The Ecampus Blog

Pilot project in open e-Learning

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.

Tags: elearning

Using PDAs with workplace trainees

This is a fascinating, practical example of mobile learning in use. A short podcast investigating how PDAs have been used at Pilbara TAFE.

technorati tags:mobile, learning, PDAs, TAFE, elearning

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Tags: elearning

Flash, Multimedia & E-Learning

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 the XMLHttp activeX object into 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.

Tags: elearning, flash, multimedia