e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • Sakai Board Platform — Nate Angell

    This is a guest post by Nate Angell, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.

    Challenges & Opportunities

    The greatest challenge we face in the Sakai community is how our collaboration can stay healthy and relevant in a time when numerous forces are rearticulating not only educational technology, but education itself.

    Before Sakai first started—not even that long ago—centralized learning management systems (LMSs) were not necessarily considered crucial in higher education, as they still are not across K12 today. Since that time, most higher ed institutions have recognized that offering enterprise online learning platforms is crucial to their missions. In the interim, we formed Sakai to enable us to develop and support such central platforms on our own terms.

    Yet today, the now well-accepted idea that an educational institution should offer a single, centralized learning technology platform is under a variety pressures to evolve, including:

    • Nimble, specialized technologies with compelling academic capabilities appearing and disappearing nearly daily.
    • Large commercial technology companies offering seemingly costless platforms for collaboration, research, and thought work.
    • Students, faculty, and researchers finding more reasons to reach outside institutional and pedagogical boundaries.
    • More people customizing, hacking, and developing their technology tools.
    • Data generated by teaching, learning, and research calling out for and flowing in to a wide variety of new uses.
    • People increasingly accessing online technologies day and night from multiple devices in far-flung locations.
    • Educational institutions reinventing their activities to meet changing cultural and economic patterns.

    These same pressures—and more—challenge the Sakai community, our practices, and our technology to evolve as well. To meet this constellation of challenges, I believe we in Sakai need to understand them as opportunities for our continued engagement, not as threats against which to raise our defenses. This positive attitude is not unfamiliar to the Sakai community: we rose together out of just such engagement and apply it daily to our work with each other. Sakai exists not merely to support what we have now, but to bring our collective energy and effort to develop and own what we need tomorrow.

    Sakai in Three Years

    My vision of Sakai three years from now can be summed up in a single word: growth. Not just growth for growth’s own sake, but growth along many dimensions.

    Part of that growth should be new people and new institutions choosing Sakai and adding their ideas and resources to our collective endeavor. We set out to help educators take control of their own technology destinies. If we are not bringing that gift to more people, then we are not fulfilling our founding goal.

    Yet successful growth is not measured only by adding more names to the Sakai list. We also need to grow what Sakai can offer: our continuing work to open Sakai to other technologies via a variety pathways, to sustain multiple technology projects of our own, and to partner with complementary communities already demonstrates our progress down this path.

    We must also measure growth by how many ways we offer to engage in our vision. Sakai has come far beyond our deep, enterprise technology roots to include more players on our stage. We now count technologists of many stripes, instructors, designers, accessibility experts, vendors, policy-makers, and more among our ranks, all hailing from widely international locations and organizations of every shape and size. New efforts are underway to reach out to students, to professional organizations, and to new policy- and grant-making bodies to further expand our constituencies. By continuing to become more, to more people, we ensure our work does not atrophy, losing touch with what matters.

    Last, but not least, we must continue to enlarge what is possible with Sakai. While we have a commitment to support the activities we already have underway at our organizations, we also have the tradition and the mandate to support activities that go beyond. The continuing novelty of what our work so far makes possible should inspire us to further work that in turn generates possibilities we can’t yet imagine.

    Over the next three years, we should continue—and stretch—these trajectories, until we truly grow to become not just the community that supports a technology called Sakai, but a community called Sakai that supports technologies for education, and all that can mean.

    Steps We Must Take

    The Sakai community must focus on three, interrelated activities to meet these challenges, grasp our opportunities, and lead us to where we want to be three years from now.

    First, a very tangible, yet crucial activity: ensuring the continued health and effectiveness of the Sakai Foundation itself as a coordinating body. The unique governance structure of the Sakai community is one of our most valuable assets. The Foundation is key to our distinction. Imagine for one moment Sakai without a sustaining—and sustainable—nonprofit foundation at its center: any positive vision we have depends on the ongoing vitality of this entity, dedicated to nothing other than Sakai’s success.

    Second, a governor for our growth: building and maintaining mechanisms to ensure that growth generates continuing common resources. By establishing a viable core platform and spreading its adoption, Sakai has demonstrated that this center of gravity will generate innovation and extension. We need to make sure that our growth also returns sufficient resources to support the less sexy, yet essential activities at our core.

    Third, a guarantee of our promise: establishing and maintaining quality and coherence in our products and processes. As Sakai grows, we need to build on our promise that our work not only meets, but exceeds the quality and coherence of alternatives. To date, we have achieved these measures only inconsistently. We need to institutionalize processes to bring new rigor to our work and meet the expectations we set for ourselves to stand at the front.

    I welcome further conversation about these ideas and my candidacy for the Sakai Board of Directors. You can read more of my thinking about Sakai on my blog at http://xolotl.org.

