There’s nothing more fascinating for an e-learning course designer than watching users interact with the courses online. From where they click, their mouse movements, scrolling and so on, you can tell you a lot about what is good and what is bad about the course and the user interface surrounding it.
The problem for e-learning, of course, is that you can’t sit there and watch students interact with your courses. They’re usually on a browser far away, and it’s hard to work out what they’re doing. “Usability testing” under these circumstances is difficult.
People are trying to remedy the situation, of course.
There are some commercial companies that take these techniques and use them for business analytics and marketing. Crazyegg, of instance, take a visual approach to showing where users have clicked, what sites they have been referred from, and so on. It’s a nice, user friendly way to see what bits of your course generate interest and so on. Here’s one view Crazy Egg provide - a “heatmap”. The brighter the colour, the more clicks the user has made in the area.
Clicktale take another approach. They actually track user movements so you can watch “playback” of the user’s session. Scrolling, mouse movement and so on. The orange block moves around the screen to show where the user is moving the mouse. A very handy technique - it means you can really “see” what students are up to and improve things where necessary.
Back in 2001, a MIT project called “Cheese” did something along the lines in a marginally more primitive way using embedded script in the browser. Another open source, free way of doing something similar is by using something such as UsaProxy. Richard Atterer and Albrecht Schmidt, the creators of the software, put it this way:
We have implemented a special proxy server which sits transparently between server and client. It gathers detailed usage information (e.g. key presses, mouse movements), including information on the objects on the page which were involved in an interaction.
This allows you to share sessions with users, log mouse movements and so on. The basic idea and some of the techniques can be easily adapted for e-learning and course usability testing. Once presented as a report, a “movie” of user activity or a heatmap, or even just watched “live”, this sort information is a great way to see how your e-learning project is going.
Very occasionally in life you come across something that can really make your life easier. I had one of those moments today when I saw this. This will really increase the quality of life for a select few… including me.
About six weeks ago Composica contacted us to see if we were interested in having a look at their elearning authoring tool “Composica Enterprise“. We get about ten calls a week from authoring tool vendors peddling their wares, but the groupware functionality of Composica was enough to get me interested enough to try out a demo.
It is not often I get excited about software, but in one fell swoop Composica has solved a heap of the most irritating problems we face creating custom content for our clients.
Having all the stakeholders being able to view and contribute to the project, in real time, through a browser, saves an enormous amount of time. No more sending files around to be edited and waiting for them to come back.
Simple Author Interface
Another brilliant aspect of Composica is the user interface; it borrows heavily from popular word processors, which makes it easy to understand.
Although it has a simple interface, Composica has a heap of serious functionality for developers. The properties of every element on the screen can be fully tweaked.
Look, it’s on the internet!
Okay, an obvious point, but not having to worry about purchasing licences for desktops is a real bonus from an admin point of view. Clients can just login to the site and they are ready to go … very, very handy when things need to be done quickly.
Accountability
One for the Project Managers. Composica has a built-in task list, and lets users annotate the work of others (the notes are not published with the content).
But is it an Authoring Tool?
Yep, it’s a great authoring tool, but as you may have guessed Composica is probably better described as as platform for developing elearning content.
As I said, for me the most impressive feature of Composica is its groupware. Anything that enables a subject matter expert (SME), a flash developer, an instructional designer and a project manager to work on the same project simultaneously is a very good thing.
I was having a discussion with a phd student at a University a week ago. The student told me that the administration at the University took 20% of her research grant for administration. And that this was standard. Another student was told by the University administration that unless she signed over all “intellectual property” rights to her research she would loose her grant and candidature. She was also told not to publish any results for 12 months after completion of the project, because the University wanted to investigate it to see if any patents could be derived from it. She didn’t want to do any of this, but it was made clear her position was in jeopardy. Another academic was told to turn away any student - no matter how brilliant - unless that student brought grant money with them. The most highly paid positions at the University in question are now managerial - not academic - positions. Another person I know overheard two prospective students talking - they had concluded that standards had slipped to the point where it wasn’t worth attending the University in question.
