How do (students’ | faculty | staff) attitudes toward institutional learning and communication systems differ from attitudes toward informal learning and communication systems?

This isn’t nearly as relevant to the WPMU system as originally intended, but I do expect to be able to address the system through this survey without overwhelming participants. Some of the survey questions that pop into mind ask about personal use of social media, perceptions of institutional technology, relevance of both toward learning, perceived efficiency for learning, likelihood of using new institutional technology, etc.

I’m posting this here in case any readers (who I haven’t lost yet through neglect) have ideas on how to keep this useful while maintaining a sharp focus. Suggested questions are, of course, welcome.

I have been critical about aspects of LMSs in the past. I’ve been critical of Blackboard in particular–primarily because of my complaints about the functionality of the Vista LMS, the “must use standard LMS for everything” attitude of some university CIOs, and Blackboard’s past behavior with respect to patent claims. And while one professor encouraged me to wear my “Supporting Innovation, Not Suing It” t-shirt to class, and while I at some point last night woke up saying, “If we tell you all our ideas, will you patent them and sell them to us later?”, I wanted to open my mind to the potentials of the discussion and not be obtuse as a matter of course.

(The following notes identify ideas by speaker, but please note that the words are only verbatim if I use quotes.)

Dr. Wiley began by directing us to consider the history of the LMS, it’s purpose as manifest through functionality and initial usage experiences. A common conclusion was the LMS attempted to replicate what happens in the classroom online: requiring little faculty tech expertise, providing quizzes, assigns, grades, content delivery (paper reduct), discussions [JMS: yes and no. online discussions are both similar and dramatically dissimilar], admin and teaching functions, and integration with campus academic and student information systems.

In response to our growing list, Russ responded, “This is just a collection of things… but there is new capability, and by tying the corporation together we enable new processes. Technology enabled a transformation.”

(JMS: Agreed as a potential. Technology is nothing without appropriate training and inspiration on proper educational application. Through the LMS we quickly accomplished teaching with technology, but not technology-enhanced teaching. But if we ask, how can we leverage technology to make teaching and learning better and easier? We must examine our educational goals, audience, and environment. We must problem-solve, creatively using applications of the available tools.

(Also, there are some ways in which the technology itself has changed the way we teach, albeit slowly:)

1. Quizzes become more reasonable as self-assessments and formative learning activities when done online
2. Discussions become fully participatory, time-liberated dialogs that allow participants to branch and focus on strands that are personally relevant.
3. Digital content is searchable – discussions, texts, etc. This provides different, easier, faster access to materials and ideas that support a participant’s focused interest

We began speaking of the cultural shift associated with (or accompanied by) Web 2.0, and how that may impact education.

Justin makes the good point, if LMs is adaptation of teaching, it also seems this idea of PLE/PLN is just a 2nd generation adaptation of the LMS, i.e., teachers consider, How can I do X, Y, Z — which I did in the LMS easily — without the LMS?

JMS: Some who look at the PLE see it as something constructed by new media, connectivism, not as a substitute for the LMS. Those folks admit they don’t know what a PLE looks like and are uncertain if learning outcomes are similarly measurable. Those most comfortable with the idea of a PLE have some confidence in the organic conditions of it as a learning environment, despite it’s fuzziness.

Granted, some do see the PLE simply as an escape from the LMS, and even though they might be trying to simply recreate what they did in the LMS, they can gain some advantages just by being open: Openness, adaptable, personalized, ownership, persistence, authenticity.

I caught something of Justin saying that the open source (OSS) community is ignoring hard problems… OSS technology fails to provide sophisticated learning features like adaptive release, adaptive testing… The OSS community not taking it on…

(JMS: I accept that specific example as an inadequacy of available open PLE/PLN or Web 2.0 tools. There aren’t currently automatic gatekeeping (pre-programmed or “smart”) tools for PLE/PLN tools and media. Siemens and others might say teachers are naturally the gatekeepers. Users are the gatekeepers (though perhaps this is inadequate). Or maybe we don’t need those gatekeepers at all, that is, we can encourage the fundamentals of information fluency by directing students to assess and re-direct themselves.)

JMS: OS community is not taking on education in general. Why would they? Education is still a niche. Adaptive release is a very education-centered feature. OSS e-learning, like Moodle, include or plan to include it.

