Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
MIT's OKI Project, Open Knowledge Initiative
Stanford's CourseWork
University of Michigan's CHEF Project
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."
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Go to GA Tech, it is much more prestigious (assuming you want to study computing).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Two rather more mature open-source projects not mentioned here (I think) are
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
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)
Before anyone spends a penny, he/she should check out MOODLe - http://www.moddle.org/ . It is open source and it's fantastic. :-)