ICT trends in Education

I will be speaking on "ICT trends in Education" at the Australian Computer Society meeting in Canberra, 12th November 2013. This will be a less academic version of my "MOOCs with Books: Syncronisation of Large Scale Asynchronous e-Learning" talk for the ICCSE conference in Colombo.

ACS Canberra Branch Forum

ICT trends in Education

A quiet revolution is taking place in Australia's schools, TAFEs and universities, with education moving on-line. Award winning education designer Tom Worthington will provide an overview of the trends and its implications for education.

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS)
• Social media for education
• Open Source e-Portfolio software
• Cloud based Learning Management Systems (LMS)
• e-Book textbooks
• Portable course-ware formats

Biography: Tom Worthington FACS CP

Tom Worthington is an independent ICT consultant and an adjunct lecturer in computer science at the Australian National University. Tom designed the on-line sustainability courses for both the ACS certification program and the ANU Master of IT. In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society for his contribution to the development of public Internet policy.   Tom is a Past President of the Australian Computer Society, Fellow, Honorary Life Member and Certified Computer Professional, as well as a voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

See also:

• MOOCs with Books: Syncronisation of Large Scale Asynchronous e-Learning
• A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online 
• On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century

Optimizing the Pedagogy, Software and Content Formats for On-line Courses

A few days ago the Australian National University (ANU) announced it had joined the edX consortium and would start offering Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) from 2014. I have been running an on-line courses for small numbers of students at ANU since 2009, so decided to see what was needed to use the content for a MOOC. Here I have discussed general issues. At present I don't have any technical or procedural details of how edX is implemented.

Content

The content for my courses is already free open access, so that removes a major impediment to making it widely available. Also I prepare my course notes in a format designed to meet accessibility standards and require minimal system resources. I did this because Australian law requires access for the disabled and also because some students are in remote locations with low bandwidth connections. In practice this is a matter of using a simple layout for documents, with default formatting. The content then easily translates into the content delivery system used. Originally I used lots of separate notes in different formats, but now consolidate all the noes for a course into a HTML formatted e-book, using the Moodle book module. Hopefully edX has a similar feature.

Pedagogy

I designed course content so it can be downloaded and used off-line. This is to help with locations where the student has only intermittent Internet access. Providing off-line access also helps with student learning: the student has a reasonable chunk of work to do (either alone or in a group), before asking their tutor or fellow students about it. I will be discussing this form of synchronized asynchronous learning in a presentation at ICCSE 2013 (a preprint of the paper is available).

On-line university courses will typically group students into cohorts of about two dozen and encourage the students to get to know each other and their tutor. MOOCs seem to be still trying to find a way to reproduce this approach, with students forming their own on-line study groups. Clearly it is unworkable to have thousands of students in one group and so tools are needed to have then forum smaller groups. There have been reports of problems with this in some MOOCs, with the tools for students to select their group not being able to cope with the load. It will be interesting to see how edX handles this.

Software

Courses are usually delivered at institutions using specialized Learning Management System (LMS) software. ANU uses Moodle and much effort is put into making sure that there is sufficient capacity for the more than ten thousand students. Even so, like many of my colleagues, I also provide a copy of course notes outside the LMS, on an ordinary web site, in case of access problems. This is also useful for students who have not yet completed the formal enrollment process, and so do not have access to the LMS, but want to start work.

Hundreds of thousands, or millions, of students creates a very large load for the LMS. Today Coursera reported: "We're currently experiencing server issues. Stay tuned to status.coursera.org. Thank you for your patience.".

I have some experience at diagnosing problems with on-line systems used for emergency warning and disaster recovery. These systems experience high loads during an emergency. The usual response is to increase server capacity, but if you have very high loads this can be ineffective. It is possible to carry out a quick examination of the system and usually identify a few hot-spots which can be fixed to increase the system capacity by hundreds or thousands of times. One problems is customization of content for each user unnecessarily, thus preventing caching working. Also video and images in the wrong format, resulting in very large files can be a problem. Another problem is to offer  content to the user before they ask for it, thus wasting system resources and their time.

In the longer term it should be possible to break the LMS into a number of independent parts to make it more efficient and reliable. Google have taken an interesting approach with their "Google Course Builder", by essentially having the courses hand crafted using HTML and JavaScript. This approach will not work for the average course designer, which does not have that level of technical skills, but might be workable with some front end tools to generate the needed code. The result could be something like a compiler for computer software, which produced code which is very efficient to run, but the penalty being changes are harder to make. The LMS can instead be thought of as an interpreter of the course-ware: easier to make changes to but much less efficient to run.

Where are teacher has a few dozen, or few hundred, students they can simply make a change to the course and tell the students, answering any queries. But of there are millions of students such ad-hoc changes will cause chaos. It may be that course designers will need to learn some of the same skills of software engineers use to systematically make changes to a large system, so as to cause least inconvenience to those using it.

