Choosing a forum

There must be hundreds of collaboration platforms available to me in principle, but I'm usually tempting to pick low-hanging fruit. Following a well-established pattern, I need to taste the fruit before responding to advice.

I've just this week re-opened a Blogger blog, Questions of Project Management, for some of my students, in preference to instituting a WebCT course that 180 of them would have to register for and then maybe not use. I don't care if search engines find out what we talk about, but I do anonymise enquiries (which I still field by email).

In Systems Engineering Management (MSc with predominantly industrial delegates) we will shortly go the WebCT route, simply to provide a secure forum and minimal course information. Whether this will expand toward content delivery is unresolved.

Yesterday I became aware of Courseforum and Projectforum, which looks like wiki, but tidied up and given dancing shoes. It's got RSS integration (both in and out) and tells you about changes by email – wha-hey! This could be a solution to my lightweight VLE and forum needs, but like anything in this second wave of development, they want money. We use a phpWiki in the MSSL TMG for internal chatter, but it hasn't caught fire as yet (only ~6 users!).

I'm going to be more scientific about observing what happens with all these fora, so in the mode of a paper, here would be the abstract:

We describe how and why we used the blog-publishing web service Blogger to provide students with supplementary information relevant to an assignment in an otherwise conventionally-taught UCL course. We explore how Blogger’s characteristics fitted the demands of this publication task, and compare its facilities with other forum tools. A specific comparison is made with Discussions feature of WebCT, where we look at other courses involving the same tutors. The effect of the features of each setting on the nature of the interaction with students is explored. Both tools are compared to the use of e-mail to achieve the same ends. A sample of Students’ own response to these methods is shown, and some conclusions are drawn.

I plan to present this at UCL's next Teaching and Learning Event.

Natural Podcast

Wow, even Nature's got a podcast.



They join NASA, Stanford, New Scientist, the BBC and everybody else in the race to your brain. Earholes are the new eyeballs.

What's on my ipod? Mark Kermode's film reviews make me laugh out loud on the train (during half-term I got a few who's that scary man, mummy? looks from six year olds). And "我学习普通话" with Chinesepod.com.

I use ipodder and itunes.

In 2015, those six year olds will wonder why I bothered writing this.

Blackboard buys WebCT

I heard today that Blackboard is set to buy out WebCT.

Random selection of links to merger commentary by independent observers:

• Auricle Bath
• John Dale Warwick
• D'arcy Norman Calgary
• More roundup Stephen Downdes
  

There's a great discusssion on Slashdot where, guess what, both products get slagged off.
This being Slashdot, by people who claim to know a thing or two.  Admins and students are the
majority of the audience, but there's a few "professors" in there too. It's worth a giggle, if you
can stave off the feeling of here-we-go-again depresion.
I have some insight on this topic as a university professor. I've used
both systems, and I was on the Academic Technology Committee when it was
advising the CTO and CIO on purchasing decisions for such systems. We
wound up paying for both. As you say, they both suck, and I'm sure
whatever unholy combination is produced will suck even worse. At the
time - 1999 or 2000 I believe - "open source" was something my
colleagues on the committee had heard of but didn't know anything about,
and the CTO and CIO were computer-savvy but looked on open source with
disdain (this made sense as they were constantly wined and dined by
folks who represent closed source companies looking for big deals). I
was teaching summers at UCLA at the time and had the opportunity to use
ClassWeb [ucla.edu], an open source alternative to such tools. My
experience with the tool was exemplary; I thought it was easy to use, it
fulfilled the necessary functions and was not needlessly confusing for
students. It was also free. Best of all, the developer worked at UCLA so
when there were features I wanted I was able to ask him for them and
they were available in days. It was truly a classic case of the
superiority of the open source model working well. For much less the
price we paid for Blackboard and CT, which all the students complain
about, we could have hired programmers to handle coding issues on
classweb and had an open source solution that we could fine tune at
will. But when I made the suggestion, the feeling around the table
(particularly from the CTO and CIO) was, shut up hippie....

Another cycle

Having spent quite a bit of effort getting the e-learning horses into their harnesses last year and wondering whether all the trouble was worth it, this year could be the one where some furrows are usefully ploughed with less sweat on my part.

It has certainly been very liberating to simply direct students to the virtual store cupboard, without having to fill each of their baskets. Today's course material distribution takes ten seconds.

Me: "Log on to webCT, you'll see my course there, grab what you need"
Them: "er... great!"

