Pass the SoLT

I couldn't resist posting a link to this latest Moodle music video. Not strictly within the scholarly tradition of this blog but certainly evidence of the creativity associated with using new technology for learning.

enjoy!

A recent survey conducted by the eLearning Guild on Learning Management System (LMS) preferences reports that:

"For the second consecutive year, the eLearning Guild survey, which measures use of over 100 professionally-developed LMS products and excludes in-house created sys tems, shows that Moodle™ is ranked as the #1 LMS product among eLearning Guild members with over 24% of respondents selecting it as their primary LMS."

In the same data source, Blackboard™ was reported to have a market share of 17.5%. In May 2008, Blackboard and Moodle were neck and neck for the dominant position among eLearning Guild members. Of course, the methodology used in this type of survey needs to be treated with caution but the findings confirm the general move to Moodle within higher education institutions in Australia and New Zealand.

That said, President of Blackboard Learn, Ray Henderson reports how Blackboard is attempting to embrace customer demands and openness in future product releases. An article entitled Blackboard Ambassador includes a podcast which describes how Blackboard is responding to the growing competition from Moodle and other open source solutions. Notably, he hints that the company may soon move away from annual version releases to more incremental upgrades.

On the eve of Apple's announcement of their latest hardware device (some type of portable tablet), it's interesting to speculate how the ebook reader market will evolve over the next 12 months. Who will be the winners and losers? A recent article published on the BBC News website bets against ebook readers and reports an initiative to turn any device into an e-reader. The intention is to invent something that will run on all platforms. As Ray Kurzweil, famed for inventions like speech-recognition software, states:

"People don't want an extra piece of hardware. They want to take one device and do everything with it and they want colour screens."

Notably, the article reports Forrester Research estimate that Amazon's Kindle currently accounts for 60% of all e-readers sold in the US last year. Sony, which offers a competing Reader device, accounts for 35%. Some analysts claim that as many as 10 million e-reader devices will be sold in the United States in the coming year. What share of the market can Apple secure over the next 12 months?

Future developments in this area have particular significance for Massey University as we have a strong commitment to digitize our current print-based learning resources. In the next few weeks, Massey is about to start a formal pilot using An.notate as both a stand alone and integrated tool to work with Moodle. This tool will allow students to annotate online readings, and search and place markers for points of particular interest. Arguably, the tool will be even more powerful when students can access and make use of its functionality from portable devices. A formal evaluation of the Massey pilot will be undertaken over the next few months and I'll post an update of our findings in due course.

In this brief entry, I report two notable developments.

First, last week the title of my position at Massey University officially changed from 'Director of Distance Education' to 'Director, Blended and Distance Education'. The obvious implication of this change is that my role now extends beyond just distance learning to relevant aspects of campus-based teaching.

I have spoken at length in previous postings on the topic of blended learning which can apply to all delivery modes. In the literature, the definition of blended learning remains open to debate, but at Massey we have been trying to more precisely define what this concept means, in our context, as we develop an institutional-wide Teaching and Learning Framework. The current working definition reads:

“Blended learning at Massey University is about purposely integrating different resources, environments and delivery modes to provide an exceptional and distinctive experience for all students.”

Of course, the definition is far less important than how we enact it and work has already begun on an Operational Plan with specific initiatives aligned to the University's Strategic Plan - The Road to 2020. The intention is to launch a draft of the new Teaching and Learning Framework, which contains key initiatives related to Blended and Distance Education, at a university-wide professional development event in early December.

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On the 9th October, I'm involved in hosting an interesting Colloquium for Massey University staff on the topic of Opening the Curriculum. The Colloquium is set in the backdrop of the University's move to an open source learning environment (Moodle and Mahara) and the revision of Massey's current Intellectual Property Policy. We expect the event will generate some interesting discussion on the future of learning, teaching and knowledge transfer in the modern university environment. I hope to provide a report on this event in my blog. In the meantime, here is further information about the Colloquium.

Why ‘Opening the Curriculum’?

Massey University is in the midst of a radical transition to digitally-delivered curricula. While the technical and organizational dimensions of this transition are proceeding apace, the implications for practice and the opportunities this transition presents are as yet poorly understood. For many locations the move to Web 2.0 has been accompanied by a revolutionary opening up of the curricula to a host of new players. What do we at Massey make of these developments?

What Topics will be addressed by whom?

The colloquium considers the challenges and opportunities of this transition in the context of intellectual property rights, peer-to-peer production, ethical economies, open-source software, creative commons licensing and digital publishing. The open session features two scene-setting guest presentations by Drs Adam Arvidsson and Wayne Mackintosh - globally recognised experts in these fields.

`Ethical Economies in, with and through Higher Education’ - Dr Adam Arvidsson (Department of Sociology, University of Milano)

Speaker Description: Author of the Ethical Economy, Adam’s research and teaching explores the political and ethical dimensions of the co-production revolution currently redefining and reorganizing business practice around the planet. He is a passionate and engaging speaker drawing on live case examples and experience.

‘Open Learning, Business Models and Copyright Options’ - Dr Wayne Mackintosh (International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic)

Speaker Description: Wayne is the founding director of the International Centre for Open Education. He was formally an education specialist for the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) where he worked on a number of international projects. Wayne is a passionate advocate and user of open software for education and was responsible for establishing the WikiEducator Project. He was formerly Associate Professor and Director of Flexible and Distance Education at the University of Auckland.

A hot topic currently on the agenda at Massey University is how to enhance the student learning experience by taking advantage of new digital learning resources. This opportunity was recently described in the latest Vice-Chancellor's video log on the topic of distance education...

Massey has a long tradition of providing students with high quality print-based study material but we now have new ways of making content available to learners. The challenge is to strike the right mix or balance between digital and conventional learning resources. This challenge brings to the forefront the concept of blended learning, which lies deep in the DNA of Massey University. Although the definition of blended learning is context specific, as different blends will be required in different programmes, Massey aims to provide all students with a rich learning experience using the latest technologies alongside of existing proven delivery systems.

The difficulty is that we need to think about the needs of all learners. While we know from enrolment data that 97% of Massey students have an email address not everyone is able to receive large bytes of rich digital media over the internet. For example, we have many students studying from prison who have limited computer access and the problem of the 'last mile' of internet access remains an issue for many rural New Zealanders. On an enterprise level, the University has to be careful not to exclude some learners in our desire to enhance the learning of the majority through a more vibrant digital experience.

Our intention over the next 12 months or so is to pilot a number of solutions that attempt to exploit the potential of digital media. We hope the lessons learned will help us to better understand our student needs. We already make use of Adobe Presenter as a delivery system for audio enhanced Powerpoint presentations and there is increasing use of MediaSite as a means of capturing lecture content in a digital format. The pilots will expand our efforts to traditional text-based content by using open source authoring software such as ICE in the Stream (Moodle) environment along with hardware solutions such as flash drives, e-book readers, etc.

One of the real challenges is to ensure that new delivery platforms provide a clear advantage over conventional systems and to be careful not to merely pass additional costs on to students. There is little point providing content in a digital format if students then turn around and print all of this material out on their own machines. However, there are clear environmental benefits of saving thousands of pages of paper and our pilot initiatives will aim to advance the University's carbon neutral goal. I will provide further updates on these pilots as results emerge.