Some MOOC providers seem to be attempting to avoid the problem of supporting a large system by using other services in place of their own, such as Google and Facebook. But this may simply transfer the problem somewhere else and also can result in privacy problems. Universities offering courses in Australia are subject to federal privacy laws. It is reasonably simple to configure the in-house LMS (even an outsourced one) to meet the legal requirements to protect student information. But if the students are required to use an external social networking site as part of their course, then ensuring privacy becomes more difficult.

Totara Corporate Version of Moodle Learning Management System

Totara offer an interesting commercial open source distribution of the popular Moodle Learning Management System, tailored for corporate training. Moodle was originally developed for universities and so does not have the compliance features needed for vocational and corporate education. Normally the organization installing Moodle has to add extra packages and customizations (there are specialist companies which do this, such as NetSpot and BrightCookie).

Totara appear to have packaged up their customizations and are selling these bundled with Moodle (note that Totara is commercial open source, that is when you buy it you get to see the code, but it is not free). It is not clear how much of Totara is really a unique product and how much is the same open source add-ons which are normally used with Moodle.

e-Networking the National VET E-learning Strategy

The Canberra Institute of Technology hosted a National VET E-learning Strategy "e-Networking Night" at their Reid campus on 14 June 2012.

Jyothi Jayaram, ACT toolbox champion, provided an introduction to the National VET E-learning Strategy.

The National VET E-learning Strategy is an excellent federal, state and territory initiative to improve vocational e-learning. However, in my view, the terminology used for the "strategy" is unnecessarily confusing, with most potential users of it blocked from access because they are unable to understand the terminology used.

Next was Annie Gregg and Graeme Steadman on "Academy of Real Estate: Dos and Don'ts, Challenges, Support and Lessons Learnt in implementing e-learning".

They took a unit of competency "Appraise Property" and worked with "All Homes" to design a Moodle based course. They pointed out that there is more to e-Learning that just putting a lot of resources into a learning management system. Also they suggested checking that you check your IT people are providing the same version of the LMS you are planning to use (many educational institutions have got around this issue by outsourcing the LMS to a specialist company). Also it was suggested to spend time on the structure around the LMS to help the students. The point was made that with vocational courses, the students are very focused on getting in and getting their course done so they can keep their job, or get a better one. A SCORM package was used (using Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS) to convert Microsoft Word documents to SCORM), which limited the computer platforms it could be delivered for.

It seemed to me that a lot of the issues are not about preparing a course for e-learning, but about setting up an institution to use it. Also integrating the assessment into the course content can help the student learn but greatly increases the complexity of course development and maintenance. A less integrated approach might be acceptable to the students if the same set of tools is used for several courses. It also occurs to me that such packages would have potential for delivering training in other countries, particularly China and India.

Nina Allen talked about CIT teacher examples of using some of the web2.0 tools in online learning:

CIT uses the Moodle LMS, Equella repository and Wimba virtual classroom. Nina pointed out that a photo of the tutor was useful for introducing them the students. They provide recordings of the face-to-face classes with Wimba. The Powerpoint slides are also provided online. Interestingly a glossary of the main terms is provided in the Moodle page (I would have put this in the notes so it does not clutter the front page, but Nina argued that this saves the students asking). Mobile applications can be sued by the students with their smart phones wherever they happen to be. Nina pointed out that training videos of scientists in white coats are not that interesting to younger students, whereas examples from pop culture (such as the Big Bang Theory TV show segment on operant conditioning with chocolates).

CIT pedagogical examples in e-learning by Margaret Robson:

Margaret teaching vocational teaching at CIT. She suggested that pictures liven up the e-leaning content and also using images in quizzes. Students can be asked to research a topic and contribute their results back to the class.

Margaret referred to the "flipped classroom" (or flipped teaching), where the lessons are online and worked through by the students at home and then classroom time is used for practical exercises.

Margaret also mentioned Badge Stack, which awards badges to students for small learning tasks (seems to be like virtual elephant stamps).

Augmented reality: what is it and how can we use it in education - Helen Lynch and Jyothi Jayaram

Helen talked about an augmented reality camp at the UoC Inspire centre (the centre was created to teach technology enhanced learning to Canberra school teachers and seems to be having a considerable impact). The example of AR shown uses embedded invisible codes in images (Steganography), which can be scanned with a mobile phone or tablet computer, which then access online material. Helen demonstrated creating a code using layar.com.

This may be of some use where printed brochures are used. But to me this looks like a gimmick with limited usefulness. The photographs have to be accompanied by a caption explaining that there is a hidden code, so a visible code may as well be used. Also care should be taken in transporting documents containing hidden codes across an international border, as you may be arrested for spying.