  • Sakai Board Platform – David Goodrum

    This is a guest post by David Goodrum, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.

    First off, I’d like to thank Michael Feldstein for his generous offer to the Sakai board candidates to present their perspectives in this forum as well as offer thanks to the many readers of e-Literate for their patience in wading through a discussion of board responsibilities, Sakai product directions, and open/community source approaches.

    I won’t repeat my background and basic platform, which are available here; and will try my best to answer Michael’s call to articulate what I see as the Sakai community’s challenges and opportunities, where I see both Sakai products and community in three years, and what steps we must take to get there.

    Challenges and Opportunities: that we face as a community and as part of the larger global education community over the next three years

    The larger global education community is living in interesting times: communication is increasingly instantaneous; technological capabilities leapfrog each other daily; social, economic, marketplace, and political changes are constantly upon us. And so the need for individuals to learn, connect, and be contributing members of intellectual as well as social communities grows ever more important. And the ability of our institutions to create an environment to enhance the success of students and scholars alike becomes ever more critical.

    The Sakai community is built upon the core values of

    • Higher education meeting its own needs
    • Our institutions maintaining control of their own destinies, and
    • Sharing the burden among like-minded partners.

    The opportunity for Sakai is to build on its current success of the Sakai 2 Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) and meet the future head-on, providing global vision and leadership for how technology can be integral to the success of the core academic mission.

    In my view, the biggest challenges for the Sakai community are to:

    1. Continue to build and evolve a shared vision for the future and maintain core values
    2. Deliver on commitments to always provide high performing and scalable products friendly to both users and developers, and
    3. Accomplish this with a lightweight yet strong Sakai Foundation that champions the most valuable contributions and the most successful self-organizing behaviors in the community.

    Sakai in Three Years: A vision for what Sakai (both products and community) should look like three years from now to respond to those challenges and opportunities

    Sakai Products

    A version 1.0 of a comprehensive vision for Sakai products has been recently articulated, at least from a teaching and learning perspective, with the Sakai Learning Capabilities Design Lenses. Michael Feldstein has previously written a  post about this work and invited me to write a post on the brainstorming and other community activities that led up to the version 1.0 document. It was very exciting to be a part of this highly collaborative work in the community and to continue to champion it in a variety of venues.

    I think it’s accurate to say the document is presented as a comprehensive product vision for both the Sakai CLE as well as the newly announced project called the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE). Building on considerable advanced work on both the concepts and architecture for Sakai OAE, along with a hybrid approach to working together with Sakai CLE, the two projects are well positioned to deliver on the promise outlined by the Sakai Learning Capabilities.

    LMS vendors are always marketing their latest or refreshed versions developed in secret and pursuing technologies and/or market share by acquiring other companies or suing in the courts. Even the open source Moodle is poised for major change as it is now beginning to strategize and brainstorm for a total rewriting/refactoring of its platform (e.g., see this).

    The Sakai consortial values and governance affords us all a much deeper level of influence through a variety of tangible contributions to governance, direction, and products that uniquely meet the needs of higher education. In the next three years, Sakai is well positioned to provide an ecosystem of products, integrations, standards (e.g., LTI), and support that together can fulfill the Learning Capabilities vision.

    Sakai Community

    Simply put, my vision for the Sakai community is a house with all the lights turned on, occupied by multiple groups who are self-organized and board-recognized, and united broadly by common purpose and values. A lot of Sakai community accomplishments over time have occurred somewhat in isolation, pursued by a single institution, and difficult to find up-to-date information on.

    This seems to be evolving already. Both the Sakai OAE managed project and the Sakai 2 Technical Coordination Committee (as well as the teaching and learning community efforts on the Learning Capabilities Design Lenses) have been prime examples of highly visible, self-organized efforts within the community, each with multiple participating institutions.

    In three years, my vision is for a broader and more diverse Sakai community with a successful merger of Jasig and Sakai, more multiple-institution supported efforts, more higher ed institutions and commercial affiliates as members, and better outreach and communication of community initiatives overall.

    Steps We Must Take: specific actions that must be undertaken to fulfill that vision

    There are scores of actions and contributions the community would need to take to fulfill the vision I’ve outlined above. But let me focus on specific actions the Sakai Foundation Board needs to take.

    For Community Vision

    For the Foundation itself, I see several critical areas for thoughtful leadership by the directors through a dialogue with the whole of the Sakai community:

    1) Partners. Make mergers and partnerships with other community source groups an opportunity for both organizational efficiency and technical and functional collaborations. The growing open source ecosystem in higher education supported by partner commercial affiliates affords us all a strategic approach to continue meeting our own needs while maintaining control of our own destinies and sharing the burden among like-minded partners.

