enterprise e-learning: effective use of educational technology
TRANSCRIPT
Enterprise e-Learning: Effective Use of Educational Technology
Jim Farmer*, Justin E. Tilton**
*Georgetown University, USA
**Nuerasoft s.r.o., Czech Republic
Abstract
e-learning and e-research are universities’ core competencies. In the United States information and education technologies have not yet demonstrated any increase in productivity in these critical activities. This paper suggests enterprise architecture, integration of numerous “tools” specialized by discipline, level, and method, digital repositories, and common open standards could achieve significant improvements in teaching and learning productivity.
The paper identifies actions information technology executives can take to increase institutional performance, improve services to students and faculty, and reduce costs.
Keywords: e-learning, productivity, enterprise systems.
1. The Issue: More for Less
With few exceptions, the productivity of colleges and universities in the U.S. has declined as education technology was introduced. Now most colleges and universities in North America and much of Europe have installed commercial learning systems that are little used by faculty, tolerated by students, and appear relatively ineffective.
Figure 1. Change in ProductivityU.S. Colleges and Universities
The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching’s Toru Iiyoshi [10] expressed his concern differently: “Yet one of open education's most critical questions—how can open education's tools and resources demonstrably improve education quality?—was rarely mentioned [in national and international meetings].
Unfortunately, this omission from the conversation mirrors the education community's serious lack of understanding about the transformative potential of open source education.” He comments further: “Thus, a crucial task before us is to build intellectual and technical capacity for transforming “tacit knowledge” into “commonly usable knowledge”; Building this capacity is urgent, as the process of creating and sharing quality educational knowledge needs to catch up with the burgeoning availability of open educational goods.”
Yet there those specializing in distance learning—the Open University UK, Open Universiteit Nederland, Athabasca University in Canada, Lübeck University of Applied Science (Fach Hochchule Lübeck), Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Coastline, Rio Salado, and Dallas County Colleges and the University of Maryland University College in the U.S.—have demonstrated that education technology, primary implemented using the Internet can increase student retention, student mastery, and academic program completions by 5 to 20% with costs less than residential universities for the same disciplines and levels of instruction.1 These colleges and universities have learned how to effectively use the technology. Similarly the for-profit U.S. universities University of Phoenix and Devry Technical Institute have achieved productivity in their on-line courses.
In information technology, estimates of 50 to 80% of software licensing and maintenance costs are for maintaining interoperability of enterprise systems.2
Industry has implemented service-oriented architectures, open standards, and open source software to reduce costs of software licensing and maintenance, perhaps as much as half.
Similarly colleges and universities were duplicating the development of course materials. However MIT and Utah State Universities initiatives to distribute “open
1 Carol Twigg summarized the benefits in a policy context. See Ref. [18]. Individual institutions have reported similar success, often in conjunction with a software or content vendor. Colleges using Plato have an exceptional record of success with remedial and college algebra.
2 From “CIO Challenge: Maintenance Costs,” by Jim Middlemiss, Wall Street Technology, June 2004 as quoted by Oracle Corporation. See Ref. [5] for the Oracle Corporation summary..
courseware” free of any licensing restrictions on its use. This offers a way, through cooperation, the high unit cost of instructional materials can be sharply reduced. The amortized cost of content development is about one-fifth of the cost of instruction.3
Until now information technology managers seem to have been unable or prevented from adopting practices that would benefit faculty, students, and the universities through improved service and reduced cost implementing of education technology.
2. Presentation or collaboration
Reflecting the method of instruction for advanced graduate students, universities tend to develop learning systems focusing on communication between and among students and faculty. The Sakai Enterprise Bundle and Bodington open source learning systems focus on e-mail, discussion forums, chat, and now voice and video communications. Distance learning, most pervasive in the first two years of college, tends to focus on sequenced delivery of lesson content, activities, and quizzes. Open source elearning systems LAMS and Moodle implement sequenced pedagogy.
Sakai Chief Architect Dr. Charles Severance [16] describes the university’s position:
“My biggest concern is that LAMS organizes things into flows with some sense of order, whereas the more traditional LMS systems simply provide capabilities/tools that are always there and can be used in any order and with no need for the instructor to ‘make a script’.”
