Whilst waxing lyrical about the issues related to scaling up weblog use within higher education institutions yesterday I put forward a couple of refreshing alternatives to the 'e-learning=proprietary VLE' furrow now being ploughed by many institutions. I think we have a lot to learn from institutions that have opted for an eTools and services model as an important part of delivering on their learning and teaching strategies, so I'm revisiting this theme today. In yesterday's Weblog scalability and automation in referring to the University of Warwick's BlogBuilder tool I said:
“On a more general front I really like Warwick's approach. Whilst many HEIs seem to be convinced that the future of e-learning in their institution is inextricably linked to binding themselves to a single enterprise level proprietary VLE, Warwick's ELab Tools and Services IMHO shows us there is another more flexible and adaptable way. That doesn't mean they don't use VLEs, it's just that they have deliberately eschewed the emerging 'monoculture' I've waxed lyrical about elsewhere.”
IMHO Warwick has one of the most clearly articulated and visionary e-learning strategies in the UK which has informed decision making and progress since the publication of their An e-strategy for the University of Warwick in January 2001 (available both as PDF or a menu driven HTML version.
Within this 2001 document we find statements like:
“The University of Warwick is a diverse organisation and it would be inappropriate to impose a standard VLE for all departments and purposes. Such a policy would likely inhibit adoption of innovative new approaches as individual academics discovered the limitations of the particular package selected. Rather we suggest that the e-learning Development Unit provides generic tools and capabilities for e-learning such as Web publishing, Collaborative authoring, Web conferencing, On-line assessment and audio / video production.” (p33)
The progressive nature of Warwick's 2001 proposals seem to have been reinforced in their An E-Learning Strategy for the University of Warwick (May 2002).
“E-learning resources should be an amenity for staff and students, but not imposed on staff.”
“E-learning is not simply an aspect of IT provision.”
“… there will be relatively few staff who will not find something of use among the array of possibilities now opening up.”
and in its Virtually a VLE but a lot more we find restatement of the belief that:
“… the acquisition of a one size fits all Virtual Learning Environment causes difficulties”
When I see tools like Warwick's BlogBuilder or the University of Washington's Portfolio, Virtual Case, or Peer Review tools I can't help but feel these institutions have got it right. Their staff and students can select from a growing catalogue of learning and teaching tools which enables them to focus on what they want/have to do without the dangers of cognitive overload and irrelevant VLE furniture.
Other examples of this 'tools' model were considered earlier this year in our series of articles about weblogs and content management systems as alternatives to the mainstream VLEs. Many of the open source content management systems like PostNuke have modular architectures which seem to stimulate a lot of creative activity in their developer communities and so, for example, we find a personal journal or blog supplement being published by one of the members. Other examples include our recent contribution to the Moodle community where we enhanced the functionality of an existing RSS 'tool' so that each course could receive an infinite number of syndicated information/resource feeds.
But the informed readers of Auricle will have spotted the gotcha! All of these tools, including Warwick's and Washington's run from within some sort of platform and invariably have some dependencies upon that platform. For example, let's say Warwick wanted to put BlogBuilder into the public domain so the whole educational community could benefit from their work. Not so easy! BlogBuilder is a java application which uses using Oracle as a back end and has a custom authentication dependency. The costs of decoupling and licensing Oracle would prove a major disincentive. Of course if BlogBuilder was running as a service then where it was hosted wouldn't matter so much … are you listening JISC:)
It's also easy to forget that the proprietary VLE WebCT started life as Web Courseware Tools, suggesting a toolkit model informed the original design. The 'toolkit' vision has now metamorphized into the 'complete enterprise solution'. But who knows, maybe the Web services model will find discrete tools coming back on to the agenda of the proprietary vendors' marketing departments?
So we need to accept that tools and services are generated on, or hosted in, a platform of some type. Of course, from a vendor's perspective, if they can transform their host application into a platform then recurrent $$$$$ await. What Warwick, Washington and the open source initiatives have recognized is that ownership and control of the platform is all important; it is from that point all other decisions are made.
Warwick or Washington wants to add a new tool or enhancement? They just do it. They have control of the platform. The majority of institutions, however, don't own their platform and so are reliant on their vendor's interpretation of their needs and the vendor's prioritization of the features and 'tools'. In the latter case such decisions are as much informed by business imperatives such as competitor analysis, the need to keep shareholders happy, and published release dates, as with client satisfaction.
Theoretically, the Sakai Project should fit right in with the tools oriented model I've been describing. I'm holding back from installing the first release for the moment, until I've done some more homework, but I found the Sakai illustrated documentation provide a useful overview. It's a little disappointing to find that in the user documentation Sakai is being described just as:
” … an enhanced version of the original [University of Michigan] CourseTools. It is a set of software tools designed to help instructors, researchers and students create websites on the World Wide Web.”
In another part of the Sakai site we find a rather grander:
“Michigan, Indiana, MIT, Stanford, and uPortal will all license their considerable intellectual property and/or experiences with large scale application software (e.g., Course Tools, Work Tools, Navigo Assessment, Oncourse, Stellar, uPortal, OneStart, Eden Workflow, CourseWorks, etc.) into a re-factoring of best features. This will include an enterprise-scale course management system, distributed research collaboration tools, and an enterprise services portal … ”
The apparent downgrading of Sakai to an 'enhancement of CourseTools' in the user documentation is perhaps because it's better to get something out there quickly than promise perfection later.
One of the contributors to Sakai is UPortal which is gaining a lot of traction in the higher education community. The concept of the enterprise portal into which you can plug and unplug services and tools is attractive, but the granularity of the services and tools fronted by the portal concerns me. On the one hand the portal could offer me access to my weblog (small grained) whereas on the other hand if all the portal is doing is acting as a gateway to a VLE, arguably, another portal, and another interface to navigate to get to the tool I want, then that becomes more questionnable.
Of course if current VLE's became invisible and transformed themselves into discrete services accessed via a portal then ….. ?
