Answers for 2011
Well, I guess a year's time is as good as any to have some answers - even if the answer may very well be no answer. For the original post see: Questions for 2011. Yes, there will also be a Questions for 2012.
1. What makes anyone think that the video games push (mostly by the iOS platform devices, but Xbox, Playstation and Wii) has anything to do with formal education?
Well, I don't know if gamification gained any traction, but things like achievements in video games have lent themselves to things like badges. I suspect that my original assertion that it will be marginalized, will remain until someone can quantify and measure the whole process, much like they've tried to do with standardized testing.
2. Why haven't educational institutions really pushed for a mobile learning environment?
I think there's been some motion here - certainly the open courses are structured so that they are mobile friendly, and the big two LMS vendors (Desire2Learn and Blackboard) are both becoming more mobile friendly, I suspect the resistance comes from the institution's inability to control and verify that a potentially mobile student may not be that student, and the only way to assess a person is still in-person. I don't think it matters anymore, in work most people will use the Internet to research a possible solution to whatever problem they face, so knowing something isn't as crucial as it once was. Knowing something however does allow you to find a solution sooner - making you a more efficient worker - which is what capitalism wants.
3. Will the consolidation of the web conferencing tools that education typically use (Wimba and Elluminate) mean that new companies with new models will arise?
Well, they haven't arisen yet, but there's a plethora of tools out there to replace Blackboard Collaborate or whatever it's called this week. However, no one has put together the killer app - which I hope is the form the web conferencing takes - mobile native, low bandwidth friendly, and most of all, accessible.
4. Wither edupunk?
Yup. edu-post-punk should be interesting.
5. What will Pearson as a publishing giant and accredited University mean?
Turns out, not much. Unless you consider an extremely walled off garden of textbooks in a proprietary LMS with Google Doc integration something.
A New Method of Assessment
Well, not quite new, but a new wrinkle on the old way to assess language skills. When I worked in the Second Language area of my former employer, they did assessments in an interview session where the interviewer could only ask and respond according to a script. I always thought that this could be automated and it was one of the items I was going to push forward this year before my contract was not renewed. Ah well, missed opportunities. It's nice to see that Desire2Learn's latest upgrade allows for recording right in the tool - finally. This is something second language learners have been looking for - having used other solutions like the clunky Can8 system - having an audio stream connect directly to the LMS is a great thing. Of course, assessing verbal skills is tricky, and certainly you wouldn't want to do too much of this sort of assessment at a distance, but business courses could easily say record your 10-second elevator pitch, listen to it, improve it and submit the best version. All in that one assignment you have a reflective component that deepens the learning and builds a practical skill both things lacking in higher education. To build it out further, you could add in a component of what makes a good elevator pitch prior to the assessment, perhaps a video of a good elevator pitch or a demonstration of you giving an elevator pitch.
For me this is a real advancement in LMS's. We're not relying on written skills (which have been in decline for the last few decades) as much as one used to because profs are bored with marking papers and students are bored with writing papers. Yes, papers still have a purpose in higher education. Look at the popularity of Michael Wesch, who largely has gained his academic fame from videos on YouTube (not to say that he's not a highly respected anthropologist, he is the author of many of those papers!). Surely these are markers that education is changing - shouldn't academics respond?
Adding MouseOver Tooltips Within Desire2Learn
Lightly tested with: IE 7/8, Firefox (Win) 3.0/3.5, Chrome 5/6, Safari (Win/Mac) 5, Safari (Mobile). No guarantees for browsers earlier or later.
I've been working both angles of my strengths lately - I was asked by a faculty member who was trying to use the D2L tools for glossary and content in conjunction to provide context sensitive tool tip like definitions of terms. Like all web programmers, why start in a vacuum? So knowing that a great tooltip JS is available in JQuery, I considered using it. The JQuery solution is a large one to embed the entire library for a couple of functions. Looking further, I searched out this tutorial/premade tooltip script, which does the job nicely. It would clobber any styles created by D2L that had been already added to a topic created prior to adding the script, so I had to hack around it to fix that. I also had to fix the tooltip always surfacing above the text, which in the frames based LMS world, defeats the purpose of having a definition; in this case you get a definition you can't read because it's behind a frame (or the top of the window). Another fix I put in was to ensure the box did not appear off screen if it was too close to the edge of the window, it still does in certain cases, which I haven't narrowed down - if anyone out there wants to take a crack at fixing it, be my guest.
The implementation of the script isn't too difficult if you're OK with editing HTML code (a matter of adding three lines and editing two lines) and are precise in your edits.
Here's a link to the PDF instructions and the zipped file with the javascript and CSS file.
Of course, if there's any errors please let me know and I'll correct and/or clarify them as soon as possible.