Open University UK’s Jason Cole [1] suggested why the two different perspectives are common. In his book “Using Moodle,” he identifies four types of courses: Introductory survey course, skills development course, theory and discussion course, and capstone course. Achieving learning objectives for introductory survey and skills development courses is best done with sequenced learning; discussion and theory and the capstone courses more through collaboration and independent study. The design of a learning system often mirrors the type of institution rather than the pedagogy approach for a specific discipline, level of instruction, and type of student.
Moodle and LAMS are adding collaboration “tools.” Sakai is adding learning sequences. The same is true for commercial systems such as Blackboard and WebCT. In a few years perhaps the systems will begin to have the same broad functionality. If so, faculty utilization of all learning systems will increase as their needs for the support of diverse pedagogies required for teaching and learning would be available. And students will benefit from the availability of the technology.
3 The cost of courseware development and the total cost of instruction for Arizona community colleges is given in Ref [3].
3. Framework and Tools
There are between 80 and 100 open source projects developing online learning systems. One representative said MIT has “28 learning systems.”4 The casual observer would say this duplicative development and perhaps say faculty were not communicating. Closer observation reveals rationale behaviour. There are hundreds combinations of discipline, level, and pedagogy required to effectively teach the many knowledge domains of modern universities. These specialized learning systems differ because they tend to focus on unique combinations. For example, some of the learning systems teach algebra focusing on equations, engineering on problem sets, language instruction on translation of written text and dialog of native speakers, English composition on short essays, chemistry in laboratory simulations, and so on. Each combination is an effective pedagogy appropriate for the type of student, discipline, and level. And they place different requirements on the learning system.
For effective instruction, the faculty member must be able to have available and choose the right combination for the students in the class.5
At some institution likely there is a learning system or tool designed for a specific combination. These systems and tools are often developed by faculty or dedicated programmer under faculty direction and reflect the “best practices” of the faculty member. As these systems are used with additional students, there is a new requirement the software add a directory, security, authentication and authorization of the user, activity logging, access to repositories, and so forth. Software development on this specialized system then duplicates work common to all learning systems and often to administrative and library systems as well and, because of different designs, even becomes a barrier to interoperability.
Consolidating these learning systems would reduce information technology costs. Enterprise architecture created a way to achieve this commonality. Typically called “platform and tools” or “framework and tools” the communication functions, including context, is provided to the “tool” as a service.6 The Eclipse project for software developers is an example with more than 400 :tools” available to business analysts, systems analysts and programmers. With a standard framework, the tool developer has to develop only the functionality unique to the tool and use the framework services for common functions.
Blackboard was the first learning system supplier to document this need. Chris Etesse [2] observed:
4 This remark was made at a Sakai meeting. The author asked not to be identified since his remarks require context.
5 The Sloan Consortium has been reporting research results on the part of the participating colleges and universities. For example, see Ref. [11].6 See Michael Feldstein’s discussion in Ref. [7].
“The first generation of Course Management Systems (CMS) focused on ease of use and generic features such as grade books, quizzing tools and course calendars. Now that this first round of wide adoption has been achieved, faculty and instructors are finding that they require a second generation of tools and capabilities. They want discipline and pedagogy-specific tools and content which provides distinctive instructional experiences for students. This requires a second-generation CMS platform that supports the integration of external tools and content while still providing a stable, robust, easy-to-use environment. In many ways, a CMS is becoming an operating system for education delivery.”
Blackboard now has several hundred “Building Blocks” available and sponsors an annual “Building Blocks Conference” held several years at Georgetown University. Many of the Building Blocks have been developed by other firms; some are available as open source software.7
Moodle implemented “platform and tools” in version 1.5 called “Blocks.” This has encouraged a number of developers to design, develop, and make available specialised “tools.” LAMS has a similar capability called the “tools interface.”
The Sakai Project labeled the specification for the tool as “Tool Portability Profile. The Sakai Framework is described in Figure 1 from a recent presentation on architecture. An outline for writing a Sakai Tool is shown in Figure 2.
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SakaiTPP Tool
Sakai Framework
• Registration of tools and services
• Provides portability between environments where possible– HTML / Web Services
• Framework includes presentation elements as well to support tools
Figure 1 – Sakai Framework
7 Blackboard Chairman Matthew Pittinsky described his vision for Building Blocks in a 2003 White Paper. See Ref. [15].
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SakaiTool Code
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Writing a Tool
• Each tool describes its presentation needs in a generic fashion - the framework provides mechanisms to render the tool’s presentation
• The tool is unaware of any aggregation or final presentation
• Tools may produce “application”services related to the tools (chat tool / chat service)
• A service built for a particular tool should still operate through an API and be available to other tools
Figure 2 – Writing a Sakai Tool
So far the learning system developers have been unable to agree on a “tool portability profile.” IMS Global Learning Systems Inc.’s Tool Interoperability 2005 early draft specification was inadequate to develop a comprehensive and interoperable tool. With IMS now focusing on specifications that benefit users, a comprehensive and detailed specification may emerge from IMS consistent with user needs.
