e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Why All LMS’s Are ‘Pretty Good/Bad’

    I got a lot of positive feedback on my “Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process” post, so I’m going to continue the occasional series. You can find all the posts in the series at any time by going to the “small school LMS selection” tag on my site.

    To recap, these posts may apply to your school if at least three of the following are true:

    • You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
    • You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
    • You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
    • Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
    • Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
    • Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
    • You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
    • You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.

    In my first post, I wrote both that “all of these systems are pretty good” and that “all of these systems are pretty bad”. While that’s rhetorically cute (maybe), I realize that it’s not terribly helpful without some more explanation. So this post will provide that explanation.

  • Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process

    I have volunteered to give my local community college some advice regarding some LMS migration decisions they have to make—if to migrate, when to migrate, how to migrate, and so on. In many ways, they’re a pretty typical school with some pretty typical problems, so I thought it might be worthwhile to write down some of this advice for others in similar situations. You might be one of those others if at least three of the following are true:

    • You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
    • You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
    • You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
    • Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
    • Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
    • Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
    • You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
    • You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.
    If so, then this advice is for you:

  • ITOE: I Slow

    As I had feared, I have just not had the time to keep up with the homework for the “Introduction to Open Education” class. I find myself falling further and further behind. For this reason, I am not going to sign up for a guild. I don’t want anyone else in the class to be dependent on my timely completion of the work. 

    I will probably do a few more of the homework assignments on my own schedule, since I have been finding them to be valuable learning experiences. But no promises.

  • Sakai 3 Screencast

    Michael Korcuska has a new screencast up showing some of the concepts planned for Sakai 3:

     

    I really like what he’s doing here. These multimedia narratives of concepts still in development should greatly increase the amount and quality of feedback the developer community will get—before the release gets out the door.

    By the way, as far as I know, this is working (though not necessarily production-ready) code.

  • ITOE: Comparing Two OpenCourseWare Styles

    It’s week three, and the course continues to elide the distinction between open education and open educational resources. That’s a shame because there’s a real opportunity to explore the differences in goals in the current assignment:

    Carefully review five (5) random courses from MIT OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/) and five (5) random courses from CMU OLI (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/). Write a post on the different ideals of quality expressed in the differing course designs; describe how you feel the different designs reflect on the different universities.

    (more…)

  • ITOE: Motivations for Open Education

    Well, it’s only the second week of class, and I’m already turning an assignment in late. (It was due yesterday.) I can’t even argue (plausibly, anyway) that the dog ate my blog post. So much for iron self-discipline.

    At any rate, here is this week’s assignment:

    Carefully review at least 20 pages describing motivations for the open education movement. Write a substantive post with references on the motivations of the movement.

    (more…)

  • Things I Like About the Facebook Interface

    There’s a lot to dislike about the Facebook user experience. The groups capabilities are pretty anemic, for example. And don’t even get me started about making me go to a web page to respond to a private message. But I am finding some clever aspects that are worth emulating too. In particular, there is some subtle and clever work around subscription management. For example, if I comment on a photograph that somebody has posted, I am automatically subscribed to the comment stream for that photo. I have entered the conversation, and the system infers that I want to be kept abreast of it. There is nothing explicit in the user interface for this. I never had to click on “subscribe to comments” anywhere. The system figures out what I want from the actions I take.I suppose the danger of this approach is that the system will infer incorrectly and I will have no way to fix it as an end user, but so far that has not happened to me yet. I’m guessing this is because Facebook sets a fairly well-defined social context and that its designers can therefore make pretty good guesses about what people will want to have happen within that context. This sort of inferential system response is worth further thought, particularly in areas such as subscriptions and permissions, where explicit management by the users can become overwhelming very quickly. 

    Another thing I like is the “see more of” or “see less of” type features in the status updates. Sometimes I get friend requests from people I don’t know and have never heard of. Because I am now a quasi-public figure (aren’t well all?), I tend to accept these requests. But while I don’t mind these strangers listening in on the public stream of my daily life (even if I don’t quite understand why they would find it interesting), I don’t necessarily want to know what they are doing in their daily lives. So I appreciate having the ability, when a status update from a person I don’t know appears on my screen, to select the option to “see less about” that person in the future. Likewise, if I really like videos, I can choose to see more posted videos in the future. These features works well, in part, because the updates posted in Facebook are mostly casual and non-essential news items. It’s hard to see how a “see fewer homework assignments” would be such a good idea in an LMS interface, for example. But the general idea of adding accessible and coarse-grained (and therefore intuitive) controls (not “show me 30% of this person’s updates” but “show me less about this person”) is also an interesting one that is worth exploring further.