Technology

information & communication technology

Universities and Course Management Systems

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Steve Epstein responds to an article in Syllabus describing the purchase of a proprietary course management system. Epstein feels that universities should not purchase CMS because they would be provided for free by content providers (read: textbook publishers). Epstein states:

In doing her financial analysis, Pletcher reported that she "considered license fee, plus five years maintenance, plus installation costs." Missing from the analysis are the cost of faculty development and the cost of faculty support. While these costs will continue with any campus based CMS, they are not necessary. Moreover, the cost of the present system, $3.3 million over five years, could be reduced to zero.
The cost of a CMS system is not necessary because publishers will provide them for free. For several years, leading publishers have provided electronic content that can be imported into many leading CMS. If the school paid for a CMS, this content can be used with the college’s system. If the school does not pay for the CMS, the content can still be used.

This potential model, of paying for the content and not the delivery system, shows that once again the medium of the Internet is spawning new business models. Any purchaser of technology systems has to clearly understand what the possible business models are – or wind up spending $3.3M more than was necessary.

Business Blog Consulting

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Rick Bruner has created a blog on the business aspects of the medium. This is an excellent site for corporate professionals, especially sales & marketing, wanting to know how to use blogs for more than just personal journals.

Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects.

Via Lee Lefever.

New Word for Your Web Dictionary

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Here is one that fellow bloggers will appreciate. Chris Mackay at Tantramar Interactive has introduced me to a word that describes a new kind of worry – "googlanxiety". It’s from Richard Akerman’s Manifesto Multilinko (another Canadian blog!):

Googlanxiety – The worry that if you don’t post daily, Google will stop indexing your site so often and ranking you so highly.

Not that I’m ranked so highly, but I was up to a 5/10 yesterday and now I’ve dropped to a 4/10. But does it really matter? My Google ranking, which was 0/10 last year, hasn’t increased my client base :-(

Not so subtle effects of technology

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One more example that the “medium is the message” is this commentary by James Farmer on a class moving from the FirstClass web course management platform to WebCT Vista. Apparently the structure of the group discussion areas is different – namely that WebCT allows learners to go directly to sub-group areas without passing through the main (instructor-controlled) discussion area. There is now less structural control, as the instructor’s comments in the main discussion area are not being seen as often by students:

Net conclusion – students are showing lower participation rates, groups aren’t following tasks, Elizabeth is having to ramp up her involvement dramatically and shift her pedagogy towards a much more directed one and, without any change in course content, type of cohort, activities or assessment the entire course is changed  all because of the structure of the environment.

As I commented yesterday, the pedagogical methods used by instructors are important, but so is the selection and use of technology. According to McLuhan’s laws of media, every medium (technology) enhances, retrieves, obsolesces and reverses some aspect through use.

Educators have to clearly understand instructional technologies, so that they can use them wisely.

[James has some diagrams on his site, an aspect of this blog that I’m missing, but should soon address with the next version of Drupal]

First Online Teaching Experiences

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In the April issue of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Dianne Conrad of the University of New Brunswick has published her qualitative research on the reflections of novice online instructors. The research covers interviews with five new instructors, all using the WebCT platform in a university setting. The study uses Collins & Berge’s framework for facilitating interaction online.

Conrad notes that most of the instructors’ concerns were content-oriented, trying to ensure that enough content was delivered. There was little mention by the instructors on the student learning process, a hot topic amongst those using blogs in education. Conrad also notes the important role of instructors’ egos in the virtual classroom, and that online environments require a more learner-centred approach. Though not mentioned by Conrad, I find it interesting that all five instructors were men. Would the "content focus" have become more of "learner focus" with a different gender mix? How about with a different cultural mix?

One of the respondents made a comment about the limitations of the platform, in that the discussion fora were not searchable. This reinforces my opinion that any LMS/LCMS should be used in conjunction with a good CMS/Blog so that the conversation is less constrained by the technology [this open source blog is searchable, as are most others]. You need the right tool box, as well as the right pedagogical approaches.

Conrad’s study is a worthwhile read for anyone working with online instructors in an academic setting.

Blogging’s Perfect Pitch

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Lee leFever has won Judith Meskill’s Perfect Pitch Competition. If you didn’t know about the competition, it was looking for the perfect elevator pitch (e.g. no pictures) explaining the business benefits of blogging to the uninitiated. Here’s a piece of Lee’s pitch:

By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company – context that can profoundly affect decision making.

If I could have referred to this pitch last week, I would have appeared much more erudite in Halifax ;-)

Congratulations, Lee!

Wikis help to develop political policies

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Last week when I decided to talk about blogs in Halifax, I was told to keep it simple, and only discuss blogs themselves, not other social networking software tools. Most people in the audience knew what a blog was, and a number said that they were bloggers. In later discussions, I found out that few knew about wikis.

Well it seems that wikis have gone mainstream, so you had better learn about them. The Green Party of Canada is using this tool to collaboratively develop its policies online. So if you don’t know about wikis, or are looking at real-world applications of wikis, then check out democracy in action. This is not an endorsement for the Green Party, but it’s nice to see some democratization of policy building.
In the early years of radio in Canada we also saw the new medium being used to encourage democracy and learning – witness the National Farm Radio Forum and the Citizen’s Forum. Perhaps these social networking tools will rejuvenate our democratic processes.
Via Constellation W3.

Further analysis of this use of technology in politics is available from Mark Federman’s What is the Message?.

Clay Shirky does not believe that this is a true wiki, because changes have to be submitted through e-mail. The problem with completely public wikis is that not everyone is working in the best interests of the community. I guess that filtering change requests via e-mail is a good compromise in such a public venue, but a bit labour intensive. Maybe this isn’t a true wiki, but I hope that the underlying wiki nature helps with the aim of developing policy from the ground up.

Free Online Course – IT Fluency

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The University of Washington is offering a free, self-paced course in Fluency in Information Technology. According to the website, the course covers the basics, concepts and capabilities. For example – Basics: e-mail, word processing, searching for Web information; Concepts: what’s a "graphic user interface," how do networks send pictures; Capabilities: troubleshooting problems, thinking up IT solutions. There’s even a section on SQL.

A cursory review of the course shows that it is based on a published book, and requires about 150 hours of study time, which includes projects and quizzes.

What is missing from this course is interaction. I understand that a free course cannot offer mentored support or instructors, but why are there no blogs, student-generated FAQ’s or discussion boards? These would not cost much more, but would add a lot. It will be interesting to see what the uptake on this course will be.

Anyway, I commend the university for making this course available.

Moodle’s Latest Version 1.2.1

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Moodle, an open source course management system, based on a constructivist learning model, has released its latest version. What caught my interest was:

There are over 1,000 registered Moodle users in 75 countries
Moodle has a WebCT quiz import
WYSIWYG editor
"The new multilang filter allows texts to be entered in multiple languages, and only the best one will be shown to each user (depending on their language setting)" [ I like that!]

Keep up the good work Martin.