Although any open standard for tools interoperability would limit some tools development, its acceptance would sharply accelerate the adoption of standard “tools” and decrease the cost of maintaining interoperability of learning systems.
4. Learning Management Operating System
Michael Feldstein [7], State University of New York (SUNY) Learning Network, described the “Learning Management Operating System” explaining how it would contribute to the increased effectiveness of e-Learning at SUNY.
The learning operating system is a services-based design. An important function is providing “context”—as Sakai Chief Architect Charles Severance calls it—to tools. Context includes a list of persons and their roles for a tool and relates the tool to course, course offering—the specific instance, and sections and groups within the course offering. CHEF, Sakai’s predecessor learning system, simplified context by defining it based on the location of the “site” within the layout as compared to other “courses.” Later Sakai added “section awareness” to tools implying the structure must be “course offerings” within a term and subordinate “section.” CHEF has inheritance of authorizations and people. Feldstein prefers Groups and Permissions from uPortal since it implements a directed net instead of a tree structure. This provides the flexibility necessary to support cross-listed courses, team teaching, multiple levels of groups within a course offering, independent studies, and non-term instruction such as Executive MBA programs.8
SUNY is implementing uPortal with aggregated layout. This brings up a second consideration; what functions
8 See also Refs. [7] and [9] for more of Feldstein’s vision.
should be in a portal and what functions are in the learning operating system or framework. For example, at the portal level, an e-mail portlet would use the student’s personal e-mail address and personal contact list—it could even be GMail and aggregate mail from multiple addresses. The same portlet as an e-mail tool implemented in the learning operating system would, by “context”, send mail only to students within the student-defined study group or only to students registered in the course or section and faculty identified others. SUNY’s current design efforts should provide guidance for the division of functions between the portal and the learning operating system.
Sakai, uPortal, LAMS, and Moodle have efforts underway to bring commonality in the way the learning operating systems interoperate with enterprise portals.9
Likely this will focus on WSRP—also supported by Microsoft’s .NET—and Web Services.10 The service definitions will be the most difficult. One of the Moodle developers has suggested implementing services as they are being defined by JISC (UK), DEST (AU), and SURF (NL) in the e-Framework for learning and research initiative.
Recently Open University UK has reported funding Moodle to implement roles (version 1.6) and all levels of IMS’ Learning Design. By agreement, Open University UK will also bring their assessment experience and assessment expertise from JISC-funded research into Moodle.11 This development will improve Moodle’s interoperability similar to Blackboard and WebCT’s early adoption of the IMS specifications, and may, by the number of Moodle users, encourage the rapid and broad adoption of all IMS standards. If so, the quality of on-line instruction should improve significantly because of the capabilities that will be available to faculty. The only issue, as Toru Iiyoshi, is building the capacity to use these new capabilities.
5. Enterprise Integration
The need for enterprise integration soon follows the implementation of a widely-used learning system. The volume of transactions and the need for accuracy suggests automated business processes.
Suppliers of administrative software are now adopting open standard Web services for enterprise integration as suggested by JISC several years ago.. At one level—
9 Note that Moodle was represented in the IMS Tools Interoperability demonstrate at Alt-I-Lab 2005 by the Dirk Herr-Hoymann, University of Wisconsin, a Sakai Partner that has implemented Desire2Learn as the enterprise learning system. However, the University, like many others, has Moodle being used by a school (or department) within the university.
10 About half of all colleges and universities use a Microsoft operating system. Microsoft does not support the JSR 168 portlet specification in its Sharepoint portal.
