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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 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.
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
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...
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.
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.
That was a joke, by the way. Kind of.
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.
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.
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. :-)