Harvard Open Source Courseware

mpawlo writes "Gnuheter reports that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society releases the H20 courseware software as open source. Two years and 1 million USD are invested in the software so far... The software has been tested at Harvard Law School, but should be suitable for other disciplines than law."

Comments

speaking of open courses...

[Anonymous Coward]

what about mit's initiative to do similar?

also - anyone notice a massachusettes thing happenin' here?

Re:speaking of open courses...

[Jason1729]

What do you mean what about it? It's still going on. I book marked it when slashdot had the original article about it. It's right here.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:speaking of open courses...

[TheSync]

While I think the MIT open courses concept is nice, most of the entries I see are like this:

1) Hi, I'm Prof. X
2) We're going to learn Y
3) Read a single chapter from each of these 20 books that cost $100 each

If the MIT initiative actually made the learning materials themselves free, that would be another thing altogether, but unless you buy all those books it is worthless.

Of course, I'm not saying this is practical or possible.

Re:speaking of open courses...

[matt_king]

I think the title of this article is incorrect, as this project isn't about courseware in the e-learning sense of the word, but rather an open messageboard system with a slightly different paradigm.

1 million dollars????

[banka]

I checked the site out and it seems nothing more than a glorified message board.

Someone, please enlighten my ignorant soul and tell me what makes this software so special?

Re:1 million dollars????

[Jason Earl]

Not only that, it's a message board in which each participant is required to respond to a random post from one of the other members of the rotissirie.

In short, it is not a place for having discussions, but rather a place for forcing people into disjointed discussions with whatever oddball gets stuck with your post.

On the other hand, it would appear that their is currently a fairly high signal to noise ratio. The threads are all disjointed, but the posts are quite intelligent all the same.

Re:1 million dollars????

[ssbljk]

Agree. I tried it and I think that it's not worth that bunch of money

unless M$ developers made it ;)

Re:1 million dollars????

[Hal Roberts]

I'm the project leader for H2O. I'm not sure where Jonathan got the $1mil figure -- my estimate is well less than half of that, which is really not much money at all for professional software development. That money has paid for about about 30 man months of development time, basically 2-3 senior engineers working for about a year to go from conception to a well tested code release + publicly available site.

More importantly, the Rotisserie is far, far from a glorified message board. It is, in fact, one of the very few true, recent innovations in online discussions. It implements a radically different approach to online discussion that solves many of the problems that people generally make about online discussions -- that the quality of the posts is often very poor, that boards are more often than not balkanized into narrow interest groups that merely agree with one another, and that many more people lurk than participate in discussions. The tool uses a combination of techniques to combat these issues, which are especially important for facilitating meaningful academic discouse but are also vital for conducting any thoughtful, productive discussion online.

First, the system slows down the discussion into semi-synchronous rounds. Every discussion is broken up into a series of discrete rounds, and no rotisserie post is published until the end of the given round. This structure encourages people to take the time to put considerable thought into their posts rather than trying to post as quickly as possible to garner the most attention.

Second, the system democratizes the discussion by automagically routing posts between users for further response. After the first round is over, each first round post is assigned to a specific other user for further response. The discussion can continue in this way for as many rounds as the discussion creator desires. This structure encourages everyone to participate equally in the discussion, allowing smaller voices equal weight to large ones. This structure also encourages more careful response, since every post has a very good chance of getting a response (posters are encouraged by the likelihood of a careful critique, in both the carrot and the stick senses).

Last, the system allows for discussion between different projects (projects are loosely analogous to courses, though they can also be less formal, ongoing centers for discussions around a common topic). This combats the balkanization problem by bringing genuinely differing views into play for a given discussion. On a less idealistic scale, it allows for different courses within a given school or, even better, different courses at different schools to discuss with one another, giving students the opportunity to get exposed to potentially radically differing frameworks of thought than those taught by their own professors.

We have been using some form of a rotisserie tool at the Berkman Center for several years now and have been using this particular incarnation of the tool for almost a year now. Both teachers and students report great success in using the tool. It really works. It's our hope to encourage its use beyond the academy for any group that wants to create the kind of productive, meaningful discourse that is difficult with traditional threaded messaging systems.

The further plans for the project are also potentially groundbreaking. We plan to create a collaborative course development system that will allow teachers freely to share their syllabi with one another and easily connect with other courses exploring similar topics. Teachers are currently limited pretty strictly to their own local resources and those of the propietary text book companies when creating course content. H2O will make it possible for teachers to participate in the same kind of community based production demonstrated by the free software world and by the bevy of other such successful efforts (cddb, wikipedia, kuro5hin, etc)

Re:1 million dollars????

[artlader]

Hmmmmm... We really like Moodle. It's open source and it's TERRIFIC!

See it at http://www.moodle.org/

Re:1 million dollars????

[rnd()]

I apologize on behalf of my fellow slashdotters... it is obvious from most of the highly modded posts that very few posters and very few moderators actually took a few minutes to look over H20 and understand what it really is.

In fact, the balkanization you refer to is widely prevalent in the majority of comments posted to this particular story.

Actually, so is the phenomenon that you mentioned in which people rush to post quickly because otherwise their post will be lost in the noise.

H20 appears to intelligently combat most if not all of the drawbacks of "status quo" online discussion. In particular, it addresses some of the problems that would inevitably occur if a typical online discussion were used in a course scenario.

One thing that I would love to see added to H20 would be a recommender system (possibly using collaborative filtering) to identify threads/rotisseries/projects that the recommender predicts would be of interest to each user. The unique structure of the rotisserie would prevent the recommender from creating total groupthink, and one would hope that individuals' decisions on how to rate a particular post would not be solely on the basis of agreement.

Re:1 million dollars????

[Hognoxious]

...one of the very few true, recent innovations... radically different approach ... combats the balkanization problem ... radically differing frameworks

This all sounds like you lifted it from Androidson Conslutting or Toilet & Douche. Or indeed Dilbert. I thought about giving you bonus points for avoiding 'Paradigm shift', but then I decided it was only because you can't spell it.

It's usenet with a bag on the side.

Re:1 million dollars????

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the constructive criticizm, fscktard. Next time, put down your bag of chips and log in and look at the site before spouting off. How's that for a paradigm shift.

Re:1 million dollars????

[Hognoxious]

How's that for a paradigm shift.

That's not a paradigm shift; it's lame, badly-spelled, foul-mouthed abuse, which I don't mind if it's witty. If it's witty.

This is interesting to see....

[Gortbusters.org]

College campuses are the birth place of many great pieces of software as well as development houses for other software.

It's good to see open sourced college software.

mmm

[cultobill]

I think that learning-via-the-internet is a "killer app" for rural areas. I go to a engineering school, and we use this piece of shite called "WebCT". It is bad enough that no one wants to use it. The few (cruel) teachers that use it have a good thing going though. Homework via a webpage, instant grading (for things like Physics), and the theoretical ability to take a class from somewhere off campus.

I would kill for the ability to take some classes remotely over the summer. Though nothing replaces a real teacher, there are some subjects that could do it.

Also, this would mean worlds of difference for people outside the big cities. The ability to start a degree while living in some-godawful-place, NM could mean the difference between living your life in said godawful-place, and being able to get out if you wanted.

The real question is, will people use it? Or will distance-learning stay the toy of masters students?

Re:mmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I'm the WebCT admin at the community college I work for... sad thing is, WebCT was the best of what is available until they changed their pricing scheme and went corporate. Our license fee went up 4000% (yes, four thousand) this year. Even at the new price, there is only one or two others out there I'd even consider using.

Re:mmm

[MrWa]

The University of Phoenix has a large online program, offering numerous degrees and certificates. While not as well-known, or academically respected as Harvard, theh programs is apparently pretty good and successful.

I completely agree that these types of programs are what the Internet should enable for people: to do things that they are unable to do because of location. We are able to meet people, communicate, and maintain relationships (professionally and personally) on the Internet - using this resource to learn is the next logical and easy step. The hard part is getting the programs tough and effective so that they are respected.