11 From conversations with Open University’s Niall Sclater and Jason Cole that have not yet been documented.
major software suppliers like Oracle, SAP, and IBM—use industry standard definitions for the SOAP transactions and XML data exchanges—HR-XML for human resources, IFX and XBRL for financial transactions, DSML for directory, and so on. Those specializing in student systems tend to use national standards for data exchanges. Specifications from BETCA in the UK and PESC in the US and Canada are examples. But other sources of data exchange specifications are emerging: In the European Union and those that are implement EU practices, it is the yet-to-be fully-defined Diploma Supplement.12 In the U.S. it is a set of standards from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that may be imposed on U.S. colleges and universities and non-U.S. students. These standards include directory and human resources and education. The Department claims to be coordinating the specifications with the European Community, but there are no publications suggesting how or when this will be done.13
Perhaps the best example of collaborative enterprise architecture is the ESUP Portail Project in France. The 13 universities have a plan to provide enterprise integration using open source software January of 2007. The project uses existing staff and is on schedule and under budget. The project provides both formal training and a help desk. They are using Web Services and JSR 168 and WSRP portlets for data exchanges. The enterprise system includes CAS, uPortal and Moodle and existing administrative systems modified for single signon and as sources for administrative portlets. 37 other universities, schools, and agencies are planning a similar implementation.14
6. Open Courseware
Open courseware offers an economic way to share instructional content and even templates or sequences of learning reducing unit costs. Open courseware can also include assessments necessary both to adapt learning to a student’s mastery and learning system and to demonstrate mastery. Moodle’s community templates and courses and MIT and Utah State’s open courseware are examples of available content. Publishers also provide content available as IMS course cartridges that
12 An example was provided at EUNIS 2005 by a presenter from the University of Warsaw.
13 A report on some of these differences is expected from Georgetown University’s Interoperability Center. Discussions are underway to vet U.K. standards with U.S. software suppliers and to bring the JISC service specifications to the U.S. Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC). JISC (UK), SURF (NL), and DEST (AU) are partnering in the eFramework for Learning and Research to ensure commonality. The specification processes will have to be sharply accelerated to avoiding delaying software developers.
14 The effort is led by Alain Mayeur, Université de Valenciennes. A summary is given in [x]. The project Website is www.esup-portail.org.
can be immediately used in IMS compliant learning systems.
There are two challenges to widely use these materials. First is internationalization and localization. This is often achieved by someone locally translating and localizing these materials. Because the materials themselves change with new knowledge, there needs to be a way of managing the continuous update of the material for each locale. This coordination and management has been accomplished in the translation industry; their assistance was offered to uPortal, but was not implemented. Those developing or aggregating courseware should consider building a community of translators for the material and a system for organizing continuing maintenance.
Second, the material needs to be reorganized to meet national or local learning objectives. The European Union’s efforts to develop “transferable courses” and the U.S. common course number initiatives from the several states suggest that a method be developed to assemble a specific “transferable” course from standard courseware and local content.
Universities in the U.S. generally expect faculty to develop courseware as, in the past, they authored textbooks. Courseware now requires—as the distance learning programs understand—a team of multimedia, learning design, and assessment specialists to assist faculty express their domain expertise in course content. This is a major development effort that publishers could have profitably undertaken if tertiary education had developed specifications to permit published materials to be used without modification in all major learning systems.15 The IMS initiative for a “common course cartridge” could resolve this issue. The record so far in achieving agreement does not suggest early success. This then leaves the larger distance learning programs to bear this capital expense or cooperative organizations among universities and colleges to reduce unit costs. The efforts of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to make the specialized learning materials from Open University UK available as open courseware as well as their investment in the materials from MIT and Utah State University may have a major impact on the availability of effective course content.
7. The “community”
As researchers probe sustainability of open source software, they have identified two sharply different types of communities in higher education. The Sakai Foundation focuses on the development of software “code” with the mantra “code rules.” Exchanges of information about the Foundation’s work are most often posted on the developer’s list. Much of Sakai’s conference programs is especially relevant to Java developers. (This may change as the Sakai partners begin
15 In the U.S. the costs for developing a three-unit course (equivalent to 45 hours in class) has been estimated from US$30,000 to US$1,000,000. In the 1990s the cost of developing the three-year baccalaureate programs at Open University UK was confirmed as $US 1 billion.
to influence governance and priorities. The Sakai Foundation followed the University of Michigan’s Sakai Project in January 2006).
Almost all of the 65,00 registered members of the Moodle community are users—teachers, principals, faculty members, and education technologists and researchers. MoodleMoots are local and inexpensive. They focus on how to use Moodle for teaching and learning. A large number of those attending MoodleMoots have financed both their own travel and the low conference fee themselves. The sixteen MoodleMoots in 2005 had an estimated total attendance of 2,400 people. Within a year every five new participants yields a new institutional implementation and five additional Moodle forum participants from the implementing institution.