Increasingly, students will expect more and more direct provision of on-line information. Here's a trendspotting survey in the Grauniad (spotted in Cutting Through). The conclusions talk about media buying habits of the youth, but these are trends that will probably affect student expectations in universities too. In not too many years' time, it has to be stressed. Next year's first tutorial could go like:

Them: "Hey grandad, I've looked for your RSS feed and course documents last week, where are they? I want my money back. I'm off."
Me: "er... wait!"

New UCL blog spotted - any more?

Peter at the Management Studies Centre has started a team blog like this one, called Thriving on Chaos. Know any more bloggers in UCL?

The idea of aggregating abundances of blogs is dealt with by James Farmer in BlogSavvy, which seems to be a spinoff from his existing Incorporated Subversion.

UK Education resources : changes afoot

Attentive readers will note that this is cross-post from Double Loop.

My usual mode of operation in the edu-game revolves around the annual round of production and feedback linked to the academic year. I'm looking ahead to future concepts right now, and it's around this time that I start trawling around the national resources. I've just spotted that the entity formerly known as LSTN has mutated into the UK Higher Education Academy.

The reason I'm looking here is to get a sense of what practitioners are doing with learning technology around the country. I'm suspicious that what I'm seeing is not representative of the best. Certainly sites the the UK HEA don't fit the zeitgeist of now, and more importantly my working practices. No attribution (Who are you guys?), no contribution (no comments boxes!), no RSS (what, none at all?). Too many empty strategy papers (aarrgh PDF!! arrgh dead URLs in the PDFs!!!) and out of date case studies.

An example, I came across an LSTN-branded working paper, in the Physical sciences subsite (why?), entitled Virtual Learning Environments stating that

The most basic form of asynchronous communication with computer technology is the use of email, where a message is sent and the reply is sent later i.e. asynchronously. So, all VLEs should provide at least basic email facilities.

What, university students don't have email they can use? Why are these dated papers still being circulated? Hasn't the community moved on in the last two years?

I suspect the valuable practical lessons are out there somewhere not being reported, at least not here. Back to the blogfields.

I'm ramping up my orbits around blogdom looking for inspiration. A very small sample can be seen in the sidebar of this blog. I'm getting a consistent impression that the best learning technology practitioners, at least the ones who blog, are seriously struggling against two things.

1. Managerialism and corporate approaches to learning technology implementations. Example: teachers being required by directive or circumstance to use a particular VLE tool.

2. Directed experiences of the learner, i.e. prior programming of a student's responses at course-design time.

To some extent these two aspects support each other. Heavy tooling up leads to industrialisation of production, whereas the opposite models are also mutually supportive. Many commentators are advocating a pick and mix (a.k.a. the filling station model) toward both provider technology (blog, wiki, podcast, webpage, VLE if you must) and learner acitivity (browsing, using Google, emailing each other, discovery).

Edublogger awards

... representing some of the best in Educational Blogging in the past year or so.
Expect to see more of some of these in the sidebar soon.

From Incorporated Subversion.

UCL Teaching and Learning Strategy 2005

It's good to see the buzz-alphabetti of ICT and VLE mentioned, among other things, in the UCL Teaching and Learning Strategy that was announced recently - here (restricted to UCL staff). It looks as though some key viewpoints made at earlier consultative workshops were incorporated. Now, how can we turn this into implementable plans at Departmental level next session?

Interactive whiteboards

I gave a demonstration of how to use an "interactive whiteboard" to a group of lecturers yesterday, and it's fair to say they were very impressed. They were lucky, actually, because they'd inherited a teaching room left behind by the Ergonomics department, and so coincidentally they inherited a large and perfectly-configured interactive whiteboard.

These things are really good to use. They're one of the few things in the area of "learning technology" which is genuinely quite intuitive to use. Simply use it like an ordinary projector screen, but when you want to scrawl a note on top of one of your slides, or use the mouse to perform some action, you simply touch the screen with your finger!

This model comes with some very handy extras, such as character recognition (it will turn your scrawled markings into neatly-formatted computer text), different colours of "pen" to write with, etc. Try one out, if you ever get a chance...

Goose is getting fat

Term 1 at UCL is coming to a close and there’s almost time to reflect on my e-learning practices.

I’ve been running a course – MSSL’s ST4 – almost entirely free of the photocopier. Does this make it e-learning? Who cares?

Notes/slides were delivered using our VLE, WebCT, but lectures ran as normal – using materials largely unadapted from the previous year (I have inherited this particular course). The existence of the course discussion forum was mentioned, but by and large ignored by the 15 students. To be honest, I think they have better things to do than chat.