Strategy developed and other free resources and how and where to find them - Jyothi Jayaram

There was not time to discuss resources, but there is a list at: https://actnationalvetelearning.wikispaces.com/

CIT Leading the Way with e-Learning in Canberra

This was an excellent afternoon of learning about e-learning. In between making these notes live at the event, I found myself writing a proposal to ANU to implement a repository like CIT's and to implemented flipped teaching for ICT students. This reminded me of events I attended inn Canberra in the mid 1990's about use of a technology called "The Internet" where it was not so much the details which were important, but the sense that this was something of practical value which could be quickly implemented.

Dokeos Open Source Leaning Management System

At the Australian eLearning Congress in Sydney,Will Ford, e-Learning Content Author at Sony Australia, described how they use the Dokeos Open Source Leaning Management System to provide product training for sales people. They use Flash for content, but he is looking at using HTML5 in the future. The also use Audacity for audio and DAZ Studio for animations. He also uses no-free products, particularly Adobe Creative Studio 5.

Will pointed out that audio and video may cause problems for some students (who may be in a noisy shop on a slow Internet connection), so content should also be provided as text. He also showed a video game developed which had a course test built into it. He commented that while visually enguaging, this provided unpopular with people who were less skilled at video games (so this was used as formative feedback mid course, rather than as the summative assessment).

Follow-me Sync-surfing For Online Push Web Conferences

On further consideration the feature I would like most in a Real Time Learning Management System is Co-browsing, with Push web pages implementing Follow-me / Sync-surfing. This is what the Elluminate product calls "Web Tours". The person giving a presentation brings up a web page on their screen and this web address is sent to all participants and the web page displayed on their screen automatically.

Real Time Learning Management System

Recently I attended a series of on-line web conferences during the day about e-learning by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework and weekly web conferences with the staff of ACS Education. Both series used the Elluminate Live product.

While described as "Web conferencing", such video conference systems do not actually use a web browser, except to to launch the application, which consists of Java software downloaded via the Internet. It is remarkable that such web conferencing works as well as it does, even on a slow wireless mobile Internet connection (set the software to use no more than 28.8 kbps and one low resolution video frame per second). However, such systems have not advanced much in terms of functionality over video conference systems of ten years ago.

Apart from audio and video, the systems offer a text chat window, a white-board, application sharing and some polling functions. A major limitation with such systems is that native documents cannot be shared. That is when a power-point slide or a word processing document is shown to the group, they do not really get the document, but an image of part of the document.

Another problem is that these applications are separate from the Learning Management System software which students will also be using. Web conference systems offer integration with LMS such as Moodle, but this integration is implied to being able to launch the conference from within the application. The LMS applications do not interact with the web conference in real time.

It does not seem to be widely realized that an LMS can be used in real time by a group. I have used Moodle live in a face-to-face classroom. I could see when a student had completed a task from my Moodle console. It should therefore be possible to expand this to provide remote real time facilities, within Moodle. These need not be closely coupled to audio or video conferencing and could be used with a separate audio or video conference product to provide the audio and video or live in a classroom.

Some of the web conference features are:

• Participant status: The list of participants and their status is shown (present/absent, happy/sad, asking a question, applause). Moodle already has an "Online Users" block, which could be expanded to add status.
  
• Polls: This allows the moderator to survey the participants with multiple choice answers. Moodle has a survey module, but this is designed for formal course evaluation surveys. Moodle also has a "Quiz module", but this is designed for complex assessments. What is needed is a simple way to create "clicker" audience response function, as provided with VotaPedia.
• Text chat: This allows any participant to send a short text message to the group. Moodle has a "Message" function, but this directs message only to one address. There are forums for groups, but these do not refresh in real time and are designed for longer more complex messages. It should be possible to provide a real time message function module in Moodle.
• Web tours: Elluminate and some other web conference systems, allow a web address to be sent from the moderator to other participants where the web pages is displayed in their browser. As most LMS are web based, this could be an easy to implement function which would be very useful.
  
• Slide show presentations: Presentation of images with a live moving pointer is the main function used in the web conference. Moodle has not "slide" function: Files for Powerpoint and other presentation programs can be provided, but Moodle can't open or control them. Providing this could be complex and use of web tours would be a simpler alternative, with web based slides.
  
• Live or Recorded Audio and Video: Audio/and/or video is played and in some cases transmitted live. Moodle has provision for video and audio playback built in. This could be expanded to control an audio/video conference.
• Meeting Recording: The audio, video, slides, text chat and all other interaction of the session is recorded. This is a useful function.
  
• Whiteboard: A drawing window is displayed which the moderation and optionally, all other participants can draw on. There is no draw function in Moodle and this would need to be provided as an extra module.
  
