Flexknowlogy

UEN and USHE are hosting a showcase of current learning management systems tomorrow, August 14th, at the Marriott library in Salt Lake City. I get to present Moodle at 9:30am, so here’s a quick link to my Moodle Demo presentation page, which includes an overview document and a backchannel for chat.

Today I am presenting at the SFo MoodleMoot on how Moodle can be used to deliver Open Educational Resources, especially through our modification of Moodle, the Open Meta Mod.

Presentation slides are now available and you are welcome to participate in the backchannel through the chat window provided below.

Presentation Slides

openmod.ppt

Web Sites Referenced

• OpenCourseWare Consortium
• Open Educational Resources Commons
• David Wiley’s OpenContent Wiki
• David Wiley’s OpenContent blog
• Utah Open High School
• Creative Commons licenses
• MIT’s “Making the Case for OCW”
• Why a Reputation Economy?
• UK’s Open University LearningSpace
• OpenContentDIY
• Leigh Blackall’s slide on Another Way

P.S. After my presentation was over, I came back to my hotel to find this bus in the parking lot. It’s nothing less than a sign for a questioning open education convert.

It looks like I’ll be presenting at the 2008 MoodleMoot San Francisco, June 9 - 11, 2008 South San Francisco Conference Center on our Open Mod for sharing open educational resources. I’ll be dragging Kenneth Woodward along to explain the technical facets of the mod, and to delve into the community of Moodle developers.

Of course, prior to the conference Ken and I will have to work pretty aggressively with Clark Nielsen and John Krutsch to ensure that the mod’s features and functionalities are stable and presentable.

After a year-long developer famine, we now have a new Web developer who is assisting us on revivifying the Moodle Open MetaMod project as part of his duties.

In a nutshell: the primary goal of the mod is to allow individual resources OR activities within a Moodle course to be “open” to either non-authenticated visitors or a custom role called “Open User”. There are a number of secondary goals related to intellectual property metadata (e.g. Creative Commons). Much of the information posted here is based on the “official” Open MetaMod page at our Meta Web site.

Project Status

• We have recently corrected errors in the 1.8x version for use in Moodle 1.84.
• The current version of the mod works only on mySQL, though Mr. Sergio Sama Villanueva at Universidad de Oviedo in Spain has added PostgreSQL support, and so adding that to our install package and testing is a high priority.
• Mr. Villanueva has added other features as well, which we plan to test and evaluate.
• We also have a short list of usability alterations and feature enhancements to implement.
• We are working on an update for 1.9 this spring. We hope to present that broadly for feedback from the Moodle community, starting at the June Moodle Moot in San Francisco.
• We plan to host a Moodle 1.9 public instance with several UVU opencourses, and providing pre-made user accounts for teachers, students, and “open users” to test the mod.

Download the Open MetaMod for Moodle 1.8x

Users interested in testing the latest released beta version of the Open MetaMod may download the following ZIP file:

Open MetaMod for Moodle 1.8x

Note that this version of the mod works only on Moodle 1.8x installations on mySQL. A PostgreSQL version is forthcoming. Additionally, unlike previous versions, this version of the mod does not have an installer, and files must be modified manually. In short: use at your own risk!

Detailed Overview of the Open MetaMod

Open MetaMod is a modification for the Moodle learning management system that provides instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual Resources or Activities within a Moodle course as “private” (only visible for registered students) or “shared” (allowing anonymous guest viewing).

A new third option for Moodle Activities, “open”, allows registered non-student users to interact with the class in Moodle activities. This is different from “shared”, as it allows authenticated users on the Moodle system who are not officially registered for the course to interact with students and instructors on the discussion board, take quizzes, complete activities, contribute to wikis, etc.

Instructors and designers can mark resources or activities as “Copyright cleared/Creative Commons” and as “shared” either individually through the normal course module/block interface, or en masse through the Open Settings in the Administration block. All Creative Commons license types are supported in the latest version of the Open MetaMod

Tagging Individual Resources/Activities’ Copyright Status

Note: The default tag of all resources and activities is copyrighted. This is done intentionally to inhibit the accidental sharing of copyrighted course materials.

1. To tag individual resources or activities with a copyright status, first enter your Moodle course and click Turn editing on.
2. Next to each resource or activity you will note either a red “C” indicating Copyrighted or a green “CC” indicating Copyright Cleared/Creative Commons:

   

   • Clicking the red “C” or the green “CC” will toggle the copyright status of this resource/activity.
   • Only resources/activities tagged as “CC” are eligible to be “shared”.

Marking Individual Resources/Activities as “Shared” or “Private”

Note: Changing the copyright status of a resource marked as “shared” from “CC” to “C” will automatically disable the shared status.

