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Software for Online Courses?
bcrowell asks: "I teach Physics at a community college, and a lot of the faculty are trying their hands at teaching internet courses. I'm going through the process of getting approval to offer some of our physics courses with online instruction plus lab, as an alternative to lecture plus lab. (My main motivation is to boost enrollment in some of our higher-level courses, which tend to get canceled if not enough people enroll.) The standard software for this kind of thing seems to be WebCT, but I get the impression that it's proprietary straightjacket-ware. I'd rather go with something open-source, especially since proprietary software seems to come and go, but the best open-source code is forever -- who wants to waste their time building a whole course around the flavor-of-the-month software? I'm particularly curious whether something like Slashcode might work. Most online courses include a requirement that people post a certain number of 'substantial' comments, where 'substantial' is a subjective term to be determined by the instructor. I know some teachers who say when they teach a large online course, they just don't have time to read all the posts, so they end up going by length a lot of the time. Wouldn't moderation by one's peers work better?"
Might there not be a zope product of some sort that would work for this? What are you looking for out of the project? What are your goals? "e-learning" or whatever seems a bit broad. Who will do the admin work? Does the university already have a site license for some other product?
For basic discussion type things, slashcode, or one of the clones/mutants might work rather well. In fact, too well. You'd need to modify it for closed registrations, drop the automatic mod priveleges, etc.
Finally, I can say that as a former student, I'd be least interested in a BS web-course at higher levels. At that point in my education, one-on-one time was highly important.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I've had one class use WebCT. It's pretty good, though I do now know what it costs.
The teacher would post the syllabus, lecture slides, announcements, solutions, etc to our class's forum, where only students in the class could access it, unlike profs who put all that info on their website for future students to see and cache before taking the course.
Two not-so useful features were the ability to perform multiple-choice quizzes in class and have instant grading, and a chat feature where the TA would schedule sessions. We only had one quiz, and it didnt count (I think the prof was trying it out). As for chat, I never used it, as I never really needed TA assistance.
What I really liked were the ability to upload assignment deliverables to the server, as opposed to emailing the prof and overloading his inbox, using floppies, or printing out stacks of paper. Another biggie were that we could look up our grades at any time for assignments, exams, etc., and also get a comparison to other students in the class on a particular gradable item -- a histogram of grades and descriptive stats on those grades (ie - mean/median/high/low). (I _really_ liked that after the final for that course - I saw that the highest score was 30/35, and that I had a 30.)
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
There's systems like blackboard.com for handling courses in a traditional lecture manner (one-to-many) covering a single topic.
We rolled our own for ThePhotoCourse.com using a combination of subforums and a way of doing lessons with integrated quizzes. This was a few-to-many approach: several instructors, each handling a small 'classroom' of similarly inclined students.
One professor has worked out integrated quizzes as an online component to his real-world course (which is where we got our approach for thephotocourse). The method is that you read the material and get quizzed, and if you don't pass the quiz you get hints or more material until you do have it 'mastered'. Still automated, but useful.
Ultimately, your course s/w is going to be based on:
a) your format: lecture/regurgative material, lab/hands-on, other
b) your teacher/student ratio
c) relevance of assignments and quizzes to the course
d) whether pass/fail (or grading) is required
Tools like slashcode are useful for _talking_ about something, but _teaching_ requires more than just two-way talking. You also need application, review, and testing.
Good luck!
A.
- yes, WebCT sucks, but it doesn't even matter because:
- students who take courses online tend to do it as a way to devote less time to the classs.
Considering this, I'd say that a peer moderation system wouldn't be useful in such a situation. Count on your students doing the least amount of work possible to get their grade.I'm watching Naomi full bloom,
I'm hoping she will soon explode.
Read: Like most universities, mine feels that the place would be much better without students, and so we want to find a way to continue to pull down our huge paychecks without having to actually teach courses.
Urm, dunno 'bout you, but I sure as hell don't want the people that I'm competing *against* in terms of the grading curve to have anything to do with how my work gets graded. Even if there isn't a curve --- are you sure that having people who may not like you or necessarily have a good enough grasp of the material moderating your posts? Personally, I don't think the web can replace a real instructor --- I *need* face time; however the web (when done properly) make for a nice supplement.
.....glad to see the lameness filter's working just fine.....
Blackboard is pretty popular too http://www.blackboard.com/ - but it and WebCT are both costly and non OS. Perhaps someone should start a php/mysql combination OS replacement...
We are doing a "Pilot Program" (dear god in heaven..) of this company's main product. YMMV,but it seems to be a straightforward content-management type system geared specifically to class management (though not free, it is fairly cheap). I believe that if you bug them enough they will give you access to the source, but it isn't Free as in speech.