• Screen sharing: An application on the moderator's desktop (or one of the participants) is relayed to all participants. There is no such function in Moodle. This would need to be added with an extra module.
  

Of the listed functions, the easiest to integrate into a LMS such as Moodle, to form a a useful package, would be the status, polls, text chat and web tours. These could be used in a face to face classroom or with a separate audio/video conference system. It should be noted that such a system does not need all functions tightly integrated. Different components can be synchronized with timing, without being delivered via the same system.

What might be interesting is to add time to all relevant parts of the LMS. At present the LMS is static, responding only to user input. But there is no reason it could not be animated.

Learning objects webinar

The Australian Flexible Learning Framework.will host a webinar on "e-Gems: Learning objects: Create, reuse and deploy for better teaching and learning online!", by Helen Lynch,Canberra Institute of Technology, 12.30pm, 11 May 2011.

e-Gems: Learning objects: Create, reuse and deploy for better teaching and learning online!

The 11 May e-Gems session will show practitioners how to create, reuse and deploy learning objects using the VET Reload Tool (open source software that can be used with Moodle, Blackboard, Connected Learning Community or Studywiz on a Mac or PC).

Learn how to assemble existing resources, eg word documents, digital photographs, html pages, video and PDF files, into a learning object.

Alternatively, find out how to add or remove pages from an existing learning object downloaded from an online repository such as LORN or the Toolbox Repository.

The session also looks at the importance of learning design in resource assembly.

It will be presented by Helen Lynch, who has worked as an educator and e-learning enthusiast in the vocational education and training and university sectors in NSW, carrying out flexible learning research and developing e-learning solutions for training organisations.

Currently the ACT Toolbox Champion, Helen is based at the Canberra Institute of Technology. Helen holds post graduate qualifications in educational management, online education and Indigenous education and is studying a doctorate at the University of Southern Queensland researching learning object reuse.

Details:
Date: Wednesday 11 May 2011
Time: 12.30pm – 1.30pm AEST
URL: http://tinyurl.com/egems11-reload

The e-Gems series of online seminars are presented by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.

Towards an Open Academic and Collaborative Environment

The AuSakai 2011 South West Pacific Conference is being hosted by the Australian National University, in Canberra, 13 - 14 September, 2011. Sakai is a Learning Management System which ANU uses for its Alliance system for some student and research discussions (this is separate from the main Moodle based system called "Wattle" used for the bulk of online teaching at ANU).

Keynote Speakers:

• Ian Dophin, Sakai Foundation
• Lance Speelmon, Indiana University, IN, USA
• Josh Baron, Marist College, NY, USA
• David Goodrum, Indiana University, IN, USA

Key dates:

• Call for Presentation Proposal due Friday 27 May 2011
• Early Registration will open on Wednesday 1 June 2011 (ends 20 August)
• Standard Registration (21 August - 13 September)
• Networking Dinner for all participants on Tuesday 13 September 2011

Those registering from ANU are eligible for a 100% subsidy of their registration costs ...

Learning management counter-revolution

Colin Steele pointed out to me "Learning management: the revolt of the end-user" (Beverley Head, Campus Review, 13 Dec 2010).
This article is a little disappointing as it is mostly about universities using open source software for their learning management systems . But you can use open software and still have very closed course content. What is far more interesting is the issue of opening up the actual course content, as the UK's Open University has done with some courses.

Beverley gives the example of Deakin University considering what end-user devices to allow after the selection of the Desire2Learn LMS. But it is not that hard to create web based content which works on iPads and smart phones, as well as normal web browsers. This will be a standard feature of all LMS (at least of all worth using). This does require the author to put a little thought into designing readable material, which is not a bad thing for education. The tool used can help a little. Essentially the same skills are required as for providing accessible content, which Australian universities are required by law to do.
The issue is not so much getting the tools to support Web 2.0, blogs and wikis (which is not hard), but what is done, educationally, with these tools. Getting teachers to incorporate these into courses in a meaningful way is hard.

My Green ICT course is provided in a format suitable for a tablet computer and smart phone. As soon as the formatting is tidied up in Moodle (with Moodle 2) it should be feasible to do the course on such a device. Reading the notes and taking part in the discussion will work fine on a hand held device. But typing a 2000 word essay on a smart phone, on the bus, will make less sense. There are ways these devices could be used more creatively, for example in real time for collecting data.

Using distributed and cloud based tools will not necessarily dilute the university brand. Fortunately the ANU took my advice and gave its new LMS its own name, not tied to a product. Instead of calling it "Moodle" (the product), ANU gave the learning system its own name (ANU Wattle). So bits of cloud based systems can be used and branded as part of "ANU Wattle". In any case universities have never had complete control of learning technology, for example externally provided education packages were used (called "books").