Re:mmm

[Dynedain]

That godawful-place, NM, is Nutt, NM. (It was the nearest point on a map to where I lived for 2 years, 7 miles away) Long distance phone charges out there add up fast enough that your internet college degree will end up costing as much as a real one.

Re:mmm

[CanadaDave]

I agree that WebCT is a piece of shite. I had to use it last year, and I think it had been around for about 4 years at least, since the last time I used it was in 1997. And in 4 years, it had barely improved at all. They were missing many features, such as: the ability to log out, secure login, and a lot of the http code was just plain buggy.

One colleague of mine has done a great job of cataloging some of these problems with WebCT.

Re:mmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. The college that I'm taking courses through (I'm a high school student) uses WebCT. I've had problems to no end with it.

• Whoever wrote it did *not* care to look at the HTML spec at all. In fact, it's almost as if they deliberately avoided looking at it-- there are HEAD tags randomly throughout pages, closed BODY and HTML tags that have no beginning, etc. Consequently, it works only in Internet Explorer (and barely even then.)
• Posting a message to the 'bulletin board' or sending a 'WebCT e-mail' will give you a 'You have new mail' message when you log in-- not because someone has responded, but because your own post/mail is 'new.' One would think that someone reads a message while they write it.
• There's next to zero integration between courses. One has to go to seperate pages to get assignments, view mail, etc for seperate courses.
• More problems that I can't even remember. . .

As for the ability to take classes remotely, however: It's great. I'm able to earn college credits without having to spend time going to a college campus. Now if my blasted high school courses weren't so time consuming. . . :)

Re:mmm

[KFK - Wildcat]

I am also studying in engineering, in a new Problem & Project-oriented program. Basically there's no teachers as such, only small groups of students working together to solve given problems. Most of it could be done remotely (learning new concepts from textbooks, etc.) and it would be alright, but you can't become engineer without getting "hands-on" with the subject, and that includes using expensive lab hardware. Also, team work, project management and such can't be learned by textbooks and wouldn't work correctly off campus.

Re:mmm

[Anonymous Coward]

My school (George Mason University) has just started online classes for masters students in CS. But its online as in, there is a video camera taping the REAL class (you can see the other students in the classroom). The teacher uses an electronic whiteboard so you see all the slides they put up, and the marks they make on those slides in real time. You can type questions to the teacher, or even hook up a mic and ask questions that way. All the audio and slide information is saved so you can play it back later, which is great for studying purposes. It's pretty freaking sweet. Especially for me since I live an hour away from campus. The only issue is that I have to go to campus for tests. If there was a way that I could take the tests locally, I could move to another country and still be attending that school. Just think if other schools adopted this? Anyone anywhere in the world could go to ANY school they wanted to. It's going to be a brave new world.

Re:mmm

[Iros]

I just happen to have the glorious (mis)fortune of operating a webct server. WebCT has gone through 3 standard major versions with a 4th due soon and a fork to a horribly expensive entirely redesigned version called vista which requires a mix of sun hardware, oracle and a few other things which cost half the earth (note, I like Sun hardware, but I'm talking rather sizable Sun hardware). The upcoming standard version looks a lot nicer in screenshot, and I hope they fix the backend, because of those problems mentioned:

1) SSL and ticket based authentication with the ability to authenticate via kerberos/Active Directory, ldap, custom authentication through a compiled c module or the old style dbm way, but there's a logout button now as well !

2) the site reference above references rather outdated information. Campus Edition 3.8 is current

3) if you think the frontend is still bad, you'd be digging your own grave if you saw the backend. For a 7-10k user base your talking about 1.5 million files, many of them zero length or similar used as flags with data storage in Bezerkeley DBM and ASCII. Data integrity is held by making sure the same chaotic (because they show order in their apparent randomness with closer view) values remain the same in many locations at once. This also means system performance is related heavily on disk access and cacheing. If it runs slow more disk spindles will make the world go round (to a point of course ...)

As a final point, developments in open courseware and other systems are becoming interesting, but the maturity from the point of view of service managers etc is important. The LMS vendors have support which can be purchased in more specialised agreements if necessary and this in turn makes management types feel safer. Its the same old problem in a different product. Give it a few years and I'm sure you'll see (possibly open) products that support distance and local learning that are well engineered, supported (by people offsite to make management feel safe or else a knowledgeable base of users to draw on as employees or contractors) and usable by designers and students. In particular, I think the combination of wifi, notebooks/tablets/pda's, lectures and LMS software could enhance the scenario as technology advances.

Re:mmm

[Rob Simpson]

Yup, it's definitely crap. I believe it does have the ability to log out, though, because I think I can remember "make sure you log out" messages after finishing my CLST301 quizzes before I graduated last year.

Another interesting "feature" of it is that on the messageboard, teachers can delete messages (see issue 16.10 page 5) but students can't.

Re:mmm

[cloudmaster]

I'm completing a *regionally accredited* BS in CS online through Franklin University (http://alliance.franklin.edu/). There are a bunch of online schools, but only a few that have regional accreditation. Make sure that any school that charges money for courses is regionally accredited, or the degree means less than nothing - esp if you consider going to grad school.

BTW, those people complaining about WebCT might feel better to know that the system sucks from a sysadmin's point of view, too. Then again, almost all Learner Management Systems are garbage from the admin's or developer's point of view. :)

Re:mmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look at Moodle http://moodle.org/. This is VERY cool. (and open source too).

Learning ability is great...

[miscellaneous_havoc]

It's great to learn the content, if you're curious. However, you need the degrees the colleges provide. As a student, I think I could handle learning on my own with these "Internet courses", but there are only a few classes that are offered strictly as Internet courses. Maybe this will give the field a boost.

Re:Learning ability is great...

[Blaine Hilton]

I think what will really help it along is when broadband becomes the norm and everyone uses video conferencing. I think the visual, or at least audio aspect adds a lot.

Re:Learning ability is great...

[TheSync]

You can get a wide range of undergrad and grad degrees online with the University of Maryland University College.

For example, you can get undergad degrees in programs like accounting, business administration, computer and information science, english, environmental management, fire science, history, human resource management, humanities, information systems management, legal studies, management studies, marketing, psychology, and social science.

A Social Leveller?

[otisaardvark]

This is really interesting to see. With projects like this off the ground advanced material is made available for free to huge swathes of the globe who wouldn't previously have access.

Could internet teaching methods promote a global meritocracy (at least academically) which is truly fair?

I suppose the answer is not quite (e.g. all material is presumably English only, and only those relatively rich enough to be able to buy some internet time will benefit) but this idea could given time really develop those with potential but without opportunity at present.

I would love to see an extension to the scientific disciplines.

This can only end in tragedy.

[Soulfader]

"Are you all right? What's wrong?"

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force... as if millions of university tech support people suddenly cried out in terror--and were suddenly silenced. I fear something dreadful has happened."

Seriously, is there any demographic (outside of sales) more technophobic than university professors? Or was my experience atypical?

Re:This can only end in tragedy.

[emmastory]

I think professorial technophobia may be relaxing a little, anyway. I took a couple years off to work and I've noticed a difference even between my freshman year and now - NYU has, in that time, implemented Blackboard, and many professors take advantage of it. It's not much more than simple templated course home pages and discussion boards, but it's somewhere to get handouts and assignments and discuss topics outside of class. It's easy for the faculty, and a lot of them use it.

In the past year, nearly all of my courses have had their own sites - either through Blackboard or set up independently by the professors themselves, on NYU servers or elsewhere. Approximately half of my professors are using PowerPoint presentations now, and most post lecture notes or make use of class mailing lists to varying degrees. It's not shockingly progressive, but it wasn't the case when I started school a few years ago.

