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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
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...
...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.
Anyways, I've heard that professor started using Learning OnLine for this same material and a friend of mine took the class and liked it. Now, learning online comes as part of Lon-CAPA which somebody else mentioned in this forum.
-Joe Tenbusch
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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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
http://dotlrn.collaboraid.net