Universities need not have an intensive debate about supporting mobile devices. This is not a question, it is a given: universities must support smart phones (iPhone and Android) and tablet devices (Apple iPad and Android).

The debate over the non-availability of Flash on iPhones/iPads is a distraction from educational objectives. Flash is not required for e-learning.

It should be remembered that traditional formats for packaging educational materials (books) are still useful, as are their online counterparts (eBooks). Formats such as ePub make it very easy to combine LMS based and eBook based content.

Discussions of formats to use for e-learning are unnecessary. The same formats as used for the web can be used for e-learning. As an example, the ePub ebook format is just web pages packaged up for off-line use.

Tailoring e-learning templates to different disciplines

Greetings from the Australian National University where the science teaching staff have been looking at some of the best of the the implementation of courses in the Moodle Learning Management System. This year the ANU transition from Web CT to Moodle. Here therefore second generation designs of mature on-line learning materials.

It was interesting to see, even though the university provides templates for courses, there is a wide diversity and innovation in the way courses are laid out. This partly reflects the requirements of different disciplines. The course for a course in mathematics looks very different to one for ecology or science journalism. It was interesting to see that the design used reflected the discipline, with the mathematics course looking "mathematical" the ecology one having photos of the natural world and the journalism course mimicking a newspaper.

Some issues were the difficulty of creating a hierarchical structure in Moodle's relatively flat approach. There was no easy way to communicate high priority announcements to the students without them getting lost on the routine on-line discussion. Also integration of external tools, such as VotaPedia, was an issue. It was interesting the different approaches to how to overcome these problems. An example is that I have found the Moodle Book module to create a deep hierarchical structure, but some others have used a different approach.

What was most useful was the mutual affirmation that using LMS was now an acceptable and routine way to teach and that some diversity was okay.

Principles of good education practice

Lauren Kane, from the Flexible Learning Unit of the College of Engineering & Computer Science facilitated an Education Design Workshop this morning at the Australian National University. The topic was "How can educational technologies, including ANU's learning management system (Wattle), enhance your teaching practice?".

We worked through the "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" (Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson, The American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, March 1987):

encourages contact between students and faculty,

develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,

encourages active learning,

gives prompt feedback,

emphasizes time on task,

communicates high expectations, and

respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Lauren pointed out that this was written long before the current e-learning technology was developed, but the principles are still applicable. Also I though they could be equally applied to postgraduate teaching, as for example in my Green ICT course COMP7310 and in Unravelling Complexity VCPG6001.

Digital Education Revolution Skills

Professor SV Raghavan and Senator Conroy both talked on the benefits of broadband for education at the World Computer Congress 2010 in Brisbane this week. But will teachers know what to do with broadband?

More work is needed on tools and skills for teachers to use the fibre. I can say this sort of thing now I am an award winning online educator. ;-)

While the federal government has done good work on educating teachers with projects such as Edna and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, the investment is relatively small compared to that being spent on computer hardware and networking.

Recently I have been taking part in an online discussion in the LinkedIn Group: Higher Education Teaching and Learning, of how to present materials to students. What was worrying was that many teachers were replicating poor paper based education in the digital domain. Faced with the problem of students not reading long wordy documents on paper, they put them online, producing long wordy PDF documents. When the students did not read those, the teachers gave the students to hour long lectures on what was in the documents which the students (sensibly) had not read.

This week during the World Computer Congress in Brisbane I talked to a university professor who was having problems with email. They were keeping copies of all messages from students and book collaborators in the university mail system. As a result their mail box was clogged with copies of draft papers and books.

Universities provide tools for efficiently handling documents in learning management systems and e-portfolios. However, the system administrators may be too quick to remove all data from the system at the end of a course. This then requires the teachers and students to manually store duplicate copies of materials elsewhere. Multiplied thousands of times across schools, TAFEs and universities, this is a waste of teacher and student effort. Also the students will be learning poor e-literacy skills which they will then take with them into the workforce. I will be discussing some of this at the Canberra MoodlePosium, 7-8 October 2010.

The ANU asked me to prepare a 6 week e-learning course on electronic document management to be offered from early next year. This would incorporate material on electronic document management and web design courses I previously presented in ANU face to face courses.

One problem I had with this was making it interesting. When this material is part of a larger course the student has to do it, to complete the course. A standalone EDM course might appeal to a few records managers and librarians, but then they are more likely to want to do specialist courses designed just for them. What I might do is call the course "Working in the Cloud" and present it for all information professionals (including educators) needing to support efficient online work practices. That would explore efficiency both from the point of view of getting the work done and efficient technical use of the online resources.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 6: Past and Future

Reflecting on what my online tutor had to say, perhaps teaching a class of 200 students online needs different techniques and tools. My past experience as an online facilitator has mostly in developing public policy on IT, starting in the the mid 1990s. Internet based forums were used for this and part of the process was to try to develop a consensus view on difficult issues, such as Internet censorship.