• After a resource/activity has been tagged as “CC”, the grayed-out door icon will become clickable.
• “CC” resources/activities default to “private”, indicated by a brown closed door icon.
• Clicking the door icon will toggle the private/shared status of this resource/activity.
• “Shared” resources are indicated by a glass door icon.
• An open door icon, which indicates a fully “Open” status.

Making Copyright Status and Shared Status Changes En Masse

Tagging and marking individual resources seems pretty onerous, right? Well, this is purposefully the case so that instructors/designers are forced to consider the copyright status of each and every resources or activity.

However, we’ve also accomodated the need to tag and mark multiple resources and activities simultaneously with the OCW Settings link, found in the Administration block.

• To tag a subset of resources/activities as Copyright cleared/Creative Commons, simply click the checkbox next to the resource/activity group.
• At the top or bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
• Clicking Save Changes on the Copyright Status page takes you into the Private/Shared Status page.
• Only resources/activities marked as “CC” will be eligible for “shared” or “open” status.
• To toggle a subset of resources/activities as either “private” or “shared”, simply click the appropriate radio button next to the resource/activity group.

Terminology

C

Copyright This indicates that a resources or activity is protected by copyright law, and should not be made available to the general public. For one’s own protection, one might best assume that all resources or activities are de facto copyrighted<./dd>

CC

Copyright Cleared or Creative Commons license. This refers generally to the idea that a particular resources is legally eligible to be made available to the general public. Ensuring the Copyright Cleared or Creative Commons license status of a resource and activity is solely the responsibility of the instructor or course designer.

private

Indicates that a resource or activity should only be available to registered Moodle users who are also enrolled in the course.

shared

Indicates that a resource or activity should be viewable to both registered Moodle users who are also enrolled in the course as well as anonymous Moodle guests.

open

Indicates that an activity should be fully accessible to registered Moodle users regardless of whether or not they are officially enrolled in the course. If a course allows “Guest access”, anonymous Moodle guests may view but not interact with “open” activities. Note: This feature is not available in the current version of the Open MetaMod for Moodle.

Campus Technology reports that all 44 of Blackboard’s LMS-related patent claims were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office based on 10 issues raised in a reexamination request filed by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) in November, 2006.

Blackboard has two months to respond to the USPTO’s determination, and we can bet they will bankroll as big a response as possible. Surely their recent victory against Desire2Learn for patent infringement will fuel their strength of will to fight. For my part, Bb’s lawsuit leaves me wondering if allowing the lawsuit to stand trial while a USPTO reexamination request was under review was not just premature, but also extremely wasteful of our tax dollars and court time.

I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles about learning management systems (LMS) and personal learning environments (PLE) as of late. LMSs, once the darling of educational technologists, have been getting a sound thwacking inspired by the recent Blackboard patent lawsuit victory. In almost a stars-aligning continuity, PLEs have been gaining more attention and support as “Web 2.0″ technologies have improved, broadened, and gained in popularity amongst communities. Several aspects of both have risen to the top of my constantly-refilled cup of questioning: LMS as a “walled garden”, PLE as perhaps pedagogically superior but strategically tenuous or immature, and the lack of full debates between the two approaches to technology-enhanced education.

George Siemens blogs up just exactly the news I’m interested in week after week, and on the 28th he posted up a reference to Peter Tittenberger’s short piece The Strength of Garden Walls found on his a touch of frost blog. This article describes the percieved value of institutionally administered learning management systems and social software tools as “walled gardens” for their ability to provide teacher control over user access to learning materials and tools, and the distribution of the participants’ input and output.

(I should restate that, for most institutionally administered social software tools are set up specifically to inhibit or even disallow public access and public viewing, often out of fear of legal repercussions for providing access to students’ personally identifiable information (e.g. in the United States, FERPA in higher education and K-12). For example, LMS’s natively restrict public access, typically don’t allow publishing of student work outside the password-protected site, and authentication access is often provided only through the institution’s student information system. So walled gardens don’t really provide teachers with control, they simply give teachers a box of handcuffs, sans keys.)

My perception is that most of the prominent folks involved in new teaching and educational technology believe that the walled garden approach is “bad”, that LMSs are “bad”, and that open, learner-centered strategies, such as personal learning environments (PLE) are “good” (or at least “better”) because they better reflect or adapt to current Internet-driven trends in networked information and social connectivity. To elaborate:

• Educators who believe in fostering authentic learning experiences have become increasingly disillusioned with the walled garden of the LMS. Increasingly popular “real world” Web-based social software has cast many LMS tools as redundant.