Similar use was made of the VLE by me and my colleague for our Space Technology course, PHYS3C64/SS15. The online materials supplemented the normal lectures.
I’m planning a similar use for Project Management next term.

I think the students regard whatever we are doing as pretty normal. They are probably surprised if a course doesn’t at least have a web page. By and large they cope with many of the hurdles of the VLE very quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing how 80+ undergrads, who aren’t necessarily techies, get on. This time, they’ll be receiving a dead tree edition of their notes anyway so WebCT will be used for extras: optional slide-sets, some coursework briefing documents, and a forum for coursework Q+A.

Outside of my own sphere, I haven’t heard much of the last institutional workshop on e-learning strategy, nor have I been able to keep up with much more than my immediate colleagues. What about you?

Overviews of e-learning research papers

For those of you who'd love to read more research papers on e-learning but don't know where to look, this website seems like it will be very useful:

http://www.elearning-reviews.org/

It's run jointly between Stanford University and a centre in Switzerland, and compiles brief reviews of research papers related to e-learning. I've only just discovered it - the site is a bit ugly but the content looks really useful.

Julie's Introduction

Hello, I'm Julie Voce and I'm one of two Learning Technologies Support Officers. My role is to provide support, advice and training on all aspects of Learning Technology. The main area I deal with is the Virtual Learning Environment, WebCT, however this will probably change as people embrace other technologies like Computer Assisted/Aided Assessment.

To let you know a little more about my background, I have a MEng in Computer Science so in theory I'm quite techy with experience of programming in C, Java and obscure languages like Haskell and Modula-2. My first job after graduating was at UMIST (now part of the University of Manchester) on an EU funded research project which developed a piece of language learning software for intermediate to advanced learners of French (Freetext). Whilst at UMIST I also taught on the MSc in Computer Assisted Language Learning, where our students had to develop a WebCT course and I am pleased to say they did remarkably well.

For more information about learning technology see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/learningtechnology/

Let's not go there

In Derek Morrison's Auricle, a frightening 2nd-hand account of rampant corporatisation - use the Official VLE or get a slap. Derek:

Message from Earth to institution; weblogs, wikis etc - you need to support them.

The First Party was James Farmer - article here - note the many, many messages of outrage and support.

The paradox is, I suppose, that teachers require support and infrastructure to deliver their teaching. What they don't want is for the provision, when it comes, to completely dictate their teaching practices. If we can't have provision then we'll require to be left alone to work. That's natural enough when we are talking about £200 OHP units but not necesserly the outcome when the technology costs are orders of magnitude greater.

Creativity is not an optional extra in the education field. I sincerely hope our institution doesn't go this way (towards a proprietary monoculture of tools), and, to date it doesn't look like it will. An example of second-mover advantage, perhaps?

The time taken to add one lecture

OK, so I’ve got this 2-hour lecture, ready to go onto the OHP, for Space Systems Technology. The notes, in practically book-chapter quality, are already on the WebCT course, so I shouldn’t feel compelled to put anything else online. But I do. Somehow, I want to make the customer offering complete (note how I come out with spontaneous marketing-speak now?), and also make a handy on-screen revision tool that might jog the memory more than memory itself.

Let’s see what’s involved in providing Powerpoint – they like to print out the Notes pages, and why not – and Impatica versions of an existing presentation. I’ve already anticipated a little by having a sequence of slides, illustrative of the progressive degradations that you get when compressing images, be longer than I would use for actual overheads. The sequence itself is like frames of a movie, and the learning point is all about comparison rather than analysis of any particular one.

First of all, I make sure I’ve got my Powerpoint file ready (it’s called “processing” and the course is called PHYS3C64), so let’s start the clock. Here are the steps:

1. Transfer processing.ppt (786 kb) to a network drive
2. Log on to server running Impatica 3.0.2
3. Find the source file, Add to batch list. Enable navigation controls and HTML output. (There’s loads more : zip, SCORM, ipk)
4. For this one, I don’t want to introduce two lots of compression artefacts, so I go to the Media tab and (here’s hoping this is right) set the JPEG compression to 100%. I assume that normally, it will compress the whole slide-image as one entity.
5. Oops I spotted an option “apply extra compression” in Output Files. Turn that off.
6. Hit Impaticize!
7. 38 slides take a minute or two.
8. OK, now I’ve got a processing-imp.jar. Turns out it’s 930 kb. Haul this back to my PC, along with the 1 k html wrapper it makes, and the copy of the player it spits out.
9. Bundle these puppies together in a dummy folder.
10. I already have the 3c64 setup as a Network Place – using the webdav info provided in MyWebCT. Copy the dummy folder across. For some reason I can’t copy files this way, only folders. However, I can move files once they are present on the server, so I put them where I want now.
11. Log on to WebCT.
12. The next bit takes ages, it seems. Putting two additional files at arbitrary places in an existing content module seems overly clunky (I know, I know, it’s because HTML forms don’t generate Events). WebCT doesn’t help me by not having a proper file browser dialog for selecting to-be-linked file, just this huge list in a tiny font.
13. Switch to View mode for a quick test. Press F11 to get more actual screen back. Click through the subject icon, this link here and Boing! my first slide.
14. Having minimal/no compression is good for me (I’m working on a fast-ish network) since all my text and graphics are clean. Now how about that series of compressed photos. The slides are now coming out at 800 x 600 rather than my native 1024 wide. Excellent – all OK.
15. My native powerpoint file is launched ok from WebCT (although it leaves an empty screen on the browser – weird).
16. Check that the titles are consistent in this module’s table of contents. It should say “Science Data Processing – for on screen viewing” and “Science Data Processing – Powerpoint for Printing”. Getting the phrases rhythmically the same is important, I feel. One thing I hate is when the browser launches a helper app without warning!
17. All done. Update Student View so they actually see the new stuff. Takes no time (but funny how it goes through all the hidden files too). All I have to do now is wait for the complaints.
18. About 40 minutes, including typing this lot. I’ve probably missed Top of the Pops now.

Dan's introduction

As requested, allow me to introduce myself. I work as the FISO for the Life Sciences faculty, a job which centres on staff IT training and advice, and website development, but also happens to include quite a lot of e-learning-related work.

In many cases the e-learning work has been using WebCT, since that's the main e-learning vehicle provided at UCL, but also important is Tony Gardner-Medwin's LAPT tool. It provides self-paced learning through questions and answers; I've had some involvement in developments with that.

I do have an interest in website development and programming, which has meant that I've been able to develop various web-based tools. Here's a personal project of mine which I've been working on:
http://hiv.sourceforge.net/
(N.B. It's a personal project done in spare time - not connected with UCL!)

My UCL homepage:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/is/fiso/lifesciences/

Let's have a meeting!

But not like this: Dilbert

Auricle ... diverse platforms

Dan suggested we look at Auricle, Bath's e-learning website (actually a blog, though more formal than this one).

This will go in the sidebar (the bit over there, under our names) when I get time. Meantime, one article caught my eye directly, about diversity of toolsets in e-learning. Derek Morrison says

I put forward a couple of refreshing alternatives to the 'e-learning=proprietary VLE' furrow now being ploughed by many institutions. I think we have a lot to learn from institutions that have opted for an eTools and services model as an important part of delivering on their learning and teaching strategies, so I'm revisiting this theme today.

More.

Please Welcome ...

... Dan Stowell and Julie Voce, as team members. Whilst probably known to most readers here anyway, can I suggest that they say a little bit about themselves?

WebCT conference

From reading the October 04 WebCT newsletter, it looks like we just have enough time to convince our HoD's to send us for tapas-leave in Barcelona - the annual WebCT jamboree.

e-learning reports - introduction

Hello, and welcome to e-learning reports.

This blog has been set up by staff at UCL to illustrate, entirely unofficially, how the development of e-learning tools works in practice. We don't have any particular message, system or theory to impart. We are not experts by any means, nor are we e-learning strategists. This will be a record of our observations "doing" teaching through electronic media. Education practices are continually changing, now more than ever. Taking part in this blog is one easy way of keeping in touch.

Use the site feed for an easy way of keeping abreast of new articles. Paste this feed URL into your feedreader (Help! What does that mean?) : http://elearningreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml

The team members will be reporting on their experiences of creating courseware, adapting existing materials, and incorporating electronic tools in their teaching practices. Some of the team members may be learners, and we'll see reports on their perspective, too. The reports you'll see will be fresh from the field, reflecting the reality of teaching practice.

We'll also recommend websites, blogs and other resources that will allow you connect with other interesting e-learning topics and practitioners.

Along the way, we'll learn about what works (and a little bit about why), reveal common frustrations and difficulties -- and their solutions -- and hopefully inspire others to get involved too.

Comments from you will always be welcome; in fact, they are expected of you!