My experience of acting as a educational tutor online is confined to one course "Green ICT Strategies", designed for mentored and collaborative e-learning. Having not been impressed tutors who talked too much in class, I decided to take a low key role by first setting some readings and questions, then leaving it to the students to discuss. Only if there is a problem do I take part in the discussion. During a 12 week course, I would typically need to take part in the discussion only two or three times. Instead I would provide individual mentoring of students.

The greatest challenge I see in the future is to have enough resources to be able to carry out the facilitation role in courses. In small courses of up to 25 students, which I have been tutoring, it is relatively easy to get to know the students and they each other. Peer pressure and individual mentoring can then keep the discussion on track. But if there are 200 students (because the educational institution wants to lower costs), can normal group dynamics work and can there be time for the tutor to provide individual mentoring?

It may be possible to have larger groups by using social networking techniques, as applied to business by services such as LinkedIn. As Franklin and van Harmelen point out:

"LinkedIn acts, at a professional level, as a model of educational use in the way in which it can be used to disseminate questions across the community for users seeking particular information."

From: Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen, JICS Repository, 2007

Such systems automate some of the work the tutor normally has to do manually. This then makes it possible to create and maintain a sense of group purpose in a much larger group. Some of those tools are already built into e-portfolio tools such as Mahara.

However, I suspect the larger part of the challenge will be to educate university administrators on why there is still a need for tutors to have the time for interaction with students, even when that interaction is online.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 5:

My tutor replied to my "Reflections of an Online Student", agreeing the course on how to tutor online could be improved but commenting that my experience is different from most other students, who are happy with the course. They suggested this might be because the typical tutor for their courses has up to 200 students and are used to using the Blackboard Learning Management system to handle them.

I find it hard to conceive how any tutor could cope with providing the individual attention which students deserve, in a group of 200. I like to limit my classes to 25. If there are more than this many students, the class needs to be split into several groups. This is partly so the tutor can get to know the students, but also so they can get to know each other. How could you work in an amorphous group of 200?

Also perhaps if I used Blackboard as much as I have used Moodle, I would get used to it. At least it seems more suitable to my way of working than Web CT was. This is partly a matter of simply getting things to appear on the screen in a way which I could read. It may be that I am not using the system correctly. But I an not a novice in using web based systems and either it is doing things in some way I do not understand, or more likely just does not work properly.

However, it is also perhaps a matter of philosophy. In using the Blackboard system for this course I had the constant sense that there was some key to the way the course material was arranged which I was missing.

In designing an online course (admittedly I have only done one) I assumed the way to do it was like a web page. I design a web page with material positioned in order of importance, in the same sequence as text is read: for an English reader, left to right, top to bottom. So I put the course material on the page with the most important information at the top and then following down, usually in the sequence it is to be used by the student. Usually there is something for the student to read, then do and then be tested on. It is difficult for me to understand what other sequence could be used. In the course I have just done I spent a considerable amount of frustrating time wondering where was the resource I was to use next: why wasn't it on the screen in front of me, in sequence, under the previous step?

My conclusion from all this is that I should not be tutoring the sort of courses which I have just been trained for, in this on-line course. Neither the educational approach used, nor the technical tools are ones which I am comfortable with.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 4: Student forums

Having caught up with some readings for my Course in Online Student Centred Discussion, it was time to post to some of the online forums. I was not looking forward to this, being late to the course, with no excuses as a self-professed e-learning expert. Also I was still having difficulty getting the Blackboard learning management system to work reliably. The system told me that some functions may not work as I was using Apple OS9 operating system, which was a worry as I was not using an Apple computer. Blackboard seemed to confuse OS9 with Linux.

However, the online student discussion forums seemed to working so I posted an introduction about myself. In doing this I noticed that there appeared to be no way to format the text, or include hypertext links. While I like using plain text, it was a bit disconcerting as the formatting bar was not functioning on my web browser. This required me to write my posting elsewhere so I could spell check it, before pasting it to the forum.

The forums seemed to work much like any threaded conversaiton system. But I was able to find a function to shown me just new postings and so each time I had to laboriously scroll through all the postings looking for new ones (at least the new postings were in bold, so I could see them).

Seeing what was posted calmed some of the panic I had been in for the last few hours, since discovering the course had started more than a week ago. The other students seemed to be tutors like myself with the same concerns. The tutor also seemed to be doing a good job of responding to student issues.

As I had partly come to grips with the system, reading material, doing quizzes and posting, I decided to make contact with the tutor and request assistance. However, I could not find how to use the system to send them a message. Instead I reluctantly decided to content them by email (I don't like doing this as it is annoying and time consuming to get communications from students outside the LMS).