David Wiley: “Data. Through the LMS I can capture and use data in a way I never could before.” Also, liberty of users to control consumption of content. E.g. playing course media at 2x speed.

Justin Johansen: Teachers can teach to a style, users can adapt to their preferences (disruptive).

Sara Joy challenges, suggested/asked if LMS can be a “disruptive technology”.

David: At USU an instructor with no budget for “clickers” went to the dollar store and bought $1 laser pointers to accomplish the same thing. Throw up a slide, students with laser pointers indicate choices anonymously on screen. It’s personalized (and probably more fun).

Russ: “Isn’t one of the fundamental issues also location independence?”

Justin: “Definitely, esp. when gas prices were $4/gallon.”

Dr. Wiley whips out slides of 6 changes:

• analog –> digital
• tethered –> mobile
• consume –> create
• generic –> personalized
• isolated –> connected
• closed –> open

Jon Mott: There’s a book about organizations being like spiders, which can regrow a leg, or starfish, which have legs that, if severed, can grow into a new starfish. Are we like spiders or starfish? Best organizations are hybrids. Starfish-like activities. eBay features of a spider.

JMS: Some in education want that severed starfish leg to turn into a bird. But education’s history doesn’t show that we’re evolutionary–there’s no dramatic mutation between generations that changes the species. Education is certainly not, historically, subject to revolution either! It’s adaptation at best. It’s incremental change.

Aaron Johnson: Web 2.0 can be transformative in, for instance, using a blog publishes homework online, for the world to see–maximal exposure.

Dr. Wiley points out that several class blog posts have been picked up by Stephen Downes, which impacts the community, impacts the class, impacts the writer.

Justin: In the old system publishing homework was your mom putting your assignment on the fridge with a magnet.

Aaron: It’s also transformative in a way that democratizes access. But how are things changing in how people behave and interact? Do I get more out of that?

(JMS: We’ve seen that young people’s sense of privacy may be changing, and also that online exposure can bite us in the rear.)

Justin: I haven’t had a transformative e-learning experience in the classroom discussion forum. It’s usually, “do this boring thing for class or else”.

JMS: I have. (That’s what put me in e-learning over a decade ago, and I have them with some regularity now)

Jon: I learn something everyday on Twitter. I follow about 150 people, all of the ed tech related. My network has expanded, and for the better.

JMS: And learn to filter junk out, hopefully!

Russ: Yes, adding people, one by one… “adding diversity, accumulating collected knowledge… but at some point you reach a threshold.”

JMS: At first there’s a lot of noise, but you learn to filter that out, or cut it out. I follow around 60 people, but that changes from week to week. I’ll follow a lot of people who I will later un-follow, not because I don’t like them, but because their use of Twitter may not contribute to or match my own personal way of valuing Twitter. (JMS: I’ve talked too much. Time to listen more.)

Aaron: A lot of us still use the web for adaptations of normal life. Despite my tech-savvy nature, I hear about Web 2.0 stuff and I think do I really need that? Is the real transformation in the things that we do, or in helping people understand what they can do now, with this ability to use technoloy?

Jon: Novelty of technology is not enough. You have to be evaluative. How is using this going to help me? I user twitter not to be social, but to be professional.

JMS: The beauty of these tools is the personalization. The beauty of the PLE is the personalization.

Jon: I’ve used delicious for my own purposes, but have finally found a use for it in collaborative environment.

Justin: (To his group) Why aren’t we using delicious on our OER project?

(JMS: Note to self, we might put our group’s open ed project links list on a wiki instead of a Google Spreadsheet. Then reach out to community and get additional links for free.)

We somehow manage to move the conversation back to the future of the LMS.

JMS: I see the future of the LMS being not a replication of these open, existing tools, but a way to structure, organize, and adaptively control or smart-sequence these. As Justin pointed it, adaptive releasing, setting and resetting paths, etc.

Justin: Would we, by using the LMS as a place to integrate Web 2.0, personalized tools, push folks away from using those tools?

(JMS: Is Justin talking about the creepy treehouse-ness? I don’t get a chance to ask…)

Russ: “Is it not a false choice to give proprietary vs open source? … Is it not a distinction without a difference?”

