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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
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.
Well, grading on a curve is a barbaric custom. I can't figure out why anyone would do it. Actually, I was more worried about the opposite: people would form cliques that would always mod each other's comments up.
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?
Good point, although a lot of what moderation gets used for on Slashdot is just getting rid of trolling and obnoxious behavior. That type of moderation doesn't even require that much of a deep understanding.
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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.
You're looking at things entirely wrong.
The goal of a class shouldn't be to see which students are more intelligent than other students. The goal of a class it to impart a certain amount of information to a student. Depending on how much of that information a student absorbs, they earn a certain grade.
If all of the students in the class gain a solid and firm understanding of all of the material that they need to cover in the class, then hell yes they all deserve an 'A'. They've done what they came to do, and that's learn the material.
Using a curve can be acceptable in some (few) certain cases, in order to smooth over the differences between your expectations and your classes abilities, but things like bell curves have absolutely no place in education grading.
You mention that in the average class score is 35% then the test should be immediately curved so that everyone doesn't fail. I disagree. This means that one of two things has occured. Either the teacher overestimated the students abilities, or the students failed learn the minimum required information for that test. Either way, the situation requires more examination, and you shouldn't simply curve it so people pass.
Later, you say that an 'A' should mean that a student is in the top 10% of their class. That's idiocy. What if the class only has 5 people? What if they are all exceptionally smart, or exceptionally stupid? As a different teacher, or prospective employer, what do I care how someone compares to their classmates? All I want to know is whether or not they learned the material that the class covered.
To repeat, grades should be based entirely on how well a student learned the material that was presented in the class they are in. If they learned everything they needed to, regardless of if everyone in the class also did as well, or if no one else in the class did, they deserve an 'A'. If they learned almost all of it, they've earned a 'B'. If they attained a solid grasp of it, they should be given a 'C'. If they know the minimum amount that they need to of the subject, then they get a 'D'. If they haven't managed to learn the minimum information that the course requires them to learn, then they've failed, and get an 'F'.
If you're curious as to where I'm coming from, I'm a part-time college professor who's also still taking classes (and who prolly always will be). I've also worked for a number of years in the private (business) sector doing computer stuff. Thus, I've been on all sides, as student, teacher, and business.
Topher
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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