My message resulted in a prompt and useful reply. Apparently I was not really late starting the course: there were two separate cohorts of students doing the same course using the same materials. Unknown to myself, I was in the later second group. This made little sense to me, as it did not match the timings in the course materials. But it was explained in an e-mail message forwarded to me by the tutor, and which appears to have been stopped previously by my spam filter.

Some more communication with the tutor answered some of my other concerns: the grade book made no sense as this course was not for assessment. This cam as a surprise and a disappointment as one of the primary reasons for doing the course was to be assesed. Without the assessment, this made little sense as a university "course".

Also it was apparent that that some of the problems I was having was because I was not using a computer running a Microsoft operating system and Internet Explorer browser.

The tutor also explained that they had inherited the course and it was due for redevelopment. That went some way to explaining the non-logical arrangement of the material.

For a few days I did readings and posted discussion items. But I felt that I had learnt as much as I was going to from this course. What it mainly impressed on me was the need for:

1. Clear and logical arrangement of course materials,
2. Software and content which complies with web standards so it will work on a wide range of student's computers,
3. Frequent communication between the tutor and student

Unfortunately this course provided those lessons by doing none of those things. The course was so poorly delivered that at times I wondered if this was deliberately done to make a point to tutors, but in this case the course seems to have been poorly design, implemented and run.

The course was useful in confirming that I do know something already about designing and running on-line courses. It also gave me the confidence that I was not doing a poor job compared to other university on-line courses. It also emphasised that poor course content delivered with poor tools can be partly made up for by good tutors and fellow students.

In the end I realised that being a university student has not got any easier since I last tried it and is not something which should be undertaken lightly. I will be treating my students with increased respect, with a better understating of how difficult what they are attempting is.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 3: What do I do next?

Having found I was got the text big enough to read for my Course in Online Student Centred Discussion, I started to look at what was required in what order to complete the course. The course largely followed the normal sequence: read some material, do an exercise and discuss it online . However the course did not have the regular weekly pattern I was used to from other courses, where there is the same sequence of read, do and discuss, each week, interspersed with a few larger exercises. Also the course materials did not seem to be presented on screen in a logical sequence: I seemed to have to read perhaps the third item in the list before I could understand the first, or there would be a reference to something somewhere else. There did not seem to be many hypertext links for taking me straight to course resources, and I often had to revert to a systematic search: trying every item in the menu until I found what was being referred to. The loose use of terminology also did not help, with the same resource being referred to using different words in different places, so I was never quite sure if I had the right item.

There were some quizzes, which were useful. But it was difficult to find which quiz applied where in the course, as all the quizzes were listed together, rather than being linked from the logical sequence in the material. The quizzes also had the annoying habit of requiring me to press a save button after each question and so opening a conformation window for each. At least I think that was what was happening, I never really worked it out. The actual quiz questions were useful and helped me firm up my knowledge of the material. However, there did not seem to be any easy way for me to work out how I had progressed with these quizzes, the grade book, not seeming to make a lot of sense (I found out later this was because this was a non-assessed course and the grade book was not being used).

The course notes were provided as PDF downloads. There was a problem with the interface as if I simply clicked on a set of notes I would get an error message instead of the documents. I had to remember to press the right mouse button and select to download each sent of notes to my computer and open the from there. As these are PDF documents, they were harder to read than web pages but after increasing the text size I was able to read them. The layout of the material was okay, with the exception of inappropriate graphics. At one point I was perplexed by a graphic of two people ballroom dancing. Given the course is teaching cultural sensitivity and teaching to a wide range of people, the including of this image seemed out of place. It took me some time to work out it was a visual pun, being accompanied by a caption. The content itself seemed reasonable, giving an introduction to some tutoring and educational concepts.

Now I had some idea of what I was supposed to be doing, it was time to introduce myself to the other students in the forums. I was not looking forward to this, being late to the course, with no excuses as a self-professed e-learning expert. See part four.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 2: Where are the lessons?

Having found I was late for my Course in Online Student Centred Discussion, I decided to try to catch up. The Blackboard Learning Management System had a familiar looking interface with a menu down the left side and the course content beside it. But the text was too small to read. So I increased the font size on my browser. This made the text bigger, but half the text of each menu item disappeared. The problem was that the text of each menu item was over a coloured rectangle. When I increased the text size, the background did not increase proportionally and the text overflowed the background. It was not clear to me if this was a fault in the design of Blackboard, or just poor web design for this particular course, but in either case it was not very usable. Given a choice between a page of text I could not read and half the menu text missing, I went for the latter option. I assumed that after a while I would get to know what the options were, but it did not work out that way, after several weeks use I was still not comfortable with the interface. So much for the interface: what about the course structure? See part three.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 1: Where is the course and when did it start?