I haven’t confirmed the stories, but they are from separate people all developing an awareness of an increase in managerial control of the education process. But the point is this - the University is being run by the administration for the administration rather than by the academics or students. Decisions about where resources go are based on administrative and financial imperatives, not educational imperatives. It is destroying student and teacher morale and the quality of the courses.
The first imperative of any organsation is self-perpetuation and - with any luck - growth. As the administration makes decisions about resources, it is no surprise to find out that the administration at this University has grown in size and stature. It is also no surprise that many other aspects of the University have been cut back to allow for that growth. But academics and students are a timid lot. If they complain about this creeping administration, if they reject it, they risk losing their work, their grants, all the resources the administration makes decisions about.
What about more “pure” forms of study? The benefits of this sort of education are obvious - but not easily measured. They are, essentially, positive economic externalities. A “critical mind” is not something tangible, neither is a “philosophical disposition” or “intellectual rigour”. Some things will never have a market value as such. But it’s clear most administrations like the one at the University don’t put much stock in these things either - if they did, would they deliberately hamper the publication of results or the taking on of students based on merit rather than economics? This is not the thinking of educators. So what is there to lose? Perhaps a more open, free-form system will actually help foster academic rigour in time?
This sort of system is quite possible to achieve with a combination of CRM, e-learning and assorted web services. This relieves academics of the need to do much administration beyond basic decisions about tutorial times, lecture times, locations, and so on. It gives providers of infrastructure the opportunity to offer it to a whole new market. It gives students choice over courses, over their education. It reduces the costs of admin to a negligible amount, certainly well below 20% of research funds.
We are hoping to begin a pilot project in this area as a closed beta. With any luck, the end result will be a non-profit web application for academics, students and providers of educational infrastructure. It will be open to all. Course materials uploaded will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license and made freely available, and people will be able to share course materials between courses for true online collaboration. Moderated web conferences with video and audio will be cheap and easy to use (cents not dollars per hour is what we’re aiming at).Keep an eye on this blog for updates.
But without the students and academics, though, what is a University? Infrastructure. Labs. Lecture theatres. Car fleets. Buildings. Tutorial rooms. Most of this infrastructure could be provided by anyone. Probably more cheaply and more efficiently. Why not give academics and students choice over how they spend their grants, their public funds, their private industry support, and so on? Surely they know what sorts of labs they need, where their tutorials need to be, what sort of facilities are required to carry out a piece of research, and so on. A professional administrator is probably not as well equipped to make those sorts of decisions.
If academics could set up their own courses, take on students, provide tutorials and provide course materials online, then they would be independent of the administration. If each student could decide where to spend the funding he or she gets, then each student could choose the courses that suited them. Then academics and students would have a direct economic relationship; both are probably best informed about how to conduct that relationship, not a third party such as a University administrator.
Then a University, for example, would have to compete with everyone else who could provide similar infrastructure. Why not have tutorials at a conference centre? Why not use private labs? Why not organise lectures in private lecture theatres? Why not even rent the University’s own infrastructure occasionally? Then the business-minded University administration will be exposed to the rigours of “competition”. They would no longer have a regular stream of oligopoly rents gleaned from well intentioned government spending. Rather, the academics and students decide how to allocate those funds. Probably, in all likelihood, more would go to actual education and less to administration.
All sounds good, doesn’t it? But academics are specialists in teaching and their subject areas, not in business or administration. True. Academics want to spend their time doing research and teaching, not organising the intricacies of their courses as going business concerns. Most have a preference for face-to-face teaching, not staring at 200 X 200 pixel images of their students moving at 5 frames per second. What happens to a sense of collegiality when everything starts to turn into a business? Where do academics find their students? How do students find courses? Will students have too much power to influence the educational process if they have the power to decide the financial fate of an academic? Is there a risk that the most pandering of the academics will do the best under these circumstances and the more rigorous will be put out of business?