(JMS: There are potential advantages in both that we should not lightly dismiss, e.g. proprietary may have quality advances, resource advantages, corporate attention, collaborative integration and first-choice with publishers; openness may have adaptability, customization, lower cost, ownership. [To me the subscription model is so painful, I personally want the ability to keep and maintain code perpetually, for example, stay at WebCT CE 4.1 for a decade if we wished.])

Russ: For a while technology was pulling the practice, but now (as we talk about web 2.0 tools) but now it seems we’ve flipped that.

Wiley: “Forget open code source for a minute. Forget APIs. Look at YouTube, Flickr, GoogleMaps. They all have a common language: RSS. APIs are great if you like that. But these tools are bleeding syndication, and they don’t punish you for mashing it up.”

John Hilton: Free access vs. open source vs. paid license.

Jon: “Once upon a time there was a Blackboard.com where you could create your own course for free.”

Russ: “It’s back.”

So we are talking about interoperability of the learning object (LTI)?

Wiley: “But LTI is so complex. RSS is sooo easy. Some clever folks, like Tony Hirst, will use Pipes or APIs. There’s technical accessibility, then there’s an expertise-less accessibility.

Jon: Having APIs and web services is critical. Maybe we need more than single sign-on.

Russ: “To Dave’s point about the data, if you want to use the data you have to have that captured in an environment.”

(JMS: Data can be made accessible through APIs, no?)

Jon: Livetext does program assessment and portfolios. You can build and expose your portfolio. Creators can easily export.

Dave: Yes, let’s just get data out of the end. Because even with standards everyone speaks their own dialect.

Aaron: Searchable.

John: By Google?

Aaron: Internally? Or… What do we mean by LMS for open ed?

Wiley: “Simplest example–and OCW is 1.0 simple–I built my course in Bb. How do I publish as OER? I probably need 30hrs to do it.” (JMS: Push-button public publishing?) Content publishing, content importing.

Justin: A lot of our Bb courses are full of PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, maybe HTML…

Aaron: What does Bb add in terms of content ability? It sounds like you’re talking about the same thing, replicating a course structure. Or how do you get the content out without having it trapped in the LMS’s structure?

JMS: You could do it both ways:

JMS: You have a “repository”, though I dislike that word. It’s a plain web server, or a wiki, or WP, or even an LMS repository. It contains the content–PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, HTML. You can share those straight off of the repository as disagreggated pieces. OR you can link to them directly from your individual LMS course structure. This eliminates course-to-course redundancy. OR you can link to them directly from your opencourseware platform. AND/OR your LMS has a way to select which pieces of the individual course to “open”, and then publishes an open version of your course with some parts hidden.

Wiley mentions OpenShare mod.

JMS: OpenShare does part of this for Moodle: lets you incrementally tag license metadata for resources and activities, and then mark those resources and activities as open or closed. Public can view those open items; registered students can view all the items.

Tonight I’ve released the first all-new version of the OpenShare modification for Moodle 1.9, which I demonstrated last week at OpenEd 2008.

You may view OpenShare documentation or simply download the OpenShare mod now.

Overview of OpenShare

OpenShare turns Moodle into a veritable open educational resources (OER) or opencourseware (OCW) platform by allowing instructors or designers to mark all or part of their Moodle courses as open (public) or closed (enrolled students and teachers only). The open/closed status of any module applies to Moodle’s anonymous Guest role, but OpenShare goes further, adding an Open Learner role that can actually interact and complete open activities such as quizzes. This feature provides a means by which a fully online distance education or independent study course in Moodle can be released as a self-directed informal-social learning environment for the general public, something not provided by typical opencourseware.

License, Open, or Close Resources & Activities

Though based on our old Open Mod for OER, I have renamed this version and reset the numbering because the scripting is 100% new and based on new logic. I owe a lot of thanks to Mike Franks, Jovca, and Eric Bollens of UCLA for explaining their own Public/Private modification to me, and setting me in the right direction with respect to Groupings.

Further, this version of the mod is a Moodle block that requires no modification of core Moodle code. I do, however, have two add-ons to the block that provide advanced usability of the mod. These will be available soon on the OpenShare page.