Not full courseware

[jfrumkin]

As far as I can tell, all that exists is an advanced discussion tool, with a content sharing tool coming soon. Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.). MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative is another project in the courseware space, and there are other institutions which have developed their own homegrown courseware system. What we need in this space are standards for courseware - metadata standards, tool interoperability standards, etc. The internet2 middleware initiative addresses some of this in terms of authorization (see Shibboleth), but more collaboration around standards needs to take place.

Re:Not full courseware

[56ker]

We have a new project similar to that - called SPIDER which lets students view their academic records.

Re:Not full courseware

[Sad Loser]

One you have not mentioned is Ilias. Not pretty (yet), but it works well.

The rotisserie that they describe does not seem to be a collaborative tool, but rather an asynchronous discussion tool.

The obvious comparison is not other [expensive] courseware type systems, but Slashdot. Slashdot's system of open, anonymous graded peer review is probably at least as good a way of refining knowledge in this way. A side by side comparison would be very interesting.

Just think, if they had dropped a million on slashcode - it might even be able to spot dupes!

Re:Not full courseware

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll see your karma whoring, and raise you, umm... several:
dotLRN, built on the OpenACS toolkit.
The Future Learning Environment, built on Zope.
The Open Archives Initiative is also interesting for academic information archival projects. Also eprints.org for GPL software for creating archives.

A lot of so-called "distance learning" projects focus their efforts on multimedia transmission - so that a picture of a person talking on screen can be transmitted... big whoop. The projects listed above focus on discussion and content sharing, which is where I think online education will really thrive.

Re:Not full courseware

[adamfranco]

I am currently working at Middlebury College developing a GPL course management system called Segue.

segue.middlebury.edu - our current version, in use by over 100 courses (double the total number of course websites from last year).

The Segue Project Page

Segue approches Course Management from the "Course Website" paradigm as oposed to "course folders" paradigm of BlackBoard and WebCT. We feel that websites as they are, are a superior way of displaying information than the idea of posting documents for download. Our goals were to make a system that is platform independent and will allow even the most technically timmid professors to quickly and easily get their course information and discussions online. On both fronts we've had much success; professors find the system easy to use (even the foreign language departments) and all functionality is availible from any platform with the exception of WYSIWYG text formatting. We are looking for a browser-independent XML WYSIWYG editor to replace our ActiveX one for PCIE. Any recomendations on this front would be welcome.

Segue is written in PHP and currently runs on a mySQL database. As of May however, we will be using ADODB to support virtually all databases. In April our development team will be heading to MIT to work out OKI interoperability.

Our code is all GPL so check it out!

Re:Not full courseware

[adamfranco]

Oh yes, and I forgot to mention:

Content is separated from form, so that all sites made with Segue can be easily themed and customized by the owner/professor, eliminating that bland cookie-cutter look of so many CMSs.

Also, we have implemented a completely granular permissions structure that allows creators of sites (students can create sites too) to precisely define who (anyone, authenticated users, students in the class, or individual users) can view, add, edit, or delete content from their sites. This has led to a lot of use of the web for group writing projects as it allows groups of students to easily publish, then edit each other's work.

Other Open Source Course Management Systems

[Bluejay42]

MIT's OKI Project, Open Knowledge Initiative

Stanford's CourseWork

University of Michigan's CHEF Project

Re:Other Open Source Course Management Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also LON-CAPA being spearheaded by a group at Michigan State in Lansing.

What is very interesting about this project is that works on a distributive model of content and test development. Ie a instructor for a course can construct a curricular sequence from publicly available content and activities/exercises from sources throughout the network. Activities and content composed by instructors can be made available to others very easily.

What is also to note is that exercises/tests are programmed in perl so that each student gets individualized questions according to a template and a variety of parameters.

Re:Other Open Source Course Management Systems

[dilger]

Edventure

Moodle

cbd.

Re:Other Open Source Course Management Systems

[JW555]

And another:

The BOSS Online Submission System is a course management tool, developed by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick.

BOSS allows students to submit assignments online securely, and contains a selection of tools to allow staff to mark assignments online and to manage their modules efficiently.

WebCT

[sexecutioner]

I have just been asked to put an online course together, and yes, I have to use the WebCT system our Uni uses.

If you had time, could you please list some of the major hangups you have so I know what to look out for.

Cheers,

Ashley Norris
Australian National University

Re:WebCT

[cultobill]

Sorry, I'm not the admin (yet). I've just heard stories that it's awful, hard to admin, worse to patch, etc.

Re:WebCT

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that they are two different things designed for different jobs, but I would think that Slash would be a more useful tool for online course content. It's open source, free software, well tested and works with a greater number of browsers than does WebCT.

I use FreeBSD at home, and WebCT seldom works for me, and when it does, it is slow. WebCT is worse than Windows, but unfortunately almost as widespread among people doing this sort of thing.

Re:WebCT

[Michael Crutcher]

Some of my classes use WebCT (I'm at Texas A&M). I've never been an admin, so I don't know what difficulties you might have with implementation, but I'm aware of how much WebCT sucks.

1. It only supports IE. You can use other browsers, but some functions (like adding an email address from webct's internal contact list) only work with IE
2. Its slow. If you have students that will be connecting dial-up they're going to be frustrated. WebCT likes to use large gifs as links.
3. It makes your students look in more places to find information. We have a campus wide email system that profs can use to send announcements. If you have a webct class you have to go check the site to make sure you're up to date.
4. It's message board sucks.
5. It's email capabilities suck.
6. It's layout sucks.

I'm tired of typing. Please, for the sake of your students, avoid webct. If you can't write HTML use front page or something, but don't rely on this horrible piece of crap.

CleverSig mySig = null;

Re:WebCT

[nick this]

Hear hear. Trying to use Mozilla? Nope. Not everything will work. Konq? Probably can't even log in. Chimera? Safari? Nope. Not everything works.

Even IE on Mac doesn't work for all features.

The discussions are amazingly weak. Your ability to find information in past discussions sucks.

Why not use best of breed apps, rather than lowest common denominator?

Newsgroups + email + wiki = 10 times what WebCT is. If WebCT would just offer a POP3/SMTP and NNTP interface with its databases, pretty much all my bitches about it would end.

Re:WebCT

[CanadaDave]

There is some info about security problems with WebCT here: http://www.alanmacek.com/webct/

It is about UBC's WebCT system, but since WebCT was actually started at UBC I'm sure the problems there affect all WebCT versions at all unis.

Personally I'd just make your own material and develop a comprehensive webpage. Don't use any ugly frames and fancy crap like on WebCT. For a forum, ask a keen student to set up a PhpBB, or use a mailing list.

Re:WebCT

[elflet]

I think that Slash would be a more useful tool for online course content

Researcher David Wiley, who's built most of his reputation on Learning Objects, seems to agree. He's promoting Slashdot and K5 as Online Self-Organizing Social Systems that do a better job of gathering and organizing content than most course developers.

Apparently, he's received a NSF grant to study this.

Re:WebCT

[addaon]

Hm. We use WebCT here and I've always rather liked it. Safari works for all features, and lynx works with everything but the fanciest.

Re:WebCT

[addaon]

I'd have to say that Wiki is much more suited to a collaborative environment than slash or k5. It allows not just addition of new ideas, but modification of existing ones.

Re:WebCT

[Anonymous Coward]

Many professors at my university use WebCT; I've been on both ends of using it (as a student and as a TA). Perhaps they have made modifications to the system, but I'm not sure that some of the points listed here (as referenced by some other posters) applies to the version we use (as the author admits). The system we have:

• Uses SSL to login
• Does have a logout procedure
• The tracking of which pages students visit and how long they view them has never been an issue; it's intended use is to get an idea of how long certain topics take to get through. (Although I've used it to see if a student doing poorly simply hasn't been reading the course material.)
• Generally, students don't use the email features, so I can't comment on that
• I've never attempted using it over a dial-up, as I'm either on campus or using my broadband connection, but I certainly can imagine that it really would be slow. Avoid large graphics files if you can - I think there's an option to turn them off for the system itself.