Developing class content for online presentation seems to me to be the stickier problem. To do it well, you either have to have been trained to be able to produce with a good tool like dreamweaver or authorware, or have access to a code-monkey to do it for you.
I had a sig, but
We have a GPL'd (although we haven't bothered releasing it yet) solution based on Zope called QDS. It is perfect for Science departments, and is in use currently by the NC State University Chemistry department (and has been for a couple of years). I'd be more than happy to help you out with this. Contact me at mordred at inaugust dot com. If there's enough interest, we could figure out what we need to do to release it in a useful package.
I can't believe how close to home this topic strikes for me. I am a grad student in Physics and have been considering a project just like this. I wanted to build an open source service for delivering structered content oriented around physics and math. What follows are some of the ideas I have been pondering.
First, the backend of this software would be a database server of cross referenced topics so that the presentation of material could be presented as a static idea flow (read text book) that would allow for dynamic, interactive exploration. Some benifits this would have over standard textbooks is that presentation could include video, interactive function graphing, and any other dynamic content that can be handled by a computer. The frontend would be basically a web client that could present and store the information and exploration history for future use by the student as a reference.Perhaps when you complete the course you would get a CD containing all of the material you covered and in the order you covered it, including an index/keyword search ability. However you would loose access to the dynamic content unless the "owners" decided to grant you permission to further access.
Second, While delivery mechanism would be open source, the content could still be controlled in house via a peer reviewed submission validation model. This could eventually allow growth into a colaborative effort of experts all over the world. Allowing group development expidites the elimination of informational voids as the topic coverage expands. There could multiple levels of trusted users, ie. at the lowest level would be the student who only has read access, slightly higher up would be outside material developers that could place topics into an incomming review queue, and highest would be the content owners and reviewers who would carry the burden of topic submission review and overall structure maintenance.
Third presentation of material would follow the same strategy as a class room. Both audio, graphics, and text (math) would be streamed concurrently so that the topic is "developed" to the student rather than presented en masse like a text book (So many web based methods fail to provide the teaching environment that a classroom has shown to be so sucsessful at). As an avid student, I find that material much easier to understand when I see it and hear it as it is presented, in essence following the thought process of the instructor as they present their understanding of the topic.
Fourth, any topic can be interrupted for a more in depth development or alternate explanation, if none was available a request for expansion of that area could be sent to the administrators. For math this could be the ability to define terms both rigorously and semantically, as well as, an algebraic expansion of derivations. I believe that there is a web site that employs the semantic portion of this method, although I can't think of it offhand.
On a philosophical note, I really don't believe that ideas can be property, so the student would be able to freely keep any informational content that they are presented with. However, I do believe that the structure of the presentation is unique and and therefor the dynamic structure of delivery could be restricted to developing "owners".
Pro and cons,
On the pro side, you could create an automated interactive learning experiance that would allow for dynamic exploration of the material utilizing tried and trusted methods found in classrooms.
CONtrarilly, development of the course would be an in depth work that could take years to properly create, since you would in esence be attempting to create an expert system with the data/knowledge of an experienced academic professional.
I am throwing this idea out to the public ingeneral, because I think it is an idea whos time has come. If you decide to produce this I would appreciate some form of acknowledgement of the originating ideas and a chance to help codevelop it.
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-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Our office of about 3000 people has to take various short training programs annually...office stuff, sexual harrassment training, security, environmental policies etc.
When they moved it to the web they bought/wrote a package that does all the user testing using multiple choice questions and client side scripting. So rather than sit through an hour of online tedium I 1) view source, 2) identify answer 3) submit answer.
Nobody seems to notice or care that I'm done in less than 2 minutes.
as i student i must say webct is the most useless piece of crap out there
in my opinion you should just have your lecture notes for the entire semester up and posted from day one.. be in an online chat room at certain pre-posted times to give a 'lecture' and answer questions students might have.. and then ofcourse a lab ontop of this
grading would then be two part, labs/lectures with a minimum grade of X required for each part ot pass..
as a student webct has nothing to offer for me, a comp sci student.
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...be sure to check out
Advanced Distributed Learning, the organization that promotes the SCORM standard for online content. SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model, and is widely gaining acceptance in government and commercial settings as a standard for e-Learning courses. Tools which are SCORM-compliant have a better chance of becoming widely adopted, IMHO.
But what will be appearing in the classrooms of the future will most likely be heavily influenced by this stuff.
One URL is here
Set yourself up with a webserver with httpd, irc, a maillist server, and a newserver. Then you have what is equivalent to webct. You can even get around the newserver by using a discussion board.