In the another post I suggested that employers value transparent assessments of prospective employee skills. For some, it is about status - “we have 3 PHDs on staff” - but to most businesses, they want results. If someone has a track record of results, then the employer feels safe employing them. Particularly if a respected expert can vouch for those results. Academics have a role to play here - they are filters, they give recommendations. Students will pay to be recommended, to have their work assessed by experts. Particularly ones of their own choosing. It’s up to others to judge the verisimilitude of those assessments. Any intelligent employer, for example, will cast a critical eye over them. To some extent this will encourage rigour; no student wants to do a course that doesn’t give them credibility with an employer, no academic wants to be seen to be too “soft”. Perhaps student, academic and employer interests will balance each other out to produce a reasonable educational result.
The average web application has a torturous UI that kills goats at fifteen paces. For some more complex activity, such as laying out graphics, it just doesn’t work as well as, say, as your average well-designed desktop-based application from 1996. It can’t do obvious things: such as access you web cam or allow you to drag and drop files into it. Web apps still use page re-load pages quite often. Things that worked once, stop working with new browsers. Some things work in Opera in mysterious ways. Some things work in Explorer in strange ways. Firefox does odd things. Safari does eccentric Steve Jobsy things. Nothing looks the same across all browsers. Browser incompatibility, mysterious hacks, and really diabolical bracketology rule the day. It requires hacking to make it all work.
The solution to this miasma of browser quirks and hacking? Some people call them “RIAs”, or rich internet applications. You can do things in them that you can do in normal applications such as Word or on your desktop. Drag things around. Click on windows. Play videos. Record your voice. Show presentations. That sort of stuff. They run on remote servers, and you access them via your browser.
The whole notion of web-based apps really took off when people started taking a combination of html, the document object model, css, javascript and XMLHttpRequest, to create things such as Gmail and flickr. Of course, people had been doing this stuff since Microsoft originally put theXMLHttpactiveXobjectinto IE 5, and even before that using iFrames and other hacks, but circumstances contrived to make Gmail and other apps like it a minor buzz point; and so Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “web 2.0″, a load of colourful logos were created, another coined the phrase ajax (”Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”, a word which is also the name of a household cleanser) and, with a general increase in jargon, controversy arose about the possibility of a new internet bubble.
But as more students, customers, colleagues, etc, have faster and faster internet connections web applications start to make more and more sense. Particularly when people want to collaborate over the ‘net. Indeed, some of the most useful applications simply wouldn’t make sense as anything else except server-based web apps: search engines, online collaboration software of most kinds, ecommerce sites, and so on. Indeed, the discussion is over bar the protestations of a few. Web apps are the future. No-one wants to support multiple code bases for Macs, Windows, Linux and so on (they’d rather support multiple browsers :-)). No-one wants to deal with boxes of software anymore. Punters don’t want to worry about upgrades, software installs and all that. And, for e-Learning, the punters are used to learning things from the internet and socialising using everything from mobile phones to internet forums. For web-based e-Learning, indeed for most applications, the web application is a given.
But programming web applications still makes grown men weep. Really great projects such as the dojo toolkit and prototype help a lot, but they are still in a nascent form. Dojo, for example, is really wonderful, with some AOP and some handy use of the functional programming possibilities of javascript and all sorts of other cool stuff - but it is still only approaching version 0.4. Google, of course, is in on the act with GWT, which actually tries the abstract the whole “ajax” hack behind a java library. Microsoft has it’s own thing: Atlas, all built around it’s ASP.NET platform. The problem is, no matter how good they are, they can’t expand the web application much beyond the limitations of the browser and the hackology inherent in it.
There is, of course Java web start as an alternative to all this javascript hackology. But that requires a large plugin to work and it just doesn’t work a lot of the time. How many people have had bad experiences trying to get applets to run? Quite a few. Although there is talk of making it smaller. And Adobe’s Flex, and the Apollo project, which makes use of the cross-browser Flash plugin, which I’ve written about before. And possibly something by Microsoft called XAML. And so the list goes on. In other words, there are a lot of buzzwords …
… and with buzzwords comes the traditional sound of buzzing, which addles the brain and makes programmers wish they were born in Age of Reason were Everything Just Worked. But … it doesn’t.