Anyway, to answer your question:

• Do *not* attempt to use WebCT to design your course pages! The interface is slow and infuriating. Create the HTML (or whatever) locally and upload.
• Design any quizzes/assignments with autograding in mind; if you're conducting a CompSci course, avoid asking for code via the short answer/paragraph answers *at all costs*. The painful hours you'll spend attempting to decipher formatted code that WebCT screws up is something I'd not wish on anybody.
• If you care at all about students cheating, make use of the "randomize answers" option when using the multiple choice or equation questions.
• The discussion board is just a threaded message board; not great, but not as horrible as some comments here would make it out to be. We ended up using it in place of a listserv; one section for announcements, one for homework questions, one for exams, etc.

The great thing as far as using WebCT as a teacher is the grading and stats you can get from it. Once you get the format down, it saves *huge* amounts of time. The tradeoff is that you need to spend the requisite amount of time in designing the presentation of material, assignments, and quizzes. Definitely not good for teachers/professors/TAs who would otherwise walk into class and simply start lecturing and writing on the chalkboard.

I'm not convinced that it's all that wonderful a tool but, like any tool, if you use it properly it'll do it's job effectively.

Re:WebCT

[cloudmaster]

It's basically an old version of apache with a bunch of CGI scripts in poorly organized directories. From an instructor's point of view, the WebCT LMS is fairly limiting in the things that can be done (much beyond plain text and some images is a pain), and dealing with learner tracking (the data that can be collected is fairly limited, and isn't easily accessed to do anything useful with).

I'd reccomend either just creating a series of web pages manually, or try some other LMS. Most other LMSs suck in different ways, though... Meridian and Blackboard come to mind as differently crappy and bafflingly popular (and expensive) LMS's. :)

BTW, LMS = Learner Managment System. ;)

Re:WebCT

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a major player in distance education, so I am not going to post my name, but we have just spent a pantsload of money switching from webct to an open source solution.

The main problem with WebCT, at least the version we have, which I admit is not the current version is its reliance on flat text files instead of a proper database. Because of this it doesn't scale. For example, when the number of postings in a bulletin board for a course gets too large (>700 postings) there is an annoying little problem where the messages on that board become marked as unread, which can be a pain to keep track of. This happens because it takes so long to update the txt file db. Anyway, our solution is to do several "archives" and resets per semester of the bulletin boards.

by the way, one of the reasons we are migrating from WebCT is not because the open source solution is cheaper, but because of the ubiquitousness of the WebCT logo, which the company was absolutely steadfast in not letting us tone down abit. It was simply taking up way too much screen real estate.

Anyway, all LMS's have their problems, but at least the open source ones are ALOT easier to improve on.

Re:WebCT

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an online student. But I'm also an instructional designer and webct admin. I can tell you that nearly all of the problems that you listed are more a symptom of the faculty's design or implementation of WebCT -- not a symptom of the tool itself.

In response to your list of 6:

1. simply not true. I use Netscape all the time, with no problems, including the Mail. It does depend on the version of WebCT and which Netscape is listed as suppported.

2. in general, it is slow - because the original versions of WebCT use flat files and html, etc... However, the new version - VISTA - is based on the Oracle database and shareable learning objects and thus works way faster. Please note that "slow" can also mean that your professor used big images for links (this is *optional* not a function of WebCT, per se - and unfortunately the flexilibiliy of the product allows professors to import their own horribly large images and animated ones, that you talked about. Also many professors will include giant .pdf documents or .ppt files (can't stop them from doing that).

3. Not completely true. The new version integrates with campus-wide systems like Campus Pipeline, for example.

4. In old versions, could be considered true, though the comment is very subjective. *It depends* on how the instructor manages and facilitates the board. Many don't break up the board into various topic areas, as they could. Many never clean it off - archiving old messages or "locking" old Topic areas, as they can. many other bulleting boards son;t allow HTML - webct does; many others have a low character limit (like Campus Pipeline) - WebCT does not.

I personally think this message board sucks much more.

Finally - the new verison of WebCT - Vista - allows for multiple BBs linked linearly within each Table of Contents.

5. WebCT Mail is NOT e-mail - it is only meant as a way to private mail students IN your course - it was never inteneded as e-mail. I don't see how having all of your classmates mailboxes at your fingertips, without having to know or keep up with their various and ever-changing HotMail accounts sucks...?!

6. The layout of WebCT is 99.9 % customizable by the instructor/designer. The left navigation bar can be turned off and except for the top tool bar, your WebCT course could look like *any* website. If your layout sucks its because your designer designed a sucky layout.

As for your last comment, WebCT is not an HTML editor - it's only a shell in which you put pages, whether built in HTML or FrontPage. What it does do beyond that is track these pages, provide them in a secure environment, and offer a variety of other WebCT tools - like online testing, auto grading, interactive & searchable glossaries, seacrhable media libraries, etc.

If you REALLY care about an objective look at comparing products - see here:
http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/all.jsp

Re:WebCT

[jplanet7]

Many of the objections listed on this discussion board, whether about WebCT or Angel or BlackBoard, have more to do with the way the designer used the tools... and not the course management packages themselves. For a truly objective comparison of features, see - http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/all.jsp If you also go to the Home page of this website, you will find that anyone can "customize" a comparison, based upon the unique features you value most... http://www.edutools.info/index.jsp

$2.7 million

[SHEENmaster]

My school blew nearly $3 million on redesigning my graduating class's ring. My high school. For a graduating class of less than 600 students. My public high school.

$1 million for a not-so-special piece of software for a major law school seems much less moronic now.

"Momma always said, 'Stupid is as stupid does.'", Forest Gump.

Re:$2.7 million

[domninus.DDR]

Yeah I fucking hate my school district. They spent a 13 million on a new football stadium and 3 or 4 million on a swimming pool. So now the computer science and academic teams get $0 for competitions even though we have won state cs for the past 3 years. Teacher salaries suck here and like half of my books are falling apart but nooo. Thank god im graduating. Anyone want to help me choose between colorado school of mines and georgia tech? email me ^.^

Re:$2.7 million

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to GA Tech, it is much more prestigious (assuming you want to study computing).

Re:$2.7 million

[Khakionion]

Hmm...A computer science department...that'd be great. At my old high school, our best "CS" class was "Intro to Programming with VB," taught by a "soul sistah" who didn't know the order of operations, much less how to use/program a computer. Ugh.

Re:$2.7 million

[Michael Woodhams]

I can't quite match your class ring story, but:

My graduate university spent I think $13M on upgrading the graduate college - about $100K per room. Sure, afterwards, there was no asbestos, there were sprinklers, the heating system no longer did 'elves with sledghammers' imitations in the middle of the night, and the fire alarm system worked so well that on some nights it detected 5 separate non-existent fires. But $100K per ROOM?

(And when we asked them to make a path by putting down some woodchips over the lawn that was getting very muddy, they delayed a couple of months and then layed flagstones. For a path that would become obsolete once the renovations were finished, 6 months later.)

2 brownie points to the first person to name the university... (It is in the USA.)

Re:$2.7 million

[Anonymous Coward]

Princeton.

Re:$2.7 million

[Anonymous Coward]

...too lazy to log in...

Um, check the bank accounts of your local school board. I think you'll find your money.

Re:$2.7 million

[Anonymous Coward]

DO NOT GO TO GEORGIA TECH.

everyone I know (including me) hated the place with a fiery passion and ended up transferring out.

Re:$2.7 million

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe you. Your school did not spend $3million on designing a ring for 600 students. Either you are a liar, or you are mistaken.

In the absolute worst case, most plausible scenario, 600 students each paid $5000 each for a special ring. I find this highly unlikely, but far more probable than your story, which you pulled out of your ass.