This is the first of a series of postings on my experience of being an on-line university student. This was very educational, but not in the way I was expecting.

I was offered the opportunity to take part as a student in an on-line course run by a university on Online Student Centred Discussion run for tutors. This was an appealing idea, as though I have designed and tutored an online course, I have no formal qualifications in how to do this. In fact while I have been designing and delivering postgraduate education for nine years, I have no formal qualifications in teaching.

It is ten years since I undertook any formal university studies, and that was not a pleasant experience (a business Masters by coursework, which I withdrew from after a few weeks). So it seemed a good way to ease myself back into formal studies with a relevant short course in an environment I am familiar with (online).

So I signed up for the course and waited for it to start. I had never been a very good student and one recurring nightmare, from a primary school experience, was to be asked for an assignment I did not know about (and so had not done) in front of the class. After years of peace this nightmare re-occurred so I thought I should tackle it by logging into the learning management system and see when the course was due to start.

To my horror, I found that the course had started a week and a half before. As this was only a four week short course, I was already considerably behind. Leaving aside the question of why my tutor had not contacted me, I spent several frantic hours trying to catch up. Given I was an expert in the use of the web (I teach web design at university) and had designed and delivered online courses, I assumed this would not be difficult, but I was very wrong.

To my further horror, I found I had considerable difficulty using the e-learning system, which is based on Blackboard. I have been extensively trained in the use of Moodle, somewhat in Web CT and have also used Sakai and Atutor. I assumed that all e-learning systems are much the same and I would have no difficulty using Blackboard. However, I found the system very difficult to use and after several weeks still cannot operate it effectively.

The first problem was to find my course in the system. After entering my user id and password I had what looked like a typical e-learning front page, with "Welcome Tom Worthington", which was a good start. There were two items listed below: "University library and your online course" and "Facilitating Online Teaching and Learning". While the first of these said it was my course, it wasn't. It seemed to be a list of generic resources to help online students, provided by the university library. The second link took me to a series of announcements which related to a course, so I guessed these must be for my course.

However, to my alarm, the first message in the course web site was not the "Welcome to week 1" I expected, but was about week 2. It seemed that the course had already started and I had missed a week and a half. At this point my nightmares about missing classes and being late for assignments became real. I considered sending the tutor a blazing message complaining about not having been reminded to start the course, but then considered how I would answer such a message. As a student it is my responsibility to be ready to start the course on time. While the tutor could be expected to notice if I am missing for more than a week, it is not their job to micromanage me. As someone supposedly experienced in running such courses I could not stand the humiliation, so I decided to see how much I could catch up on before asking for help. As a web expert, and someone with experience in e-learning design, I should be able to breeze through. How hard could it be? Find out in Part 2.

Translating Learning Outcomes in e-learning

Greetings from the Australian National University "Wattle Wednesday Seminar" where Lauren Kane is talking about "Translating Learning Outcomes in Moodle". This was a recap of the presentation given at Moodle Moot Au 2010, a few weeks ago.

Lauren described a four step process:

1. Select an outcome for the course.
2. Identify the characteristics of the outcome.
3. Using the online instrument, identify Moodle resource/activity or associated technology which supports the development of these characteristics.
4. Develop the Moodle activity/resource to satisfy the outcome.

What stuck me about this and the previous presentation wast that these are highly structured processes. These would be natural for engineers and computer scientists who are teaching. But it may feel a little rigid for those in the humanities. However, as a computer programmer, I would like to have even more structure, with a set of course templates to select from and then customise. As an example, I used a course in IT Service Management as the template for a course in Green IT Strategies.

We present an approach to course delivery informed by Biggs' constructive alignment theory. Constructive alignment requires that the teacher aligns the planned learning activities with the learning outcomes (Houghton, Warren, 2004).

It is generally quite difficult to translate learning outcomes into an effective course design using tools provided by a Learning Management System (LMS). This is further compounded by the difference between the language of learning outcomes and that used by an LMS.

Within our College we've identified the need for a process that provides a link between the pedagogy and the implementation in Moodle. To do this we have developed online instruments that help teachers link Moodle activities to learning outcomes.

We believe this not only enables teachers to leverage educational technologies to the maximum extent but also to effectively deliver a quality course that meets its identified goals and intents.

Houghton, Warren (2004) Engineering Subject Centre Guide: Learning and Teaching Theory for Engineering Academics. Loughborough: HEA Engineering Subject Centre. Accessed 30th June 2010 from: http://www.engsc.ac.uk/learning-and-teaching-theory-guide/constructive-alignment

From: "Translating Learning Outcomes in Moodle", Srinivas Chemboli, Lauren Kane, Lynette Johns-Boast, ANU, for Moodle Moot Au 2010