The Ed Techie

Run me through the Blackboard business model again

So Blackboard has won the initial ruling in Texas, with Desire2Learn ordered to pay $3.1 million compensation. Obviously a stupid and dangerous ruling, but as the excellent Michael Feldstein points out, who's made money out of it anyway?

It strikes me there are three ways to be the market leader in an industry:

i) Have such cool products it doesn't matter how you behave (cf. Apple)

ii) Have an average product and bully everyone else out of the market so the customer has no choice (cf. Microsoft)

iii) Work with your customers to develop your product and get good will (cf. nearly every other tech company).

I don't have an MBA, but it strikes me that option i) is damn hard to pull off and happens to only one or two products in a decade. Option ii) is so old school, industrial type thinking that even Microsoft are shying away from it now. This is particularly true in a sector like education. Unlike, washing machines say, people really care about education. You can't bully them, treat them with contempt and work against the community and expect to have the market. People are too smart and will work around you. Which leaves option iii) as your only sensible option. And the BB patent is about as far as you can get from this as is imaginable.

So when universities find ways to deliver, support, facilitate learning online (for instance using a set of third party apps held together by eduglu), are BB going to sue them? And will they sue every application in the pack? Google Calendar when used in a loosely coupled learning suite is now in infringement of copyright?

You have to say that when it comes to misunderstanding your market, the BB patent will be a classic case study. Until we have the opportunity to look back and laugh however, we should make sure we do everything to boycott them.

Blog as educational platform, VLE even

(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd)

This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway.

There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it.

I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat, enticing, well structured. Looks a damn site more inviting than, say, a Blackboard version of the course might.

Then Jim Groom took the OU's openlearn Goya stuff and put it in Wordpress. Guess what? It looks better than the original.

Brian Lamb (who easily has the best titles for blog posts around) sums it all up nicely and points to a session Jim Groom and D'Arcy Norman are doing at Northern Voice entitled  'Don't call it a blog, call it an educational publishing platform'. Which sums it up really.

There are several things of interest here for us ed techies. The first is that presentation matters. I like the look of these blog courses, and that would make me more inclined to participate in them, make me feel well disposed towards them and make me feel as though the people running them were vaguely modern and knew what they were doing. The aesthetics of the interface is something we pay scant attention to in education.

The second thing is that you may be thinking it's just a blog, it doesn't have tool X or Y that my VLE might have. Well maybe, but I think we're in disruptive technology territory here. Disruptive technology doesn't do the same things better for the same audience, it is often worse on some things, but it offers some new features for a different audience. The new features I would argue here are:

1. Ease of publishing - whether it's your own content or others, getting in to blogs is fairly straightforward
2. Ease of extendability - adding widgets and tools to blogs is just a click away, since blogs have become the universal platform across the web.
3. Openness - you can pull content and tools in from anywhere
4. Ease of navigation - blogs come with an inbuilt navigational structure that is easily co-opted for course structure.

I wonder if this isn't another example of how we in education create complex solutions to complex problems, whereas simple solutions often work better.

The tension between out there and in here

Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I'll list the ones I think are important here. I don't have any answers to them, I just know they're things we can't ignore. I'll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn't directly integrated into the formal learning experience.

1. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute the overall effect? For example, if a subset of students start collaborating in Facebook does this have a negative impact on the dialogue and learning experience for the whole cohort in the VLE?
2. Even if 1 is true, can we do anything about it? Many students are connecting and communicating via Facebook before they even start their courses. It would be unrealistic to expect, or to mandate, that they stop using whatever system they like for communicating. For example, someone else had already created an OU courses profile application in Facebook, so maybe it's better if we deliver these tools.
3. What are the privacy issues and responsibilities? If a university develops applications for a platform is it implicitly endorsing that platform? For example, in Facebook when you join a network the default setting is that everyone in that network can see your full profile. Imagine some unsavoury student X starts bothering student A through this. Student A only joined Facebook because her university had developed some tools for it and seemed to be encouraging it. Where does the responsibility lie in this case?   With the student (for not controlling their settings)? With Facebook? With the university?
4. What are the support issues? For instance on the Open University Facebook page some students have started raising tech support queries. Sometimes they get a response, sometimes they don't, since this isn't an officially recognised support mechanism. Logistically handling queries across multiple platforms will soon become unmanageable. Is this problem exacerbated if the university has a semi-official presence on the platform in question?
5. What are the real benefits? Maybe none, but I think there will be some subtle ones, which research will dig up over the next few years. Will they relate to educational performance, ie those students connected through Facebook tend to do better because they have better quality peer support and find a range of alternative resources. Or will they relate to motivation? Maybe those students in Facebook tend to drop out less because they have peer support and pressure. Or will it influence satisfaction? Students in Facebook tend to rate the course better because they felt better connected to the cohort. Or maybe none of these.