• Many institutionally adopted learning tools, driven by the perceived needs of the institution, directed by non-faculty IT, and limited by the pace of administration, are rarely able to maintain currency with readily available “real world” tools simply because the institution has neither a massive, global audience to demand innovations, nor the breadth of competitive capitalism to fund and incentivize them. Tools provided by education-centric companies such as Blackboard often come in packages, overproduced versions of real-world tools tightly bound to provide a one-stop-shopping experience, and therefore a supposed panacea for all educational technology needs. Few Web application companies would commit such an act hubris–Google has proven itself fairly capable of such a Heraclean act, with competitors Yahoo! and even Microsoft taking tentative stabs of their own.

• Educators personally committed to ideals and philosophies of openness–open source, open access, open publishing–are also frustrated with LMSs and other institutionally controlled software for their innate closed-ness through restriction of access for both contributors and readers.

• And while distinctions between the accuracy of definitions and theories of collective intelligence and connective intelligence are being debated, they share a common recognition that there is significant value in community-involved (influenced?) and socially-invigorated education. Educators who ascribe to such learning theories also find the walled garden approach to be too limiting and lacking provisions for social networking within the institution, let alone the world.

These common postures (I’m abusing that word this week–thanks, Scott) taken against the “walled garden” approach to educational technology are sound, but I do not want to suggest that the LMS is therefore obsolete, for I have presented (and probably insufficiently) only one side of the issue. I daresay there are as many sound arguments the use of walled gardens and even the traditional LMS. And though I have seen Scott Leslie weigh pro’s and cons of “loosely coupled” approaches and even one or two ed tech bloggers recognize the continuing significance of the LMS, I’ve not yet seen a full and complete debate involving people genuinely committed to each of the two sides. (If anyone is game for staging one, my alter-ego would be happy to suppress my doubts completely and take the pro-LMS side–in fact, my ego would probably not let me resign that side to anyone else!)

In my opinion, a really good debate on the subject would illustrate philosophical differences between the two sides, and might even invoke political stances (technology adoption in education [if not pedagogy in general] as “conservative” vs. “progressive”; information access and publishing as an issue of power, definable through capitalist or socialist anarchist ideals, etc).

Even if the outcome of such a debate was largely in favor of an authenticopenconnectedcollective strategy, there are of course still questions about how a PLE is LE really looks and acts like, if it is teachable. Just today on Twitter there were a number of provocative questions about the value of PLE, either as a term or as a “single”, methodological approach.

Add to that the problem that I personally still can not say with total conviction that the LMS is obsolete. Folks like myself have talked up the potential value of PLEs, but broad adoption of the PLE is currently impossible because key technologies and services are still being developed (e.g. good hubs of aggregation [go eduGlu]) or have not yet been widely adopted (e.g. OpenID). Compound that with faculty and administrative anxieties regarding new technologies and teaching approaches, and I can only conclude that the LMS will be around for a long time yet. So until fully viable (every need) and broadly accessible (every application) alternative strategies and methods become available, we might as well openly examine, in good-faith, the value of the LMS, the benefits of walled garden systems, and our reasonings for choosing one or the other.

Desire2Learn announced on February 22nd that Blackboard has won its patent infringement lawsuit against them, stating, “the jury has handed down its verdict that the patent is valid and that Blackboard should be awarded damages of approximately $3 million.”

Blackboard filed the lawsuit on July 26, 2006 against competitor Desire2Learn based on intellectual property claims related to it’s Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138. Blackboard has argued that it had invested 100 million dollars in the development of the educational products protected under the patent. (NoEduPatents.com has made an explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims.)

Backlash to the Blackboard patent by the open source and educational communities has been strong since news of the lawsuit first broke, and will likely continue through communities such as boycottblackboard.org. I personally did not expect Blackboard’s claims would be upheld when re-examined by the patent office, let alone that the lawsuit would be validated by the jury.

Because the patent claims are broad and impact so many common e-learning features, Blackboard’s legal victory is bound to be discouraging and troublesome to other commercial learning management system providers such as Angel Learning, eCollege, and Agilix. Blackboard has previously declared that it would not assert it’s U.S. patents against open source software development, e.g. Moodle and Sakai.

Does this apparent magnanimity bolster my favor for Blackboard? Certainly not; the position is superficial at best, and Blackboard knows it. Anyway, it’s beside the point: though I personally lean towards open source software for educational technology, I am a capitalist, and free market competition and consumer-driven innovation of services and products is important to me. Blackboard’s overblown patent claims are an affront to innovation and competition, taking advantage of systemic failures in U.S. Patent regulations.