What does this mean for the typical e-Learning site? Major redevelopment. Why bother? Because as I’ve posted about before, as multimedia becomes more common on web sites we’ll need more sophisticated applications to make the most of it. Plus, a better UI is a better user experience, and by extension a better educational experience.
Like a squillion other companies we have been scrambling for our .mobi domain name. For those of you who haven’t encountered .mobi before, it’s a top level domain for content designed to be accessed by mobile devices. It has the backing of many of the significant players in mobile communications and search includingVodafone, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Nokia etc.
Using mobile devices as a learning tool is not a new idea, but it is still very much at the bleeding edge stage. I think we have had two enquiries about mobile learning this year and one of those was looking for a bus to transport research students. I think I can confidently call the market immature.
Whilst we are contemplating what to do with our new found ecampus.mobi domain you can check out a couple of the (Australian) pioneers of this new fangled technology.
Leonard Low– Investigates everything m-learning. We read his blog daily so we know what’s going on.
Sue Waters – Some interesting interviews with people unitising mobile technology in the TAFE sector.
In the 80s, when most people didn’t even know what email was, the closest thing most nerds came to the internet was through things called BBSs. Esoteric text-based systems such as Wildcat were called up by people using their phones and 300 baud modems. Strange, beardy characters who gave themselves names such as Plembo and who knew what the Hayes command “ATD” did. It was a world of High Nerd and very few people knew much about it. They played games such as nethack (and still do), and thought graphical user interfaces were for weaklings. Some, gloriously, still do.
I remember seeing my first fast modem later in that period. It was a Netcomm Trailblazer. I stood in an office marvelling at how quickly the text appeared on the screen. It was a joy to behold. There were jealous oohs and aahs, but no thoughts of watching videos, listening to music or doing anything like that. It was only 14400 bps from memory. It was s.l.o.w. Almost one quarter the speed of, say, the average 56k modem that comes with a squealing aeroplane-fanned doorstop PC from KMart.
It really only started to be interesting to most when the world wide web appeared. And things started to feature pictures and text (courtesy of NCSA Mosaic amongst other things). Sure, email and other cool things might have had something to do with it too, but they’d been around sometime previously (email had existed since 1972). No, pictures and the www did a lot popularise the internet; in 1996, 56k modems started to make things look good by making pictures download slightly faster than watching a hard drive defragment itself beside a wall of drying paint. Most people didn’t want to ring up BBSs and type messages to other people who also rang up BBSs to talk about … ringing up BBSs, the computer subculture and miscellaneous topics on Usenet about odd things. They wanted to read news stories with pictures. Read about celebs. With pictures. And there was something else that involved pictures that we won’t go into. And they wanted to see lots of content from all over the place. So old fashioned BBSs all but died, and people began ringing ISPs to get on to the internet.
Next came the next smallest media type - music. And that only became viable when it was compressed into, amongst other things, the famous mp3 format. Small enough to download. And then there was the Napster phenomenon and all that legal malarkey as an entire industry realised it could be being visited by the grim reaper in the form of a cheeky, pimply teen in a Metallica t-shirt.
And then … moving pictures, in really small boxes that you squint at and then go for a coffee or herb tea or massage while you wait for the “buffering …” or “loading …” message to disappear. But even video of this kind has turned into something of a phenomenon. Youtube, the biggest of the video sites may not make much money, but it could be on to a good thing, or it may not.
Accenture said that, although predominantly younger consumers were driving changes in consumer behaviour, the trend could not be written off as a temporary fad.
“Change will only accelerate over the next 10 years as today’s youth gain purchasing power,” it said.
To address the trend, media companies would have to consider overhauling existing business models to offer more flexible ways of accessing content, Accenture warned.
“They must experiment with new channels of content distribution and new business models. In addition, they must provide the consumer with more of an editorial role in selecting, modifying and sharing the content.”