Without articulating his strategy, MoodleMoot founder Sean Koegh may have developed a strategy to build this capacity for transforming “tacit knowledge” into “commonly usable knowledge.” And it helped that O’Reilly Media selected Moodle for its first publication documenting an enterprise application. The published book conveys a sense of recognized success that no electronic file alone evidences.
8. A Plan of Action
The urgently need focus on teaching and learning is an institutional-level issue; the priority and investment should come from the highest levels of the college or university.16 But information technology executives can take actions that will improve performance by supporting the early-adopters of education technology and perhaps “cross the chasm” to main stream faculty.
These steps may provide some improved service, increased productivity, and lower costs with effective implementation of education technology. The suggested steps for those developing the technology:
1. Agree on a common set of APIs for tool portability specific enough that developers can achieve interoperability solely by complying with the specifications.
2. Modify current learning systems to support the IMS tool interoperability guidelines.
3. Develop new “tools” using the IMS specifications and guidelines and reprogram or refactor existing tools to become compliant. Costs will decline as rapidly as new or re-manufactured tools are consolidated into a single enterprise learning operating system.
4. Develop open standard Web services version of platform services to support integration with
16 Geoffrey Moore [12] describes “core” as the processes that distinguish one business from another; all else is “context.” He would recommend focusing on teaching and learning and research. However, in the U.S., five times as much is spent on administrative information systems and learning systems.
administrative and library systems. Follow industry standards if available and global standards if possible.
If those could be accomplished, best estimates from current data suggest student retention could increase by 5 to 20%, productivity could increase 5% per year for six years, and information technology operating costs could be reduced by 25% to 40%.
The cost of courseware could be also reduced by 50 to 90%.
Perhaps it is worthwhile to work together rather work separately toward the same objectives.
References
[1] J. Cole. Using Moodle, Sebastopol, California, O’Reilly Media, Inc. (2005).
[2] C. Etesse. Leading the Way on Standards–Based e-Learning. Washington, DC, Blackboard Inc. (2004).
[3] J. Farmer. “Financing Instructional Technology and Distance Education,” Public Funding of Higher Education: Changing Contexts and New Rationales, pp. 186-214, E. P. St. John, M. D. Parsons eds, Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press (2004).
[4] J. Farmer. “Open Source in Higher Education,” Open Source Software: Days of Dialogue,” Seaside, California, California State University-Monterey Bay (2006).
[5] J. Farmer. “Open Source: Risks, Rewards and Realities,” Computing Services Management Symposium, San Diego, California, ACM SIGUCCS University and College Computing Services, (2006).
[6] J. Farmer. “The Commercialization of Open Source,” Open Source and Sustainability Conference, Oxford, England, OSS Watch, University of Oxford (2006).
[7] M. Feldstein “LMOS Integration and Specialization,” e-Literate, Albany, New York, (2005).
[8] M. Feldstein “The Long Tail of Learning Applications,” e-Literate, Albany, New York, (2005).
[9] M. Feldstein “The Portal is the Platform,” e-Literate, Albany, New York, (2005).
[10] T. Iiyoshi. “Opportunity is Knocking: Will Education Open the Door?,” Perspectives, April 2006, Palo Alto, California, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (2006).
[11] M. Keeton. “Best Online Instructional practices: Report of Phase I of an Ongoing study,” Journal of
Asynchronous Learning Networks, vol. 8, nr. 2 (2004).
[12] G. Moore. “Dealing with Darwin: The Role of Open Source in Computing,” Open Source Business Conference 2005, San Francisco, California, IDG World Expo (2005).
[13] G. Moore. Inside the Tornado, New York, NY, Harper Collins (1995).
[14] National Center for Education Statistics. Projections of Education Statistics to 2014. NCES 2005-074, Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Education (2005).
[15] M. Pittinsky. Blackboard Building Blocks: 2003 Overview White Paper, Washington, DC, Blackboard Inc. (2003).
[16] C. Severance. Response to SUNY’s Request for Comment on SLN2.0. Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan (2005).
[17] C. Severance. “Sakai Technical Overview,” Sakai Conference with OSP, Austin, Texas, University of Michigan (2005).
[18] C. Twigg. Course Redesign Improves Learning and Reduces Costs, San Jose, California, National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (2005).