Hit The Ground Running
This week is going to be hellish. I'm helping some faculty put some language assessment test online in Desire2Learn, which has lead me to really rethink how to use some of the tools that the LMS provides. Their needs are such that they do language assessments and aren't testing recall - so they want to play a video and have students take the quiz. Not a problem, you'd think. Of course, it is. The solution I came up with is to use an image information field, without inserting a picture, but using the comments section, which has full use of the HTML Editor, to insert the video at the top of the screen. The downside to this workaround is that if you have more questions than the screen holds, you have to scroll the video off the page.
I've also got to start refreshing my presentation from a couple weeks ago for a new audience, this one more receptive to web 2.0 and online stuff in general. Also it needs a piece that talks about how easy (and the potential drawbacks of integrating it into a LMS) it is to put into D2L.
I'm also doing my normal work routine stuff, helping train some faculty, creating media, working with video and text. By 9:30 this morning I hit most of my targets and was already drowning again in more work. Semester start-up indeed.
Multiple LMS Usage
At Mohawk College, we use multiple learning management systems. I know this is odd, not many folks have the luxury of playing with Blackboard, WebCT, FirstClass and Desire2Learn (as well as Moodle). We're closing in on the dates that will eventually close Blackboard and WebCT as our license will be up. I've been alternately happy and sad about this; I'm happy because these are aging systems, and with Blackboard, hasn't seen widespread adoption in the College. Originally it was our upgrade path from WebCT, until Desire2Learn became our platform of choice. I'm sad because I think there was a small opportunity for a program of study to build in flexibility in teaching and learning for their students. I'm disappointed in the usual push-back that multiple systems are clunky and that students don't want to manage multiple sets of passwords and user names. Well, sure, but they do that already with Hotmail, Gmail, Myspace, Facebook and whatever other stuff they're using. Really, isn't it better to simulate real life, where you might have to login to one system for payroll management, but another for communication? Isn't that building a mental flexibility and an ability to adapt to new systems quickly, a crucial skill going forward?
That's not to say that I'm unhappy with Desire2Learn, it doesn't have any performance issues (much like what Stephen Downes wrote about the Sakai vs. Moodle in the OLDaily) and it's been the best of the lot by a longshot. I wish it was more robust in the web 2.0 area, and a built in collaborative document would be a good way to have student collaborate (without their LiveRoom add in), but it's easier to use than Blackboard and WebCT and is web-based, which is a plus for those who don't want to download the client for FirstClass.
Portfolio Based Learning
Just finished some ePortfolio training with the fine folks at Desire2Learn. One of the interesting things that came out of the discussion around their product was the use for using ePortfolio as evidence of learning. An extrapolation of this idea might be to replace marks with skills - which would map closer to our learning outcomes and fit nicely with the institution's skills-based focus for the workplace.
For instance, a mechanical engineer can share his drawings and the feedback from the content expert (teacher/trainer, or in a distributed environment, an external panel of experts) and this can be assessed as a measure of skill. Seeing as that's what employers want (from a skills-based College), it seems like a natural fit for the College system in Ontario. It would set us apart from Universities now that OAC's are gone. OAC was the old-old Grade 13, which was a post-graduate year in high school, for people who wished to enter University - you'd get 6 extra credits of High School and take advanced courses that would prepare you for the academic rigor.
I know McMaster University is approaching their medical program with Problem Based Learning which is a similar demonstration of skills that a Portfolio Based Learning program might have.
Anyone out there use a portfolio as a final assessment?
Wikis Revisited
So back in the day (July 9 and July 10 precisely), I was having trouble with the wiki not embedding in D2L, having it pop out and not stay in the frameset. What it came down to, and was something I wasn't 100% sure of at the time, was that the MediaWiki version we were using was fairly old. After attempting two upgrades, we now have a wiki that stays in the box, but IE 7/8 break the login (especially on the deep frozen computers in our labs). That problem is part of the default settings of the browser, where you have to override the privacy settings through Tools > Internet Options > Privacy tab > Advanced > Override Automatic Cookie Handling.
So for now, we're still having trouble with legacy versions of MediaWiki, but on my personal page, the latest MediaWiki install is great and works fine with most browsers. Thanks again to Barry Dahl for the inspiration to do this.
LMS Review
I've spent 19 hours at work the past two days, so I come home, plop down in front of the computer and blog about work.
As with all Colleges, we're in the final days of preparation for the first classes next week. For us at Mohawk, that means manually (well, through input scripts) creating classes, enrolling students and creating instructor accounts. Until last year, Mohawk has never had a policy that said "we as an institution will use one LMS". So the e-Learning department (of which I am a small part) has been very very lucky to be able to experiment with several different platforms. FirstClass is one of the longest running options at the College - having been in use for at least 9 years, probably more. If you've never used it, you've missed out. It's a standalone client, so it's not a web browser based solution, and while it's quirky, it has lots of options for collaboration. In fact, having used it for around 8 years, I think it's still heads and shoulders above the other LMS's in that aspect.
