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."
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?
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.
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Free your mind.
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?
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
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.
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Make Love not [Browser] War!
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.
"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?
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
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
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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...
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 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.
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.
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!").
Kineska: Cinema, soapbox, music & musings
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.
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
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
For a couple of successful approaches to web-based distance learning, look at Holmes Corporation and WatsonWebWare.
at MY engineering school, they make us take "a english class"... you're ruining it for the rest of us! :)
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.
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.
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.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
That was a joke, by the way. Kind of.
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...
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.
:w
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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 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...!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
An old standby is COW. COW is an excellent quick-n-dirty solution. It has very low system requirements and is very easily modified.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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
OACS http://openacs.org and dotLRN http://openacs.org/projects/dotlrn/
Spell my name right!
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.
Were that I say, pancakes?
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??
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.
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
We have developed a couple of years a learning environment for collaborative learning: MimerDesk
Before anyone spends a penny, he/she should check out MOODLe - http://www.moddle.org/ . It is open source and it's fantastic. :-)
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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Gary Dunn
Open Slate
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
FYI, people interested in this subject, courseware and online learning, should checkout the Yahoo group Coworking and the moderator's site
Den Haag, the Netherlands
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.