In yesterday's Keeping it simple - is it too late? post I was in medium level rant mode, so today I want to drop down a gear (but only a little:) and focus on one example of what I mean by discrete tools to support learning. Let's suspend reality for a moment. Let's assume that, in 2005, that VLEs didn't exist or that the political climate was so hostile to their use in HE that they never gained a toehold. Suddenly there's no legacy baggage to contend with. OK, I know it's an impossible premise because current thinking is informed by past decisions/mistakes/experiences, but would we simply reinvent what we have now?
An alternative reality of course is that the perceived return on investments in VLEs and supporting infrastructure were eventually found to be so wanting that eventually the political climate becomes so hostile that radical reviews and revisions of past decisions become the norm and change is forced.
Or you may opt (or pray) for a less traumatic alternative reality where the lessons of the past are learned and so the systems we have now evolve into something unrecognizable from our current VLE-centric perspective of e-learning.
My view has been pretty consistent. I've come to view the proprietary VLE-centric 'one-stop-shop', 'we can solve all your problems with product x' view of the world as fundamentally flawed and ultimately constraining upon the freedom of the sector, institution, faculty and student. But I also live in the real world. As yesterday's Keeping it Simple - is it too late? post and associated links highlighted there are few institutions left who have significant room for manoeuvre. So most institutions would probably opt for my third alternative reality in which they eventually evolve to a higher plane of existence. But let's consider for a moment what the thinking is that has enabled the one-size-fits-all VLE toehold.
My thanks to Terry Wassall from the University of Leeds who in a comment to yesterday's post writes:
“Personalised and tailored solutions are hard to support at institutional level. Thus the attraction of structured and constrained one-size-fits-all (where it touches) solutions.”
His comment articulates the issue nicely and provides a welcome balance to my polemic. Nevertheless, he reinforces my contention of yesterday that learning management systems are primarily about the adminstrative efficiency needs of the system and less about learner needs.
Terry also states:
” … multiple packages may be the most exciting and/or effective way of managing learning but its time consuming to learn …”
Now some may feel that Terry's got a point, but let's stand back and look at the so called integrated VLE. In reality it's a hotchpotch of different functional zones each with its own interface and means of navigation. Of course, if you really want to add complexity import a few different documents types, say a Word document here, a PDF document there, A Flash movie here, a RealMedia movie there. What I'm suggesting is that anything beyond the simplest text/html page is always going to introduce some element of variance and interface complexity; and we've all learned to cope with (or at least tolerate) this because we only tend to use a limited range of tools and a subset of functions within those tools anyway.
Terry's comment also is a helpful reminder that terms like Podcast, aggregator, RSS, and wiki might as well be an unrecognized foreign language to the uninitiated. If we ain't introducing our colleagues to these new technologies how can we expect them to make informed decisions about their pedagogical usefullness? Of course your institutional polices may make such orientations difficult, particularly when they are considered 'off-message' or make service 'expectation management' difficult.
But Terry has hit the nail on the head with his 'time consuming' comment. Despite our desire to see VLEs become a vehicle for enriching the student's learning experience, in the absence of perceived alternatives within HEI's IT infrastructures, I believe that, with a few exceptions, the VLE has become no more than a de facto and oh so limited (and limiting) content repository which simply reinforces the all pervasive (and comfortable) information transfer model. I say 'comfortable' because the pressures on faculty, students, and estate are now so great that even a primitive content distribution system becomes welcome. Now I know many will rush to declare several innovative examples of excellent practice from within their institutions, but how many can truly say and “this represents the vast majority of practice within my institution”. And if we continue as we are, if I was to return in a decade, would the position have really changed that much?
But do keep in mind I'm not knocking the importance of content aggregation and dissemination to the learning process. I'm merely suggesting that a) let's not fool ourselves that when our Vice Chancellor/President proudly announces our institution has now got x000 VLE 'courses' (rounds of audience applause) that this represents meaningful e-learning and b) the VLE is not necessarily the best mechanism for supporting content aggregation and dissemination.
But yet, there are institutions around who have either eschewed the mass migration to proprietary VLEs or who appear to offer tool-oriented alternatives. In the UK, the University of Warwick provides a good example of a different and discrete tool way of doing things. I've waxed lyrical about them in the past, e.g.
“The more I look at what Warwick's been doing the more impressed I become. These people have really got it. They are providing their staff and students with tools that do discrete jobs and can therefore achieve a level of flexibility that most institutions can only dream of.” (Auricle 13 April 2005).
Visit Warwick's Web Tools if you want a reminder of what they're doing.
Another star in my book is the University of Washington's Catalyst Tools which continues to grow in functionality despite that institution's parallel engagement with a proprietary VLE.
And of course I warm to the UK's JISC funded e-Tools projects because the very existence of this initiative is a recognition of the need to think beyond the VLE; although we've got to be careful that we don't forget that the eLearning Framework (eLF), with which the e-Tools initiative is associated, remains a framework and doesn't transmorph into a new type of monolith. If you want a flavour of what the JISC e-Tools initiative is about then the Academic Talk project looks pretty interesting.