You will need to deal with security issues if you want your students to be able to check grades online. There are other security issues as well. I've been on a few maillists that got signed up to pr0n lists. This weren't webct lists though. Since webct uses a webmail type interface where only other members of the class can send mail to.
So, the question to ask yourself is: What will cost you more? Getting some monkey to set up standard software for you or shelling out some cash so that WebCT can set up proprietary software for you. Don't forget the maintainence costs.
If I were you and I'd have the IT department at your school set everything up for you. Use http for all the general stuff. Let people post questions to a discussion board. And hold tutorials over irc. Use the maillist for announcements.
If you look at what people are moderating up/down, you can also get a grasp of how well they understand other people's comments.
You'd need to set rules (e.g. Do you mod down if it's wrong? Or post a correction?)
I'd have:
- Mod up a post that makes a good argument
- Mod up posts that add useful (correct) additional information.
- Mod down flames/trolls/redundants("me too"s)
- If something is wrong, don't mod - reply.
With meta-mod you could determining how well students are at judging the above criteria.Then to do the grading:
For each student, assess how well they moderated, and then look at their best and worst rated comments. Don't rely on the moderation to score for you (i.e. You have Karma of 25 - you get an A), but let it guide you to the best comments, so you can assess them yourself. And then look at the worst ones - partly to see if someone is punishing them, and partly to see if they came out with some rubbish.
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My employer does exactly this sort of thing. We don't offer online blackboards or self-authored courses as standard because our customers don't tend to ask for them and they're significant extra complication and expense, but they're there if you want them.
We'll write something that does what you want, not just take a CD-ROM off the shelf and copy your name onto it. Basically, if you can describe the function we'll look at including it.
Based on MS technologies, I'm afraid, because we have to run on corporate Intranets and finding NT servers on intranets isn't difficult. This sort of thing doesn't tend to start from IT so getting their consent to install something funny can be a good game.
If you want more info, have a look or mail me.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I've spent the last 6 months looking at online learning technology. It's a mess. We ended up with Vuepoint (http://www.vuepoint.com/) because they have a tolerable unlimited user license fee, and they have both content creation/management and course deliver/management tools. Many companies offer only one or the other.
There are a couple of 'standards' in this area, namely AICC (old) and SCORM (current). The latter stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model, and is theoretically a way of encapsulating bits of an online class to allow, well, reuse and sharing.
In practice the standard appears highly complex and unhelpful. It comes from the aviation world (don't ask) and is geared towards courses like 'how to troubleshoot a Bowing 747 hydraulic system'. I.E., big, fact based piles of knowledge. This makes it not very helpful for all sorts of other courses, like 'What to expect from chemotherapy'.
Nonetheless, in corporate world being SCORM compliant is a vital feature for many companies that want to sell elearning products. But, SCORM is a highest common factor, and everyone ends up sinking to that level if they go with it. There are companies that simply sell SCORM compliant classes for you to plug into your SCORM compliant LMS (learnign management system), but that's a pretty blunt approach.
The academic world is better - there are a number of products (like blackboard) that derive from universities' internal elearning projects. These products are often technically kind of a mess and pretty crufty, but they are often more functional and cheaper.
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WebCT is a hack thrown together, like most name-brand software these days. I took a class with a guy who used to work for them back in the days when it was a client/server app that used its own TCP/IP port. I've taken several classes with WebCT and I must say that the UI is pretty badly put together it's very inflexible, has very bad HTML output code, and generally feels like someone tried playing a football match against a team of octopuses.
:o)
There is a newer version of WebCT that is supposed to be better, but it's a rewrite in Java+Oracle, as opposed to the Perl+textfiles that the older version is. Also, they're not aiming at colleges with the new version, they're aiming for large corporations.
I've thought about writing a WebCT replacement, but I just haven't had the time. Ideally I'd like a college to hire me to write it (offers?
A GPL'ed e-learning platform: Claroline Classroom online
Maybe you should take a hard look at opensource project DotLRN, which is being used by MIT's Sloan School of business (http://sloanspace.mit.edu/ Login name: testguest@mit.edu. Password: test). It is also being used by the Berklee school of music and being looked at by University of Heidelberg, in Germany for 2003.& topic=dotLRN%20Development ).
The backgound for the software is the OpenACS project, at http://openacs.org, and is TCL+AOLServer+Postgresql or Oracle. More info on DotLRN is at http://dotlrn.mit.edu or ask around in the dotLRN Development forums ( http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic_id=15
I have led the implementation of WebCT for a major university and we have had MAJOR problems with WebCT (admin, usage, training, support, etc.). There have been a lot of changes in this market over the last year and to add to the problems WebCT has made some serious changes to their business model as they moved away from their university roots and into the corporate world (among other things this has resulted in a 500% change in pricing for campus licensing and a total rewrite of the Perl based version that can now be viewed as abandonware). Obviously if our students and teachers actually used WebCT we would have had to swallow these changes and continue on the bumpy road dictated by WebCT... but luckily that has not been the case.