Of course, this is all predicated on people having fast enough connections to do all this. Once it’s cheap enough for the average punter to download and upload a given type of media easily, you see riots and ructions. Text and pictures changed the newspaper industry, the classifieds industry, and changed the culture of journalism, amongst other things. Mp3s changed the way music was promulgated, it changed the music industry forever. Video is in the process of changing the nature of TV, movie distribution and so on. Education will be shaken up by this sort of change, too; it is, in some respects, just a purveyor of various types of media too; classes can be delivered via video, scholarly articles can be distributed via services such as JSTOR, academics can write blogs, lectures can be recorded on video and streamed online, tutorials and classes can be conducted by video conference, and so on.
As E-learning develops, and as internet capacity increases, online education stops being just about fairly boring static content; it starts replacing some tutorial rooms and class rooms for some courses. The young people, who comprise a great many students, will be used to the new technology and happy to use it. The interesting question is: how long before this happens on a wide enough scale to start changing education a lot? And how long before it is much more fun and informative than going to, say, a stuffy old lecture or another boring tutorial? Or boring old high school? Or an an uninspiring tech college’s theory classes?
How long before the local University is also competing for students with the greatest and best from all over the world? Why attend a lecture about a topic by some lesser academic when you could watch the lady who wrote the book, so to speak, over the internet? And perhaps, attend, a video conference tutorial with her as a tutor with other students from all over the world? What if you could put together a load of different subjects and classes from different Universities to create courses? What if teachers start going freelance and offering their own courses from their own web sites?
It depends on the ubiquity of fast internet connections amongst students. It took from 1962, when the first widely available 300 baud Bell 103 was made by AT&T, to 1996 when the 56k modem was released, to go from 300 bits per second to 56,000. Now over 2 million people in Australia usually get between 256k and 1.5 mps using what is optimistically referred to as “broadband”, mostly using DSL. It is still relatively expensive, and most punters are limited by the amount of data they can download, but it’s getting cheaper.
So it seems likely bandwidth will increase over the next 5-10 years. ADSL2+ being the next big change-over. It gives much increased speeds: early adopters are seeing speeds of up to 24 Megabits per second. Good quality live e-Learning, voice over IP telephony, video on demand, and all sorts other multimedia will be possible at that sort of speed. But it’s some way off as a commonly used technology; in Australia it depends in many hard-to-assess factors, not least of which is the current debacle of Telstra. Just keep an eye on those “average punter” broadband uptake stats and the costs of serving content; the changes in education will follow.
But there is something else to consider, too. With all this bandwidth being downloaded in the future, someone has to serve it. It is a massive leap from providing some static files, some course notes, some pictures, some pdfs and the occasional mpeg to providing video conferencing, video on demand, and other services to students. The costs of bandwidth increase considerably. A University may have to serve, say, 8, or 20, or 100 feeds for a class. And receive a feed from each of those students too. Things can get out of hand quickly! It is as if you stopped driving around a scooter and suddenly started paying to fill a v8’s tank. So bandwidth costs for educational institutions will have to come a down a bit, too, before the new technology starts to be commonly used.
And as an aside, those who are the best (and cheapest) providers of the type of IT infrastructure required to cater for these students with broadband are not educational institutions. They’re people such as Amazon with its S3 service and its eccentricly named Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), or possibly Google or other data centre specialists. As an aside, Google already have some great lectures online. People such as Amazon and Google can scale effectively to meet demand, Google can implement clever programming such as MapReduce. Organisations of their ilk can do things a typical educational institution’s IT department can’t.
Indeed, a great deal of educational institution IT infrastructure is unwieldly. It can’t just be moved to new systems such as EC2 easily to reduce costs. It has horrors such as Peoplesoft installations that eat small children instead. But as I wrote in another post, the same technical and social changes that are making e-Learning more important are also providing alternative ways of garnering qualifications. Those alternative ways of garnering qualifications will make the most of cheap IT infrastructure such as Amazon’s EC2. Traditional educational institutions will have to do the same, otherwise they will (technically) be less useful to students, and (price-wise) be relatively expensive.
Using mobile devices as a learning tool is not a new idea, but it is still very much at the bleeding edge stage. I think we have had two enquiries about mobile learning this year and one of those was looking for a bus to transport research students. I think I can confidently call the market immature.