Re:$2.7 million

[Michael Woodhams]

Congratulations. You have won two brownie points.

TomCat

[N8F8]

One Word: "TomCat

Another interesting distance learning program

[heli0]

Stanford teams up on distance learning project

Friday, March 7, 2003:
Through a teleconference linking Singapore and Stanford last month, Nanyang Technological University and Stanford finalized an agreement for a multifaceted research and distance learning project that will increase the University's presence in Southeast Asia and expose it to unique environmental engineering challenges.

"The Stanford Singapore Partnership, which enables students and professors in environmental engineering to collaborate on research projects, will allow 15 to 20 Singaporean graduate students to spend a summer quarter at Stanford and three quarters in Singapore taking Stanford classes through distance learning arrangements."

fuck you

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm still at work

In related news, is MIT backpedaling on OC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just checked out the OpenCourseware site , and it seems to me that the professors at MIT are dragging their feet. Just look at this electrical engineering course, where lecture notes for the first 13 lectures are Missing In Action.

Moreover, the schedule seems awfully slow: all course materials available FOUR YEARS from now! Wow, don't hurry up or anything. How hard can it be to throw your lecture handouts up onto the board? If it's not good enough for Open CourseWare, then why was it ever good enough for MIT students paying tuition?

Re:In related news, is MIT backpedaling on OC?

[belg4mit]

In some cases (for example 14.01 - Microeconomics)
the lecturer uses copyrighted material in the
lecture notes, and therefore must restrict access
to these notes. In order to make the notes
available on OCW the notes will have to be
restructured.

It's The Design

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is a message board. But it is trying a subtle way of altering the type of messages. Everyone gets one message/question to reply to, and they have "plenty" of time (a day? a week?) to respond. So everyone can take their time and assemble a good comment, rather than tossing in whatever is on the surface of their mind at the moment they're reading.

Thank you for participating. The next round of replies to First Posts ends in 24 hours from the time of this comment. All replies will become public at that time.

It's OK - the school gives them support

[geddes]

Seriously, is there any demographic (outside of sales) more technophobic than university professors? Or was my experience atypical?

My experience with professors has been hit and miss. Sure, some are indeed technophobic, but more and more professors are becoming tech savy as they realise what computers can do for them. It begins with simple things like powerpoint presentations in class or e-mailing an interesting New York Times article to the students. Eventually professors really get excited about this computer stuff and eventually learn HTML to make class web pages or record thier lectures and put them online.

That aside, most colleges make it easy for even the most technophobic professors to use courseware. At my college the library handles all document sharing, so if a professor wants to put a document on electronic reserve, h/she just brings it to the library where workers (usually students on work-study) scan them in and put them online.

As professors realize the power of technology (and especially when their institutions make it easy for them to take advantage of) they become less and less scared of it and more and more excited about it.

CHEF- Comprehensive Collaborative Framework

[tcyun]

CHEF is another project that is in the same area (much like MIT's OpenCourseware, which has been mentioned). CHEF is a product of the University of Michigan. Michigan currently has something they call Course Tools, but CHEF is a completely new codebase and is supposed to have additional/new/expanded features. I won't bore you with a list right now, if you are interested, the links are above.

Angel

[akula1]

Penn State uses a colossal waste of time and money called Angel. It is the biggest piece of shit I have ever had the misfortune to use.

Issues I can remember:
"One of the three servers was down all weekend before we noticed. In the future if you can't log in make sure you try a few times."
"Something happened and we lost all your quiz scores for the semester. You'll have to redo them."
Plus it's IIS with a SQL Server backend. It took down the entire IST departments network for two and a half days.

Steal My MSFT-Approved Edu Biz Plan, Add H20

[fruscica]

Hello all. I'm Frank Ruscica, founder of The Opportunity Services Group, a startup provider of lifelong learning and career services. Not long ago our business plan was circulated internally at Microsoft. Soon after, I received the following email from Randy Hinrichs, Manager of Microsoft Research's Learning Sciences and Technology Group:

"Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the 'originator' within the first eighteen months. With Netscape it took a little longer, but you get the idea."

An updated version of our business plan is now online at www.opportunityservices.com.

Why?

"An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups," a senior American counterintelligence official said recently, "And it is a very effective tool." So the months and years ahead may be a dangerous time for coalition troops and corresponding civilian populations.

How dangerous depends in no small part on we civilians.

As the counterintelligence official makes plain, a big part of winning the war on terrorism is convincing potential terrorist recruits and supporters that their interests are being served by America and her allies. People are at their most convinced when they are psychologically addicted. Psychological addiction takes shape in the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is fired by the prospects of professional success, romance and laughs.

By definition, providers of lifelong learning and career services (LLCS) will focus on increasing their clients' professional success. In particular, providers will race to develop and fund their own student loan programs, as most customers will need financing in order to consume their initial bundle of LLCS, and will be drawn to the provider offering the best loan package. These loan programs will, in time, democratize access to LLCS -- and hence, expand prospects of professional success to all who might otherwise become terrorist recruits or supporters.

Credibly sustainable providers will also enable their clients to enjoy more romance and laughs (see opportunityservices.com for details).

Turbocharging maturation of the LLCS market, then, should be a big part of how we civilians support our troops and fight the war on terrorism at home.

Let's Roll (out LLCS startups)! :^)

Re:Steal My MSFT-Approved Edu Biz Plan, Add H20

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a complete dipshit. Your much-touted business plan is stupid. Your TV aspirations are ridiculous. Your endorsement from Microsoft is insulting to your own cause. Most importantly, your attempts to align your bullshit philosophy against "the evil terrorists" makes clear just how ignorant your target audience must be if they're willing to believe that somehow by entering your "LLCS" they will be dealing a blow to terrorism in any way.

The only thing people will be laughing about is your career and future going down the toilet. So much for 'lifelong learning and career services'.

Let's Roll (you off a cliff)

eLearning standards links

[fellini8.5]

What we need in this space are standards for courseware - metadata standards, tool interoperability standards, etc.

While these links tend towards the corporate/military, there's been a lot of work on just that very thing:

• IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC)
• IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.
• 
  

  Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.).

  This sort of thing was supposed to be encompassed (again, in the corporate/military world) by a buzzword acronym from a couple of years ago: "LCMS" - Learning Content Management System, combined with a much more venerable acronym "LMS" - Learning Management System. Of course, lately, companies that offer one claim to also offer the other ("You got your LMS in my LCMS!" "You got your LCMS in my LMS!").
  
  

Re:eLearning standards links

[GregWebb]

I work in this field :-)

If people are interested, look up the AICC (http://www.aicc.org/) or SCORM (http://www.adlnet.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=scorma bt&cfid=210297&cftoken=69342552 and take out the spaces that Slash puts in)

Of course, the joy of standards is the multitude of available standards and interpretations of available standards but it's an improvement on LMSs having to hack courseware to talk to it at all...

Mod me back up! We're fightin' terrorism here!

[fruscica]

I concede my post is off-topic, strictly speaking. But we gotta get movin' on the LLCS front!

Are you not aware that people are dying all over the place these days!?

Focus, my (wo)man, focus...

'rotissirie' message board

[netnerd.caffinated]

I think the concept behind this is quiet good. Makes it a lot like a classroom, with a teacher. The teacher asks a question & then asks a student to answer. Other students get to rate people's answers too, so its like a round-robin slashdot.

Don't know why it cost so much to develop, but hey! its open source. Someone might mod this & get some good use out of it.

yeah, school sucks

[SHEENmaster]

1. I often hear that sports pay for themselves. Why the hell can't "your" football team pay for its own damn stadium?
2. I'm testing out of English 11 and 12 to graduate a full year early!
3. I'm looking at U.C. Berkeley, though I could be swayed to another school for some serious scholarship money.
4. My books are in fairly-decent condition, but we don't even have warm water in "Automotive Mechanics: Suspension and Steering", the most technical class my school offers.
5. As a minor, I don't have to wait for the count-down. Except for those ten days when they'll be minors and I won't be.
6. This is a much better explanation for why your school sucks. So many animated gifs of bouncy things stolen from geocities.
7. My school's site uses my DNS server on my domain. I'll make a snow-day or two my last week of school.

