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?"

Comments

"Pilot Program"

[Agamous Child]

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.

We'd be interested on opinions about our software

[raist_online]

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