For this reason we have been evaluating lots of different systems over the last 5 months and in our search we came across an application that is built on top of an industrial strength web application framework that was born in the CS department of MIT and has a very active open source community supporting it (http://openacs.org). All data is stored in a database (Oracle or Postgresql - i.e. it can be spit out in any standard compliant format needed in the future) and it is served using a heavy duty open source web/application server (AOLServer). The actual application that is built on this framework (http://dotlrn.mit.edu) is focused on community building and sounds like something that would probably interest you. We have decided as an institution to go with dotLRN (with more than 30,000 users), but we are still in the planning phases right now (we should be going live in the first or second quarter of 2003). Word of warning... although dotLRN has been in active use at various institutions around the world for more than two years (in an earlier version called AECS), the "boxed" second version that MIT is funding (dotLRN) is still in a testing phase (although it is being used in production at more than one adventurous school at the moment). Do not be upset though... the present version can be pulled from the public CVS and it works very well... and the "boxed" version should be coming in September. DotLRN was built with scalability, performance, community, and modularity in mind (i.e. modules that expand its present capabilities are being built as a write this: xml-based LMS, quiz module, presentation module, bookmarks module, glossary module... to name a few) and it is going to make some waves.
Use dotLRN a FREE (as in speech) course management system that has the backing of the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Univiersity of Heidelberg and many other soon to be announced universities and school districts.
talli
In case you want to write software to help with the "online lab" part of courses or perhaps simply illustrate certain ideas in a graphical fashion, take a look at Physlets. These are open-source Java libraries for writing physics-related Java programs/applets. Award winning, no less.
-Rahul
Genebrew
http://dotlrn.collaboraid.net
Greets!
Well, our system may be suitable, if you want to take a longer view *8-)
We're currently developing WHURLE - Web-based Hierarchical Universal Reactive Learning Environment - a GPL'd XML-based open system. It runs on a servlet engine with XSLT (apache tomcat and cocoon recommended *8-). The development team comprises several people who have run major online courses, mostly using WebCT, and we're keen to avoid the same mistakes - to this end - all our content is stored as discrete XML 'chunks' of information, which are structured into a hierarchical lesson plan - we're developing adaptive filters at the mo, but if you just want to do non-adaptive, straight course delivery, it's ready now.
I said take a longer view, because, even though we have courses running in Nottingham,UK and Hong Kong, authoring at the moment is either done by hand in an XML editor, or using some crude web forms I knocked up - we are in the process of finishing a converter for most of our legacy material, which was developed for a program called Scholar's Desktop - so if any one has courses built using this, let me know and I can get you started real quick - for others, if you'd like to see a demo of the system, or contribute, please drop me an email.Convertors from other formats are in hand, but realistically will take some time.
Addressing some of the other issues posted here - we think SCORM is a good idea and will get round to doing something with it RSN *8-) We found in our previous courses that what makes online components a success is a 'critical mass' of online contributors - silent forums are the death of any system. As for peer review - we're actively looking at this, perhaps using something along the lines that sourceforge use - most active, highest rated and so on, rather than the karma/mod system used here.
Hope this is interesting to some people - get in touch with me if you'd like to chat further.
Adam Moore
WHURLE Technical Lead
University of Nottingham
http://whurle.sf.net
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!
Blackboard is an overpriced web template...
A CS sophomore should be able to do better.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
For a few groups try Moodle (PHP, MySQL) and concetrate on pedagogy, not on software "featuritis".
WebCT does this via an IMS-compliant exporter utility, which really frees you up from being hemmed into their software forever. The exporter is still pretty young but does some impressive stuff.
But anyways, just so long as the system in question lets you get the intellectual property out of it easily, you're not stuck with any one solution.
What do you think about this one?
http://www.jonesknowledge.com/higher/jk_eed.php
Mark
I'm currently writing and article that deals with your questions/ideas. You might, though, in the interim, check out what we're doing with blogs @ Middlebury
I have been examining open-source ILIAS software, and would recommend it very highly for e-learning purposes.
http://www.ilias.uni-koeln.de/ios/index-e.html
It requires technical help to set up. If your IT department can assist, you may wish to ask them for help.
There is also a company that provides space and e-learning accounts using ILIAS software. Try Training Space http://www.trainingspace.com. They can also help with a setup of ILIAS, if needed.