Re:yeah, school sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

you, sir, are what is known as a tool.

Waste of Money

[Ftizzle]

This academic vanity is the worst form of wasted endowment dollars I've seen to date. Why do universities and others insist on spending MILLIONS of dollars each when there are perfectly good courseware products available from companies such as Blackboard and WebCT. Open source makes sense when each company can make a small investment, (e.g. linux kernel development), and enjoy a common benifit (free OS); or spend a larger sum and save licensing fees (e.g. IBM's investment in linux vs buying MS licenses). This kind of investment makes no sense. I saw the same thing at GWU; while I was there they spent god knows how much money on this Prometheus crap, which they homebrewed; only to sell it off when the couldn't make any money on it; and then switch to Blackboard. Seriously WTF. Why not just spend less on a cheaper market solution; and cut my tutition. These damn imperial academic computing departmetns who think they should be able to spend my tutition $$ on their pet projects instead of giving me decent on campus wi-fi.

Re:Waste of Money

[Anonynnous Coward]

Those "imperial academic computing departments" are beholden for whatever extortion money whatever commercial courseware vendor they're using chooses to charge every year for maintenance, forever, once they're locked into a proprietary solution.

So the money developing a courseware product, particularly as part of consortium, isn't wasted in the long term. And, believe me, without that, they'd find something else to waste your hard earned tuition money on :).

Re:Waste of Money

[Silent_E]

My university uses Blackboard. What a peace of shit program! The entire platform is built around future "course packs" that the company has contracted with publishers to provide, and the software pretty much wants you to upload content in Micro$oft format (with which Bb has a lucrative contract.) While you can use HTML if you can write it, there is not an editor, so faculty without that knowledge are left with Office.

ANY course software creatd on this model is going to eventually be purely about seling content to students. What's collaborative about that? What's educational about it? Thank goodness some universities (Harvard, MIT) are remembering that education isn't about gauging students for even more money.

Sorry to vent, but I find using Bb to be an incredibly annoying experience.

Re:Waste of Money

[davidlowie]

I saw the same thing at GWU; while I was there they spent god knows how much money on this Prometheus crap, which they homebrewed; only to sell it off when the couldn't make any money on it; and then switch to Blackboard.

Guess who they sold prometheus to...

Blackboard (which I feel is also a piece of crap).

I work for a university in california which pays approx. $70,000 a year for blackboard licensing and support fees. The blackboard support people understand less about the program than the sysadmin community. We all turn to each other for help, contacting support as a last resort. I can't wait to find a free alternative (or write my own).

Re:Waste of Money

[flwombat]

You think it's the academic computing dept., but it's not. I work for one. We just got Blackboard running and, believe me, none of us thought it was a good idea. Writing our own might have actually been cheaper.

Re:Waste of Money

[Anonymous Coward]

The are big reoccuring costs for Blackboard and WebCT!

$1 million is nothing... that's the expense of 5 people for two years.

Running WebCT or Blackboard requires at least that much money for a mid-sized institution. And the payments don't stop. And the software doesn't improve without buying into the next "upgrade" for even more $!!!

Re:Waste of Money

[guapo42]

do you even know how the internet came to be what it is? ARPA was a major patron of university research. The researchers in the university system built the internet by using it, communicating with each other , fixing problems and creating new solutions. The ideals of open science and the quest for knowledege is what drove the development of the technologies that built the internet. If they listened to you're logic, they would have kept on using the telephone, carbon copies and snail mail. and the internet would be some closed, poorly built, US military system, and you'd have no way of posting your comment.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that a name brand university releases a very small amount of their software as "open source" is NOT NEWS.

If Microsoft does, or if a big commercial player in the courseware space does (like BlackBoard), well, then THAT would be news.

Funny, it seems that the only traditional corporations that really invest in open source is IBM and Apple. Who'd think.

H20 is awesome!

[rnd()]

I'm never reading Slashdot again!

Distance Learning sites

[myrm]

For a couple of successful approaches to web-based distance learning, look at Holmes Corporation and WatsonWebWare.

engineering

[gid13]

at MY engineering school, they make us take "a english class"... you're ruining it for the rest of us! :)

Interest on the interest

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interest on the interest of the Harvard endowment.

A best-of-breed up-and-coming framework

[Evolutionary Soldier]

Disclaimer: I am not connected in any way with MIT (I'm from Univ. of Texas at Austin). MIT (along with others) has an excellent project called dotlrn:

MIT Intellectual Commons (collection of related e-learning initiatives including dotlrn): http://web.mit.edu/cet/strategy/commons.html

What is .LRN? (from www.dotlrn.org ):

-A fully open source eLearning platform.

-A portal framework and integrated application suite to support course management and online communities.

-A scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready eLearning platform that can be deployed readily by small and large organizations.

-A modular architecture to permit flexibility and to drive innovation.

-A set of best practices in online learning shared in the form of source code.

The dotlrn project page has documentation, news, forums... It is hosted on the www.openacs.org site, which is the parent web framework upon which dotlrn is based. Besides the above, the framework has a rich architecture for managing permissions, users, groups, content management, course management, forums, email, and more.

Rotisserie

[jakob_grimm]

Mmmm.... rotisserie. /drool

Where's the content?

[sakusha]

I poked around the site and didn't see much of anything I could read and study. Seems to be a bunch of placeholders for old classes that are closed and expired, and private content not yet released.

Re:Where's the content?

[Surak]

Hydrogen peroxide as fuel. Insert obligatory bleached-blonde joke here. ;)

Ok?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a great many google of lawyers talking about job security going to be a good thing???

Concept explanation

[jtheory]

It does look like a neat idea -- instead of having lots of lurkers, everyone has to post, and every post is assigned to another specific participant to read and respond. Picture sitting in a classroom, where the teacher asks a question, and everyone writes their thoughts on their paper. Then the papers are collected, shuffled, and passed out again... and everyone writes a response to what they read, the papers are collected, shuffled, etc..

I can see a lot of value to this approach in an academic setting.

I guess $1M seems awfully expensive to me, too (it looks like it's Apache Struts and JSPs, and I didn't see any tech that would be all that hard to implement), but I haven't really been through the whole thing yet.

You also have to consider that sometimes it takes a lot of work to just come up with the concept, before you can get anywhere near coding.

Re:Taco you and you anal gang suck ass!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ac your the only valid excuse for abortion I can think of. Somebody should have put the morning after pill in your momma's coffee

Harvard Law School?

[mao che minh]

Call me a pessimist, but I have serious reservations about using open source in the process of manufacturing more lawyers. I thought we were supposed to be noble?!

That was a joke, by the way. Kind of.

Re:Harvard Law School?

[Bodhammer]

Open source lawyers?

Which distro you like?

• RH8 - looks good in a suit, shows up on time, can't find a thing in the paperwork but still charges $325/hr, promises you will win in court
• Slackware - Al Pacino - And Justice for All, 'nuf said
• Mandrake - Al Pacino - The Devil's Advocate (it's french isn't it...)
• Debian - John Houseman - Paper Chase -"You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a SysAdmin."
• Lindows - Shakespeare- Henry VI, Part II,"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
• Caldera/SCO - David Boies...

sorry, I'm tired....

Great!

[DietHacker]

Lawyers - to an extent - have greater (or cheaper) access to a key branch of the government. Perhaps this is a step towards reducing legal/lawyer fees by making legal education cheaper. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my...

Re:Taco you and you anal gang suck ass!!

