps us all focus our comments and tweak them until the fit ur consensus. I thought I’d mention how I think some of these points could be addressed whilst provided a balance between control and freedom for all concerned. The assumption always being that figuring out the balance is always going to be the toughest task but worth doing because it helps us deliver the most on many levels.

My first question is whether the VLE should be tasked with producing every interface or should they produce a few interfaces that everyone can use and also some lightweight interfaces for each module or feature that is part of the VLE. By lightweight I mean light in development time and features, , .

The point being there is only so much resource in terms of people and money so where should it best be spent. In terms of balance between control and flexiblity and in terms of being feature rich but also providing simple interfaces should the VLE developers do everything or should we determine the best separation of our concerns and focus on core components. If the VLE built a robust well featured base that had good programming interfaces that would fit the skill set that’s in place. They could then build the simple interfaces that support the majority who need them. . I feel this approach would fit our resource and provide a basic minimum of quality everyone can enjoy whilst also allowing for other developments. I think this fits what Sam suggests.

Then I’d suggest others with resources such as course teams could develop alternative solutions using the programming interface that provides the more in depth and flexible features. The course teams could do this on a relatively small scale and let their solutions evolve. With regular review I’d hope it then becomes possible to bring the best performing course team developments into the VLE once these developments have matured, assuming it is strategically sound to do so.

Thus a natural evolution could occur. With the VLE team building a sound framework to support the basic needs of everyone while those with specific needs and the resources to cater for those needs able to build extra functionality and assume the responsiblity for the solution.

Just an idea, I could elaborate a lot more but it’s the general concept that’s important. Implementation would need wider discussion to ensure it fits properly into wider plans.