And though some will dismiss this news based on the argument that even conceptually the LMS has inherent flaws (failure to keep up with current technologies, inauthentic, lack of learner ownership, creepy-tree-house, etc), I believe the LMS is still a valuable toolset for many. The LMS has has propelled e-learning into a new frontier by standardizing the basic communication and delivery features for an educational audience. The LMS’s ability to provide teachers an easy-to-use set of online educational tools in a one-stop-shopping experience is and will remain considerable for the next 5 years at least. (The unfortunate reality is that alternative networked education “systems” such as personal learning environments are still being thought out and developed–at the very least alternatives are probably not ready for widespread adoption and implementation by faculty members.)

Regardless of whether you’re pro-LMS or anti-LMS in general, I think the larger debate about software patents particularly when applied to education is an issue we in ed tech all have a stake in. At the ITC conference last week I picked up a witty t-shirt given to me by The rSmart Group that signifies the position of many:

Sources

• Desire2Learn’s Patent Lawsuit Blog
• Blackboard’s Patent Info Page
• Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138
• NoEduPatents’s Explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims
• Groklaw: Reexamination of Blackboard Patent
• Wikipedia: Software Patent Debate
• BoycottBlackboard.org

Several higher education institutions in Utah are part of a Blackboard Vista 4 statewide implementation hosted by the very capable and laudable folks at UEN. While I myself have never been a fan of the WebCT/Blackboard Vista as a Learning Management System (LMS), I recognized early in the pilot that the choice of this LMS was inevitable, and so we roll with the punches.

However, even prior to the official implementation of (then WebCT) Vista, John Krutsch and I began test-piloting Moodle, the popular open source LMS. Both John and I found Moodle 1.6 to be, in most respects, fully the equal of Blackboard Vista 4; though it lacked a couple of important features (e.g. selective release), it also sported some great and forward-looking new tools (e.g. workshops with peer/self-assessments, blogs, wikis, RSS, student-edited glossaries, custom themes, etc). Add to that the fact that Moodle is open source, has a formidable user-base that’s always supportive, and requires no licensing fee, Moodle seemed the likely successor of BB Vista.

Earlier this month there have been orchestrations by a local company called Agilix to woo state institutions towards their new LMS product, GoCourses. Though already in use by BYU’s extensive Independent Study program, my preview of the Agilix LMS struck me as still in beta. But that’s a good thing, for Agilix seems keen to listen to ideas and feedback from state institutions as it urges each of us to the alter.

On the BB Vista admin’s mailing list there have been some questions and some minor grumblings about Agilix, and the possibility of massive change despite the fact that most of us who are involved in educational technology are still licking our wounds from the Vista migration. Here’s my response to all the good folks there:

Though IMS and common cartridge is coming along, I think we’re still a long way from a painless transition, no matter what happens. Whether it’s a change from BB Vista to BB Super Enterprise Campus Miracle Edition, or to Agilix or to Moodle or to whatever, there will be pain. WebCT CE 4 to WebCT Vista 4 is pain. Vista or CE to Moodle is pain. Sometimes even Vista to Vista is pain. I’m about to find out if Moodle or Vista to Agilix is pain. We owe it to ourselves to make sure the pain’s worth it.

From my point of view, migrating to Blackboard Vista has not been worth the pain. Don’t get me wrong: I have absolutely no complaints with the strong support and command of Vista that UEN provides us, but the Vista product itself was hardly a huge advance from CE 4.1, and, as I’ve suggested in the past, Vista took almost as many steps backward as it took forward.

At UVU we too are experimenting with alternatives, and I support these experiments as much out of apathy for Blackboard as out of recognition that change _is_ inevitable. My personal prediction is we at UVSC will see some sort of institutional LMS change pushed down or brought up within 2 years. To that end, I’m excited to play with Agilix, but I’m still very enthused about our successes and experiences with Moodle. I doubt either will be a panacea, but that’s probably true of anything we try. At least with Moodle it’s open source and easily modifiable, customizable, and of course the license is free.

If that seems too much of an endorsement of Moodle, think again: I am after the absolute best LMS that will offer our diverse institutions more of what they need than Vista currently does. I’m also strongly in favor of longevity in a product, and the mere fact that Moodle is open source and does not have a limited license sets me at ease. But if another product had a similar solution (i.e. an unlimited use, perpetual license) that would satisfy me as well.

At any rate, it’s going to be an interesting next few years. I am privileged to be witness to the rapid changes in LMS, and have hope that we’ll end up with something that is ultimately better. Eventually I want to see us go LMS-less, but that, wouldn’t you know, still poses a number of significant challenges, both for IT and regular (non-geek) faculty.