WebCT is still running at Mohawk as well, and I never really had to use it but the instances I've had to develop content and media for it, it's fine. I never liked the view options (switching from designer to student view to see how things look and function), and it actually plays nice with others (sort of). I mean you can export something and import it somewhere else and it kind of works fine.
Mohawk's also running an instance of Blackboard CE 6, which as I understand it is some hybrid between WebCT and Blackboard. Like WebCT, it's ok. Fairly locked in, and creating user accounts on it is a real pain, involving a custom hacked Perl script, XML massaging and a CSV. Getting students in shouldn't be this difficult should it? Of course Blackboard offered to integrate the system with our Student Information System, for a fairly large (to me anyways) sum. No thanks, how about creating a way to bulk import students that doesn't take half an hour?
We also have an installation of Moodle. Which was pretty daunting for faculty to use as there's not a large support component for them. That's not to say that Moodle doesn't have a large support community, it most certainly does. Our faculty are not the most e-learning adventurous, and the ones that are, are already using one of the 5 systems in place (FirstClass, WebCT, Blackboard, Desire2Learn and the Portal CourseTools, which e-Learning doesn't have any control over). So the ones who might've been interested in trying Moodle were probably scared away by the lack of immediate help with the system. Which is too bad, because the flexibility it can deliver is really nice. It's the MySQL of osCommerce (or WordPress?) of Learning Management Systems.
Last year, e-Learning (I was only peripherally involved with the department as I was working with technology for second language learners at the time) went through a nine month review process, to look at acquiring one system to replace the six. Desire2Learn came out on top. The final paper is on the LMS Review blog.
Having worked with Desire2Learn for about four months, I'm disappointed with the collaborative tools (blogs specifically, but online documents were something I had hoped they would be developing). I guess I shouldn't be, my expectations of a modern system is far and above what the average instructor or user would expect or need. And it's perfect for that beginner user - I just hope that we don't end up down the garden path and find out that it's not quite robust at that level. Of course, I know it sort of is. Barry Dahl and Kyle Mackie are always posting about interesting things to do with D2L and I hope that our faculty can get to that point. I guess it's part frustration that we haven't used it before, and even though our admin has been using a lot since February, he still feels he has no mastery of it. That to me suggests there's some depth to the system. Maybe we're all a bunch of self-deprecating navel gazers? It is an exciting time at Mohawk. I talked to two faculty members today who were genuinely excited to use the system, which is all I need to get through the day I suppose.
Aesthetics as Part of Usability
So the recent past has me thinking about the aesthetics of e-learning spaces, and while that may seem like a non-issue for many people, I believe it will be incredibly important as educators move forward. We rely on aesthetics to assist us in a quick reliability check. We all do this in real life when we meet a person, as they say first impressions are important. Well, this is no different in e-learning or in a face to face class.
Certainly Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle and other modern LMS's allow a creator to exert some control over how content looks. You are somewhat functionally trapped into a frame where content is held with some of these systems, but in many cases those are constraints that you can work with (against?). As an educator you might also have other issues restricting the look of your content; headers are a certain color, color schemes might be imposed by your institution, usability experts tell you what icon to use for a link or even font size might be restricted.
As an educator you have a dual purpose as well, you need to make your content accessible as well. So that means you should consider things like contrast of color, whether your font size is large enough for the visually impaired and whether your images have alt tags to ensure a screen reader can convey the description properly to a user. In fact, your institution might be under law to make your content accessible.
Frames in and of themselves pose problems for stringent accessibility rules, so your LMS might already be screwing you. It's quite possible it's screwing you anyways... never mind that ugly thought...
It's not particularly difficult to make a website accessible. It can be tricky to make it aesthetically pleasing and usable. Seeing as I've brought up visually impaired users, I would be very very remiss to not mention this other blog article about 10 Tools for Evaluating Web Site Accessibility especially for color blind users. While these are for websites, you can use most of these tools within LMS's as well. The Firefox extention (#1 in the linked article) is excellent, and has identified a couple areas that I need to be aware of in my own work. Of course, this doesn't really speak about aesthetics. Well not explicitly anyways.
Aesthetics are pleasing the eye - which can be difficult to hit the centre of the target everytime as we all view things differently. I often get asked, how can I make something look good? Practice is my default answer, but when pressed I will concede that you can't go wrong with the classic black, white and grey. Add an accent color of (one of) red, blue or green and your e-learning space will look professional. If you have a predetermined header, or logo, grab one of the colors as an accent from that. Simplicity is key. It's when people start to get fancy that sometimes people run into trouble.