Anyway, now on to the substantive topic for today. Yesterday's Keeping it simple - is it too late? post stated:
“Not that I underestimate the importance of providing the student with an efficient mechanism of aggregating the content that's of importance to them, but let's not pretend that this is any more e-learning than is a pile of handouts distributed at the end of a lecture. And let's not pretend that we actually need a VLE with a recurring license expenditure to do this … the VLE is actually a pretty poor aggregator.”
Instead of just tut tuting about how terrible it is that the vast majority of VLEs are just used as content repositories I tend to look upon this reality as a statement of need. Of course I would rather all faculty embraced student centredness, active learning, social constructivism and all these good things but, if VLEs have taught us nothing else, it's that people want some means of distributing and sharing content. At the same time I don't want these content wallahs distorting an institution's perception of e-learning activity; those distortions eventually end up as data returns which in turn can have a profound effect on policy making, and so will eventually undermine the Vice Chancellor's/President's public claims of widespread e-learning success in their institution. The question needs to become not how much you are doing but how much of what you are doing.
No, what we need an e-tool, let's call it a shareable content aggregator (SCA). What form and function could such a beast take? Let's consider the following:
- Each student and staff account would automatically be allocated an initial SCA URI and quota.
- Processing requests for further SCA accounts and allocations should be automated where possible, e.g. staff can easily request further SCAs to support specific cohorts and groups. The relative ease with which new weblog accounts can be automatically generated by 'free' providers sets the benchmark here.
- The SCA should value student content as much as it does tutors and lecturers.
- The SCA's access management features would enable a high degree of user control over who could read, write or edit content and so would support individual, group, peer-to-peer, and student-tutor work. By 'invitation only' should be a feature.
- The SCA would be media type agnostic and thus place no restrictions on content types.
- The content linked to by the SCA could be both centralized and distributed.
- The SCA should provide simple user management of content, e.g. directory tree.
- It should be possible for staff to 'auto-populate' a series of SCAs in support of a module or series of modules.
- It should be possible for designated students or student groups to auto-populate a series of SCAs with the permission of the owners.
- The SCA should support both ad-hoc and formal groupings.
- It would not be sufficient for access rights management within the SCA to assume that all groupings necessarily have accounts in the host institution. The reality of academic work is that much is done across disciplines, across institutions and across national/international boundaries.
- Content could be both manually and automatically downloaded to a device or folder/directory of the users choosing or accessed in situ.
Hmmm … mind bending … but let's see if a couple of scenarios brings this to life (ok, narrative 'use-cases' if you're so inclined:)
Scenario 1
A tutor stands before large cohort of students. Let's say 300 or so. He/she is briefing them on a collaborative assignment (could be formative or summative). The tutor wants them to work in groups of 6 and report back their process, deliverables, and outcomes in a fortnight. The deliverables will include supporting evidence in the form of multimedia content uncovered in their investigations. Because each student has a SCA the groups already have a key tool at their disposal and so the question then become one of how groups are allocated. Again because the enabling tool already exists the tutor may choose to leave this to the students to sort out as part of the exercise; the student owner of the SCA would grant access to whoever they were going to work with on this assignment. Alternatively, there could be fixed cohort groupings for a module.
Scenario 2
An inter-institutional project or research team want an efficient way of sharing content. Only some members of the team are based in an institution which provides SCAs. The team leader logs in to his computing services Web page and fills in a brief form which requests a new SCA to be allocated. His current quota is automatically checked and displayed and the new SCA URI is displayed and emailed to him. Because some of the team don't have host institution accounts the access management system requires some data to generate the relevant permissions.
Now Scenario 2 poses a few challenges to the status quo. For example, you can almost hear central IT services rushing to challenge the right of people who don't have institutional accounts to access resources? But the work of the HEI can never been confined to the borders of one institution. That didn't matter too much when communication and collaboration took the form of physical travel, face-to-face meetings, the postal service, and the telephone. Perhaps most HEI's IT policies have not caught up with the reality of ad-hoc groupings involved in collaborative work across national borders and time-zones. Attempts to constrain this or force registration on endless local accounts will only increase the administrative burden, irritate faculty, and will merely result in yet more multiple copies of content navigating its way via the email backdoor. If you don't think this affects you then consider again what your existing VLE is being used for. Does not your existing Blackboard or WebCT support just what I'm talking about? Are these 'externals' just registered manually to save the adminstrative hassle or do they all have institutional accounts? Time to brush up on Shibboleth perhaps?
Anway, that's my starter for ten … anyone wanting to take on the development of a SCA? … Or does anyone feel they have already done this under some other banner? … But do remember we're not looking for a swiss-army knife here (that's just too VLE-like). The goal, instead, is a tool that does one thing spectacularly well, a bit like a podcast aggregator with extra bits:)
