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.

  • At the Higher Education Users Group Conference Next Week

    I’ll be going to the Alliance conference, which is run by Oracle’s higher education users group, next week. I’m co-presenting a half-day workshop on SAIP with my colleague Linda Feng on Sunday. After that, I’ll be around until Wednesday morning. If you’re at the conference and want to talk, ping me or track me down. My Twitter handle is @mfeldstein67.

  • Review of Oracle AES White Paper

    Ian Dolphin, the International Director of the e-Framework program, has posted a review [PDF] of the white paper that my colleagues and I recently wrote for Oracle. As usual, Ian brings fresh perspective and insight to the topic from his perch in an international organization promoting standards for education, where he gets views into multiple projects across a number of countries. His analysis about the overlap between eLearning and eResearch needs is particularly interesting. Well worth the read.

  • Looking for Advice On Creating a Second Life Simulation

    I received an email from a reader who is working on a worthy project and is looking for advice on Second Life. Since I generally avoid SL myself, I was hoping some of you might have some tips for her. 

    She writes:

    My goal is to create a simulation that can be used by a non-profit consulting firm, where I intern, to allow employees and field representatives engage in a fun and useful tool to educate themselves about the intricacies of implementing a project. Many of our employees are at field sites around the world, and we wanted to use a platform that would not require us to all sit in a room and do a tabletop simulation; instead, using the virtual world of Second Life seemed like a perfect place where individuals could learn and interact.

    We work on international health projects, primarily sponsored by USAID, and have allocated overhead money to cover the cost of purchasing an island where the simluation can take place. As many activities have input from a variety of stakeholders, our aim was to use Second Life as a place where individuals could adopt the role of the Minister of Health, a donor, a community health worker, etc. and experience what it was like to participate in the negotiations that take place in determining priorities, indicators, targets, and other necessary tenants of our projects.

    I know that explanation is laden with international health jargon, but here are a few of the questions affiliated with it…

    • Is it best to set up seperate SL accounts attached to avatars that we can give to the individuals participating in a given round of the simulation, or allow people to create their own avatars and attend the simulation, just taking on the role in the way they behave?
    • Beyond purchasing the island and the “rent”, what other costs can we expect to incur if we don’t need any particularly fancy infrastructure? We work in developing countries, so a bare-bones facility will suffice just fine.
    • What is a realistic time frame to conduct an online learning module like this?
    • Any other advice/caveats/words of wisdom?

    Well?

  • 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.