An optional modification allows for OpenShare changes on the fly.

There are several exciting applications of the OpenShare mod:

• open all or part of live Moodle courses during the semester(s) they are offered; students do not mingle with public unless you so desire
• duplicate complete or self-contained Moodle courses and open them up for public self-enrollment
• duplicate a live Moodle server with courses intact and serve those courses with self-enrollment

One of the most significant advantages of this mod is that it provides an alternative to redundant OER/OCW publishing platforms, and diminishes the need for dedicated OER/OCW staff by putting the power to control the license and release of resources and activities in the hands of the course creators.

From informal conversations and feedback I recognize that the next step is to tackle the problem of getting OER out of Moodle so it is interoperable.

For more info see my OpenShare documentation & download page.

One passage in particular percolated my sense of irony. In addressing the idea that institutions may have more flexibility to innovate with open source solutions, Michael Chasen…

…argued that there are benefits to the corporate model of software publishing, too. “I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services,” he said. “I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai. Maybe there are. I have a multimillion-dollar hardware-testing lab just to test scalability.”

“At a minimum,” he said, “we are at least just as innovative as open source.”

At least as innovative as open source! With millions in expenditures on hardware and developers Bb is proud of the fact that they are at least as innovative as open source, which runs on the power of volunteers and sheer passion? Chasen’s statement can be read both ways, confirming what I’ve believed for the past two years: that free, oss platforms such as Moodle etc. are now on par with Bb and the other Big Boys, and thus a monumentally better deal for educational institutions. Instead of investing money in licensing, invest that money in people, and shape the direction of the LMS in ways that are best-suited to your institution’s needs.

Chasen poo-poo’s the evidence that institutions are leaving Bb for Moodle, yet his self-assured statement on the matter reveals a flaw in his logic: “There’s not more people leaving now than there were yesterday.” If I have 10 people on Bb on Monday and 1 person leaves, I have 9 on Tuesday. If 1 person then leaves (same count of attrition), that’s down to 8 I have on Wednesday. There may not be an increase in the number of people leaving now than there were yesterday, but the conversion rate is still being whittled away. To exacerbate this fact, I don’t see herds of institutions stampeding towards adopting Bb for the first time (Q4 2009 call reports new higher ed customer increase at about 5%).

Blackboard insists that it’s patent claims will not be asserted against open source software LMS development, but if they really are as shark-like as the Chronicle suggests, what other plans might Chasen et al have to deal with the growing “threat” of Moodle and other oss platforms to their marketshare? The recent Bb partnership with Sakai to develop an open source integration tool may provide some insight. Michael Feldstein highlighted this excerpt from the August 6, 2008 Bb earnings conference call wherein Chasen reported,

our learning system will be able to load other course management system courses through our interface. …a lot of campuses have standardized on the Blackboard system… but there maybe an individual teacher or a very small department that is using either a home-grown system or maybe an open-source solution…

It sounds to me as if a developing Bb strategy is to partner with or leverage open source projects to produce integration or transmogrification tools in order to sweep dissident teachers and courses into Bb.

Thinking about Bb’s modus operandi, the patent debacle, and of course the cost of licenses has already conjured some new, bitter slogans to post on John Krutsch’s >Blackboard Customer-ized Mug Maker. It looks like a great place to vent for disgruntled Bb users; let’s just hope he doesn’t receive his own cease and desist notification.

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.

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.

I ask this question without facetiousness, because if we’re talking about a holistic look at individuals learning environment, we certainly don’t want to restrict it to Web, and I even think just brainstorming the variety and interconnectedness of utilities and tools in our non-digital learning environment(s) may validly inform our digital ones, and can provide anecdotes through which we can better adapt (ourselves and others) to the online tools.

As far as my PLE, though I outlined a laundry list in your wiki, I’m now trying to think about it more organically. I’m currently toying with conceptualizing my digital PLE through a metaphor of physical space, with interconnected rooms and even “wormholes” that take me in and out of the “real” world. While at first I imagined this as a house with multi-doored, hexagonal rooms and intermediary halls (plus windows one can jump out of and back into the “real world”),

Walter R. Tschinkel’s cast of an ant colony, The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant

it might end up being more simply sketched as the architecture of an ant colony. This latter metaphor is probably seems particularly apt to anyone who knows me, as my “train of thought” is more akin to a state of ants scurrying from one point to another as they forage with semi-obscured motivations and objectives, constantly adjusting based on new and immediate information.