[Dances with Penguins]

Nice way of getting out of paying child support for his ass anyways...

learning

[More Trouble]

Of course, none of the apps people have mentioned here are particularly pedagogical. The best listed are collaborative discussion systems. Big whoop. So's Slashdot, and we're not learning much here.

There are, however, many applications built for learners. They just all happen to focus on teaching a small number of specific ideas. Good examples are World Watcher for teaching climatology and SimCalc for teaching Calculus to middle schoolers.

Writing small applications for teaching in a limited domain is just not sexy enough to get headlines or grants.

:w

In Soviet Russia the Computer Programs You!

[Dw0rkin]

eLearning is one of the big, empty busswords. As an Austrian University student, I did not have to pay tuitions for a long time and when I finally had to, I realized one thing: If I pay for classes, I want *more* service.

I know it depends on how the eClassroom thing works, but personally I prefer sitting in a class and listening to a lecture rather than watching a video of it. Though there are advantages, such as having material when the teacher makes mistakes and all, but still...

As for the coursware shown here, well if it really is that "community portal" they claim it to be, then it can very well be a good adition to current classes, but certainly not a replacement.

Slashdot Moving In

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Slashdot is moving in. Under interesting topics, we've got "Hydrogen Peroxide For Energy Storage." Not exactly what I'd expect from Harvard Law.

moodle

[dwgranth]

the system looked nice... but the institution i work for probably wouldnt use it... they use blackboard. I did however find something similar and opensource...

it was moodle. it works nice and even has some extra cool features

Re:moodle

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody should look at Moodle, it have lot's of features (assigments, quiz, peergraded assigments, forums...), authentication works with ldap, smb etc...
More features to come with 2.0 release, then it will fix to large enviroments too.

Re:moodle

[artlader]

Yes, take at look at Moodle. You will probably be glad that you did. :-)

interoperability with admin systems

[Anonymous Coward]

The main benefit of eLearning has always struck me as providing a common platform for the admin side of teaching -- managing enrollment, tracking assignments, keeping marks online, etc.

What strikes me, then, is how stuff like WebCT and others end up duplicating admin effort. Download your classlists from the central admin system, convert them to CSV, upload them to WebCT...and do this repeatedly to catch any modifications (or, more likely, the lecturers add names manually so that they can produce class lists that are completely out of sync with the admin system). What is needed is to start standardising on how to do XML-based messaging between systems so that students registering automagically get put on the courseware system.

Even more suprising - campus admin systems seem to be developed by folk that focus on finance and HR. The stuff that students and lecturers need comes in as an afterthought. The more I think about what academics and students need out of a registration/academic admin system, the more it looks like a courseware system that's grown a couple of new legs, like:

• timetabling & venue management
• registration/modifications
• academic histories/transcripts/etc.

I've done some work at the university where I am on a homegrown registration/timetabling system. It isn't fun -- especially dealing with the huge inertia of "we didn't have this stuff in the old days (can check timetable while registering), why do we need it now?" I wish I had the capacity to add a baby course-CMS component to it all, as I'm sure this would replace 90% of the WebCT use on this campus (people still think you have to spend megabucks so that you can "make webpages!").

For that matter, I'd like to see similar stuff for campus admin systems -- because the requirements for presenting registration info can be (and in our case, are) very localised, so we may need to write a front end for advisors to use for registration that ties in tightly with the monster campus HR/finance/student systems from PeepSoft/Oracle/ITS/whoever.

It's seemed to me for quite awhile like courseware would be a natural target for opensource development. Maybe it will. Certainly the amount of $ you have to drop on a repackaged apache/mod_perl/buncha scripts and DBM backend is, um a little wierd. I looked around at various things to see if they would be easily integrable into our home-grown registration system, but didn't get very far here.

(The political use of the term Open Source can also be irksome. A major university in <name-of-country-witheld-to-protect-the-innocent&g t; got a big cash award for being an "open source centre of excellence" after developing their own courseware platform on IIS/ASP + MSSQL (stupid, but not absolutely evil) that doesn't work with Mozilla (evil), and then complain in the press about the perception that OSS is inseperable from Linux (legit complaint, but get your house in order first...you expect me to dump my plans to deploy Mozilla for our students so that I can run your *open* (?!?) CMS?)).

Year before last, I taught a module on "Web Computing" to the Comp Sci crowd here, which I did an overview of HTTP, PHP programming, enough SQL to survive. I wrote a very quick and very dirty bunch of scripts to let the students upload and edit PHP stuff on the student server for doing their assignments, then I added stuff so I could record grades for the work. It was quick -- and easier than any of my previous struggles with WebCT. (I note that a couple of other people have tried WebCT here, and then gone off to write their own mini-courseware stuff).

Of course, then I had to dump the marks from the DB, convert them to CSV, load them in Excel and mail them to the departmental mark capture slave to type into the mainframe. Go figure.

University of Phoenix Online tools - industry stds

[Anonymous Coward]

The University of Phoenix online uses standard newsgroups and email for their courses. While they suggest Outlook Express, presumably any reasonable email client could be used. They have over 60,000 online students.

This shouldn't take a lot of time and $ to reproduce!

Video and audio is likely not used because you use huge amounts of bandwidth and lose the ability to skip over known stuff by moving your eyeballs and going real slow by slowing your eyes. Audio and video is way too serial.

Conferencing and multicast cause you to have to synchronize the time slots of your courses--meaning you limit the time zones and attendence of your classes.

University of Phoenix does quite well on outcome studies.

'w00t'

[tewmten]

gnuheter kicks arse :-)

Connexions Project at Rice U. is doing great work

[ebusinessmedia1]

Check out the Connexions Project at Rice University http://cnx.rice.edu/ It's a very nice piece of work.

They're collaborating with Creative Commons
http://www.creativecommons.org

Why do you need a ring?

[clickety6]

Why is the US the only school system in the world that produces graduates so dumb that they have to have a reminder on their finger that they actually graduated...! ;-)

Usenet / COW

[SgtChaireBourne]

Newsgroups + email + wiki = 10 times what WebCT is.

Unlike pretty much every system out there, newsgroups can be decentralized, useful if you have several campuses or geographic groups of users. Seems to me the way to go might be to fix up a web-based news client w/roaming profiles and use private newsgroups in combination with a mailing list gateway. That way users could use either their favorit Usenet client or their favorite mail client.

An old standby is COW. COW is an excellent quick-n-dirty solution. It has very low system requirements and is very easily modified.

VLE, MLE, etc.

[iar]

Two rather more mature open-source projects not mentioned here (I think) are

• Claroline, developed at the Catholic University of Louvain
• Bodington, developed at the University of Leeds.

The University of Oxford has just chosen the latter as its VLE. I've not used Bodington, but Claroline I've found to be very good already, albeit not as full-featured as WebCT.

As someone starting to use a VLE to teach, they are useful (if nothing else) for integrating content and discussion, rather than hundreds of departmental websites and separate discussion boards, etc. And outside of distance learning proper, they are also dead handy for i) supporting large classes [very difficult to give a class of 180 your individual attention, much as we might wish to] - ii) keeping some kind of rolling discussion going between seminars. But some folk actually prefer interacting this way over f2f contact. And it can cut down on photocopying expenses (no small matter in hard-pressed departments).

As for the integration of systems within universities (library/admin/departments/vle), yeah well that is a problem: turf wars, bureaucracy, short-sightedness, etc. etc. Part of me thinks the 'Managed Learning Environment' will remain mythical...

Ian

Opensource courseware and community system

[bapya]

OACS http://openacs.org and dotLRN http://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/

Forrest always said..

[thellamaman]

Spell my name right!

I WORKED ON THIS...

[Anonymous Coward]

H2O is bullshit. Attorneys channeling "cool" does not work.

Where did the teacher go?

[todsandberg]

My wife is 2.5 years into her (exclusively) online business degree and it seems that a missing component is the interaction with students.
What ends up happening a lot of the times is the teacher gives an assignment, the student does it and turn it in (plus tests, yadda yadda).