    2) Outreach. Implement an effective Sakai Foundation outreach strategy to a) institutions exploring learning management, portfolio, collaboration, and academic networking applications, b) potential commercial affiliates with services and application integrations that would benefit higher education, and c) other open and community source projects which together with us could create a rich platform for innovation.

    3) New Voices. Increase engagement with the newest members of the community, many of which are struggling to find their way among the myriad of projects, sources of information, dense lists of email, and potential ways to contribute. There might be a variety of ways to help with this; one idea would be to create a ‘new members council’ for new institutions and commercial affiliates. A new member would have a representative on the council for twelve months; the council would meet regularly with the executive director and other community resources he brings to bear to an agenda built by the new council membership. New members, no matter their size, should feel they have an established and direct line of communication.

    For Product Success

    For the Sakai software, I also see several critical areas of importance for the Foundation working with the community:

    1) Build and support a coherent product strategy. The Sakai CLE and the Sakai OAE (along with other community source projects) together provide the full range of capabilities needed in the demanding arena of higher ed online, hybrid and face-to-face teaching, learning, collaboration, and academic networking and community building.

    2) Turn the lights on. Formally recognize self-organized efforts within the community where multiple institutions are co-sponsoring and co-supporting specific, well-documented initiatives.

    3) Support and advocate standards. Adopting integration and interoperability standards would enable bringing together the best content, processes, and tools to support the academic mission of our institutions. As Feldstein has pointed out elsewhere, we need to integrate both the rest of the academic enterprise as well as the long tail of learning tools.

    Final Note

    As a board director, I believe I would bring a unique perspective:

    • The experience of having supported large and small campuses through an early migration to Sakai from a legacy system;
    • Substantial work with users as well as with development teams in continuing to move Sakai 2 CLE forward;
    • Early championing and participation in the Learning Capabilities visioning;
    • Involvement from the beginning in the Sakai OAE managed project;
    • Being a frequent conversant with institutions considering Sakai — some already leaning, others rather skeptical;
    • Understanding of how an institution can implement community source as a strategic direction; and
    • Leadership experience with sizable responsibilities for both teams and budgets.

    The opportunity to serve the Sakai community through a board position would indeed be a rare honor and privilege.

  • Sakai Board Platform — Lucy Appert

    This is a guest post by Lucy Appert, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. Her bio and platform are available here.

    Sakai in Three Years

    The key question for our community to answer right now is, “What is our end goal?” If it is thousands of institutional cul-de-sacs within cul-de-sacs, we are getting there by default – and we could get there with the proprietary walls of commercial solutions just as easily.  If our goal is the desire I hear expressed from faculty and students every day of integrating a variety of external tools and facilitating inter- and cross-institutional sharing and collaboration, then we need to think and work differently over the next three years.

    The metaphor of a utility strikes me as useful here. “Utility” implies standards and stability on which or alongside which other layers of infrastructure can be built. One vision of the academic technology of the future, one that I hope to see realized in Sakai OAE/Sakai 3, is that there is a base utility into which individual institutions integrate their internal systems and activate customizations without altering the functionality of the base. For some institutions, those integrations may be the customized experiences of Sakai 2 tools operating in hybrid mode. Whether it is Sakai 2 tool stability or the Sakai OAE platform, however, developing and maintaining that base utility will require a strong structure and process.

    Steps We Must Take

    This utility metaphor has been used a lot (and with some trepidation) to describe what both Facebook and Google offer users, but using it to describe the open-source products developed by a nonprofit academic foundation has a certain naturalness. However, those products must be backed by a trusted foundation and organization with the power to create and maintain product standards. I believe we are at a point where development and oversight is best done within a common project that takes into account the broadest set of institutional needs and offers a plan and a process for maintaining it over the long term.

    That does not mean the treasured Sakai “do-ocracy” must go away, but rather that the spirit be re-directed toward local integrations and customization selections on the one hand, and the development of a sound, flexible, receptive platform on the other. Facebook and Google have become utilities because they offer a standard, scalable, pleasant user experience that has been visionary and flexible enough to respond to social and technological changes. A common platform is the best way for us to achieve those goals with Sakai products.

    Challenges and Opportunities

    Building that platform is hard. It means looking at new ways of working together, ceding local control at times, and trusting in the end goal of the collaboration.  It means an end to an overriding philosophy of “I’ll make it for me, and if anyone else can use it, great.” While that approach might be helpful in the short run, in the long run it harms everyone. I get my custom experience, but others have to tailor their uses to what I’ve built. There is the very good chance that other institutions will find that tailoring too onerous and will instead build their competing versions, thereby vastly diminishing any chance of cross-institutional work or common integration solutions. And what future possibilities am I cutting off within my own institution by building only to such narrowly focused specifications?