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.

Not only do I disagree with the instructor’s desired objectives in using this survey (she essentially hopes to prove that the reason students are failing her online course is because they are under-prepared or have wrong assumptions about online education–of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the course has nearly no media-enhanced learning, no student-student contact, and very little student-instructor interaction), I disagree with the questions that I wrote.

Of course anyone who has written survey questions with a mind to gain accurate and insightful information on the participants knows what a challenge the task is from the get-go; I don’t kid myself that it’s no easy endeavor, but I also think there has to be a better way.

Among my primary objectives in writing the questions were the following ideas:

• Keep the survey short, so that students would actually do it.
• Have some redundancy to check for accuracy and inhibit prejudicial responses.
• Avoid asking questions that dare students to label themselves “dumb”.
• Avoid questions that tempted students into labeling themselves “smart”.

But the primary objective was essentially this: after reading a good number of “student readiness” surveys online I wanted to avoid asking questions that gauged a student’s willingness to partake in a lonesome independent study course. “Independent study” is not equivalent to modern “distance education” in the Stein dictionary (in fact, even “distance education” is not equivalent to “distance education” in the Stein dictionary, but that’s another story). And so though several of my questions are based on the questions asked in other “distance education” surveys, I purposefully steered away from presumptive questions like:

Feeling that I am part of a class is:
a. Not particularly necessary to me.
b. Somewhat important to me.
c. Very important to me.

As if being “part of a class” is somehow mutually exclusive from distance learning! And it’s not that I’m opposed to independent study types of courses; in fact, I myself greatly enjoy and grow in isolation, but I recognize that’s not necessarily the norm.

Then there are questions that perpetuate instructors’ presumptions that they can get back to distance students at their leisure:

My comfort level with waiting a few days to receive instructor feedback is..
Low   Moderate   High

While it may be an unfortunate reality in distance education programs that instructors do often delay responding to students (I recommend a 24 hour turn around at the latest), we certainly don’t want to encourage that behavior, nor do we want to discourage student expectations of their instructors.

Finally, I also have disagreements with the term “student readiness” in general, as that tends to automatically place the blame for student failure at the feet of the students. Jared Spool, a Web usability expert whom I greatly admired, once inspired me to make the following provocative paraphrase, There are no user errors, only
design errors. And while I recognize that this statement is not universally true, it does challenge the designer (in this case, the instructor or the instructor’s instructional designer) to reconsider blaming the user (aka student) for failing to complete the task.

My Questions

Even though I have a pretty good insight into what I think is wrong with so many “student readiness” surveys, I still had a hard time making my fundamentally different. But I’ll share them here anyway, with the hopes that some brainy folks can offer better suggestions to achieve the same general objective: determine if our students are adequately prepared–both mentally and technically–for an online course experience.

(Note: these questions are randomized in the final survey to mask redundancy.)

Options: Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
1. I often get things done ahead of time.
2. I can work independently and meet deadlines without being reminded.
3. I learn best through live classroom discussions.
4. I am comfortable engaging in class discussions on the Web.
5. If given clear instructions, I am confident that I can complete the assignment independently.
6. I often need to have instructions for an assignment clarified or explained more than once.
7. As a reader, I sometimes need help to understand the text.
8. When I need help understanding the subject, I am comfortable e-mailing an instructor to ask for clarification.
9. When I don’t understand something I’ve read, I ask the instructor to explain it as soon as possible.
10. I am very competent using e-mail and Web sites.
11. I am a skilled writer.
12. I don’t always comprehend what I read.
13. I expect to spend less time on an Distance Education course than a regular on-campus course.
14. I often put things off until the last minute
15. I expect a Distance Education course to be easier than a regular on-campus course.

If you hate these questions, give me something better.

And if you like them, you can download them here (This survey is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.):

• DE Readiness Survey (survey).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Survey version
• DE Readiness Survey (quiz).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Quiz version (scored for a “perfect” student)
• DE Readiness Survey.txt Moodle GIFT format (scored for a “perfect” student)