There isn't much of a "Teaching" or presentation component.
Imagine learning Calc or Statistics exclusively through the book. It can be a real challenge for someone whose strength is not mathematics.

There has to be a better way...

Possibly online videos (mpg files) to emulate the teaching component of schoolwork??

Homebrewed CWS

[Anonymous Coward]

My University uses a homebrewed Courseware Management System and it has actually been performing extremely well.

It was originally a comp sci student project that the university decided to adopt and develop. It is so much better than blackboard or WebCT because if we decide we want to add something new to it, we go ahead. At a university where every student has a laptop, this alone has been pretty cool. We have integrated ICU into it so that professors can choose a list of students in the class who are logged into the system and, with their permission, show the student's screen from the profs own laptop. Great if you're giving presentations and don't want to bring your laptop to the front of the room. We also have it integrated with our Library system so you can go into a course and see what books are on reserve for that course. Plus, all the usual stuff like testing modules (that include the ability to do audio recording), LaTeX integration (upload a .tex file, it automatically converts it to a jpg and displays it), course information, discussion boards, and countless other things. And the only thing it's cost the University are the salaries of one full time employee and two or three part time students every year to develop and maintain it.

Homebrewed CMS are the way to go!

Blog Course Management System

[marpa]

Disclaimer: I am the project manager of the software described below
Open source is just beginning to seep into academia, primarily because many institutions are balking at the absurd pricing of commercial course management systems such as BlackBoard and WebCT. MIT's Stellar and dotlrn, Stanford's Courseworks, Michegan's CHEF are various approaches to course management using open source code.

A very different approach to course management is being developed at Middlebury College based on weblogs called Segue. Segue seems to me to be far more flexible than any of the above allowing site owners to create their own navigation, organize content chronologically and allow for discussion of stories. It is modelled on Slashcode, PHPNuke, MovableType and includes a portal to class information. see: http://segue.middlebury.edu/sites/segue

More alternatives

[mimerdesk]

We have developed a couple of years a learning environment for collaborative learning: MimerDesk

Re: Killer App

[devinjones]

> I think that learning-via-the-internet is a "killer app" for rural areas.

It's also a killer app for rare or esoteric subjects. My wife teaches on-line courses in Medical Ethics. She has maybe 15 students per quarter from all over the US. There aren't enough students close enough to each other (and her) to justify offering the class physically. Her class literaly owes its existance to distance learning.

Moodle!

[artlader]

Before anyone spends a penny, he/she should check out MOODLe - http://www.moddle.org/ . It is open source and it's fantastic. :-)

Re:Moodle!

[todsandberg]

The correct link:
http://moodle.org/

I can remember on my own

[SHEENmaster]

therefore I'm not spending $400+ on one of those damn things. $2.7 million should've been enough to buy every student on, and be a boon to the pawn shop industry.

What About Mimerdesk?

[dunng808]

I have been poking around with Mimerdesk and find it to be quite useful, except for some quirks involving the HTML editing. Written in Perl, hooks into Apache and MySQL. For those who know, I'd like opinions as to Mimerdesk qualifies as an LMS, and if not, why?

Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project

Re:What About Mimerdesk?

[cloudmaster]

Mimerdesk doesn't appear to count as an LMS because it doesn't have any features that are really geared towards learning ro the management of learners. It's more like a collaborative working environment. It appears to be something that'd be useful for, say, teachers. To qualify as an LMS, it'd have to have some kind of tracking of users and probably some kind of testing/quizzing-type functionality. The Mimerdesk framework could potentially be used to develop an LMS, though.

Open Slate Chalk Dust

[dunng808]

H2O sounds like a good tool for building the kind of open-source, open-process course content I envision for the Open Slate project. Our goal is a slate design high school students can build themselves, a student-run network, and courseware written by college students under the direction of professors. The courseware piece is called Chalk Dust.

Gary Dunn
Open Slate

� propos Open-Source Courseware

[Dreamszz]

FYI, people interested in this subject, courseware and online learning, should checkout the Yahoo group Coworking and the moderator's site

Georgia Tech is the 42nd circle of Hell

[Kamadan]

I went to GA Tech and left for another uni because it sucked horribly. Georgia Tech has prestige, research opportunities, is decently equipped/funded, has ok extra curriculars and is near a lot of other stuff since it is in the middle of Atlanta.
That being said it also tons of problems. It has professors who only care about their pet projects. If you're not one of their research assistants they don't care about you. You have to research every professor before you sign up for their classes to make sure you don't end up with they anti-christ himself. The TAs don't know what they're doing and sadly are the people who a really teaching a lot of the classes. Class sizes are huge. They're in the hundreds of people for core and popular classes. This admittedly gets a little better as you go on since so many people leave but it just makes it all the more insulting when the prof still doesn't give a damn about the class. They actively try to fail and burn out as much of the freshmen/sophmore classes as they can with obtuse grading schemes and pointless time consuming projects. You'll never meet an Architorture or Industiral Design major because they spend 23 1/2 hours a day working on projects almost from day one. Some of them literally take the stuff from their dorm rooms and take it to the mysterious batcaves where they work on their projects because they get more use out of it that way. There are almost no women on Tech campus and the ones that are there are not in your classes. I think they have a secret underground base or something they all hide in during the day. Either that or they're all history/management/international business majors and don't have to take real classes. At night they only hang out with the frat boys or the drama geeks. The on campus housing is poorly run, unresponsive, and expensive for what you get. Parking is hella expensive and you're lucky if you ever get the spot you paid for and you're even luckier if it's not all the way across campus from where you need to be, but you're still screwed during sports seasons because they'll kick you out of the space you paid for every weekend without providing any real alternative place to put your car.
It doesn't matter how smart you are it still sucks as a learning institution. In fact all the people I personally know that left/failed out averaged SAT's around 1500 or so. People with lower SAT's actually did better and stayed longer. We came to the conclusion it was possible to be TOO SMART for GA Tech. Many of us had never had to develop real study skills since we breezed through high screwl or were accustomed to having teachers that actually cared and could TEACH(a shocker I know). You could say this was our fault for not just putting more effort into it but frankly if we had had any support at all I think a lot of us would have worked through it. Those of us that didn't go straight to the work force afterwards went to other colleges and mostly did ok.
If you can teach yourself everything(because noone else will), have money to spare(because they'll drain you of as much of it as they can and living off campus is even more expensive and crappy), and have the patience of Buddah(you'll need it with the mind numbingly stupid administration) you can make it. It is a really nice piece of paper to have once you get out, but getting a really nice peice of paper or wanting to get in on research are the only reasons to go to GA Tech. Oh and everything I've said here that's bad about tech...it's all twice as bad in the CS programs.
Am I bitter? Yes. Do I have a right to be? Hell yes. Am I being fully objective? Maybe not but I'll tell you this, there are many many other bitter people who agree with everything I've said. I don't know anything about the Colorado School of Mines, but it would have to be the domain of Satan himself on earth to be worse than GA Tech. For the love of anything you hold holy stay away.

Last Post!

[alpg]

We have some absolutely irrefutable statistics to show exactly why
you are so tired.
There are not as many people actually working as you may have thought.
The population of this country is 200 million. 84 million are over
60 years of age, which leaves 116 million to do the work. People under 20
years of age total 75 million, which leaves 41 million to do the work.
There are 22 million who are employed by the government, which leaves
19 million to do the work. Four million are in the Armed Services, which
leaves 15 million to do the work. Deduct 14,800,000, the number in the state
and city offices, leaving 200,000 to do the work. There are 188,000 in
hospitals, insane asylums, etc., so that leaves 12,000 to do the work.
Now it may interest you to know that there are 11,998 people in jail,
so that leaves just 2 people to carry the load. That is you and me, and
brother, I'm getting tired of doing everything myself!

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...