    Sakai is a popular choice with academics because it is open-source. But that can only get us so far. If we do not also offer a good user experience and an innovative vision, it will not be long before people give us lip service but pay for the kind of technology they really need and enjoy using.

    Our challenge AND opportunity lie in creating the structure and process as well as the product. My experience in attempting this type of project both within NYU and in the larger Sakai OAE/Sakai 3 project suggest that the process will be iterative, deeply collaborative, and dependent on the input of multiple perspectives to be successful. And in undertaking it, our community will be embodying both the spirit of our open-source product and the academic culture we hope it will facilitate.

  • Sakai Foundation Board Nominee Posts

    Spotty hotel wifi permitting, I will shortly be publishing blog posts from most of the nominees for the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board election. A couple of the nominees have not responded to my offer. Given the time constraints involved, I don’t read anything into that. People are busy.

    Here are the details that I provided to the nominees in the email:

    What I’m offering is an opportunity for you to write one blog post that describes your goals and ambitions for the three-year period of your proposed first term as a Board member. Each blog post would have the following three headings:

    • Challenges and Opportunities
    • Sakai in Three Years
    • Steps We Must Take

    The idea, if it isn’t clear, is to (1) outline the challenges and opportunities that we face as a community and as part of the larger global education community over the next three years, (2) present a vision for what Sakai (both products and community) should look like three years from now to respond to those challenges and opportunities, and (3) describe specific actions that must be undertaken to fulfill that vision.

  • The Future of Open Textbooks

    In general, I have been an OER skeptic—not because I think OER is unimportant, but because getting the sustainability model right is really hard. But there is one notable exception to my gloomy outlook; one bright spot that I believe really will transform education. That’s Washington State’s Open Course Library project, under the leadership of Cable Green.

    Some excerpts from a Seattle Times article about the program:

    Here’s an idea that would take a big bite out of the cost of a two-year college degree:

    Gather state community-college faculty members who teach “English Composition I.” Use state and federal grant money to pay them to assemble a top-notch textbook on the subject. Sell a digital version of the book for $30. Ditch the $100 textbook from commercial publishers….

    They could lower the cost of a two-year degree, with some studies showing students spend up to $1,000 a year on textbooks….

    The state’s community and technical colleges are leading the way with an ambitious new initiative: They’re assembling previously published “open-source” textbooks and course materials for the 81 most popular classes at state two-year colleges — including for such mainstays as “General Psychology” and “Introduction to Chemistry.”

    “The power of this is that we’re going to go from a couple hundred dollars per year [for each textbook] to $10 or $20,” said state Rep. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, who sponsored legislation that set aside $750,000 for the initiative. It’s a robust level of funding, experts say.

    “The return on our investment is going to be extraordinary,” Carlyle said.

    The open-source textbook drive is part of a larger state effort, called the Open Course Library, to assemble all curriculum materials — including the course syllabus, videos, lecture notes and exams — for the 81 most popular courses, said Cable Green, director of elearning and open education for the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC).

    The board is working with a consortium of international colleges and universities to find and assemble the materials — for example, taking pieces from freely available textbooks to create a book suited for a Washington state course. In Washington, about 90 community- and technical-college faculty and staff are involved….

    The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has matched the Legislature’s contribution with $750,000 in foundation money….

    The textbooks and curriculum materials are being developed this fall and winter for the first 43 classes with the highest enrollment in the state’s two-year colleges, including English Composition I and II, General Psychology, Introduction to Sociology and Introduction to Chemistry. By fall 2012, textbooks and curriculum materials will be completed for all 81 of the most popular classes….

    This could be hugely transformative. With the number of institutions participating and the number of courses created, this should hit escape velocity for sustainability fairly easily. It could be picked up by community colleges throughout the country fairly rapidly. And that’s just the start.

  • Sakai Foundation Board Elections

    Elections are being held this week for two open seats on the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors. You can see the slate of candidates here. Votes are due in by a week from today. In the interest of transparency, I have invited all candidates to blog about their respective platforms here on e-Literate. Time is tight, so I may not get submissions from everybody, but I hope to get as many candidates as I can to post. I feel strongly that voting decisions should be based more on just, “Hey, I’ve seen that person’s name on list a lot; s/he must be good.”

    As a sitting Board member myself, I feel it would be inappropriate for me to comment on individual candidates or even advocate specific platform preferences. But I do think it’s worth talking more about how to pick a good Board member in general. I invite members of the Sakai community—particularly past and departing Board members—to respond here in comments with your own suggested criteria, but here are some possible angles to consider when you’re evaluating the candidates:

    (more…)

  • Moodle and Sakai: A Trainer’s Perspective

    Here’s an interesting presentation from Mark Drechsler of NetSpot Pty, an Australian company that is both a Moodle partner and a Sakai Commercial Affiliate (and the first company to be both, as far as I know):