I think the natural instinct of universities (and particularly senior management) when faced with issues such as these is to think 'more control'. As readers of this blog will know, I tend to favour less control, but that doesn't mean it will be a smooth ride. There are some potentially very difficult issues, and a few legal cases, to be addressed as we blur the boundaries between out there and in here.

Do you need to love a tool for it to be useful?

A recent survey over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (via John Dale) had responses from elearning professionals, asking them their favourite tools for learning.

Can you guess the top 5? Here they are:

1. Firefox
2. Delicious
3. Skype
4. Google
5. Powerpoint

Now, given our recent VLE debates, on to the interesting bit. Where do you think Moodle came? Answer, a respectable 12th. And Blackboard? It didn't make the top 100.

Now, there are several things to consider here. Firstly, these were e-learning professionals that were surveyed, and their responses may well be different from the vast majority of other educators. The point being that Blackboard isn't aimed at elearning professionals necessarily, it's aimed at the 'average' (I know there's no such thing) educator who doesn't want to think about elearning. Just as Windows isn't really aimed at IT professionals, it's for the big market that occupies the centre of the distribution curve.

Secondly, the tools mentioned are useful for the individual, but that doesn't mean they solve some of the institutional issues that may be involved, such as authentication.

Okay, I've done my even handed part, now let's look at what it might also tell us. What a lot of the top 100 have in common is that they are customisable, adaptable and personal. Which brings me on to the title of this post - a lot of these tools are ones people really love, usually for one or more of the following reasons:

i) They do one job really well

ii) They are customisable/personal

iii) They have an easy social dimension

Now if you are the purveyor of, say a commercial VLE, or any commercial elearning software, you should ask yourself if your product really hits any of those targets.

The alternative view is that although individuals may love some tools that doesn't really matter - it's senior management who buy enterprise systems and 'loved by users' is not usually on their specification list. Shame.

Loosely coupled vs integrated again

Continuing our debate around VLEs (which I'm enjoying anyway), Niall Sclater posts that one of the dangers of the small pieces approach is that we have no control over external sites, and he uses (my favourite web 2.0 site) Slideshare being down as an example.

Tony responds rather cheekily (he tags the post 'baiting') showing the OU site was down, to demonstrate that internally hosted systems are not immune from such dangers.

I would suggest that in a loosely coupled system your risk is spread from a user perspective - if Slideshare was down, that's fine I'll do the wiki activity, or look at the YouTube clips, or read the RSS feeds in Google Reader. There is an alternative activity I can be doing, but if your VLE goes down, you are stuffed since everything is in one place.

In general though, Niall is right, this is a concern (and one I mentioned in my original post). But it gets at something deeper I think than just about choice of hosting services - it's about philosophies and attitudes. The almost universal reaction in all higher education institutions is to control things - be it systems, content, dialogue, roles, etc. And there is a good reason for doing this - universities have a duty of care, both pastoral and educational, to their students, and the best way to deliver on this is to control the environment.

Hence we have educational versions of tools, closed systems, selected readings, etc. And then we have web 2.0 which lets anyone do anything and then puts metrics and filters in place to help you find the good stuff. In order to engage in this world there is going to have to be a good deal of letting go of control - not only will that be hard to do, but it may have serious implications for students (and maybe, legally for universities - what if someone has a bad experience on an externally hosted site which you have sent them to - are you responsible?). I'm not arguing that letting go of control is necessarily better - I just think more and more of it will happen anyway, so we need to be able to handle it. I don't think trying to control things more is a valid response though. This tension between control (and thus being able to assure education) and freedom (where bad things may happen) will be one of the key questions higher education faces in the next few years, and it's far more complex than control= bad, freedom = good.

Some more VLE demise thoughts

A few people have responded either on blogs or in the comments on my (deliberately provocatively titled) post The VLE/LMS is dead, so rather than distribute my responses I thought I'd bundle them here.

Niall Sclater refers to some earlier attempts at the loosely coupled approach:

The model Martin describes of “loosely coupled teaching” was tried by Canadian schoolteacher Clarence Fisher who blogged about small pieces in November last year and had serious concerns about this approach

Amongst these were different URLs and skills. I'd respond by saying a year is a long time in the online world, and a lot of these issues have become easier - you don't need to have lots of different sites, you can pull them all into one easily, e.g. having your flickr photostream in your blog. And also the awareness of users has changed a lot in the past year - after all, how many of us would have said that Facebook widgest would be a viable means of communicating with students a year ago?

Niall goes on to say

However it is possible that the VLE will evolve into more of a management information system, working away in the background, with its information exportable to a variety of other systems under the control of students who wish to view it in environments they prefer

Yes, I'd agree with this (although whether we'd call it a VLE then is debatable). If we wanted to overcome some of the problems mentioned earlier then some form of student portal would be necessary - you wouldn't have to remember all your urls since the sites would be pulled in to your portal. And this would be one way of addressing the authentication issue too. I am rarely prophetic (although frequently pathetic), so I'll grab it while I can - I ended my VLE book by saying

In this scenario a learner’s environment is more akin to a portal with a collection of tools and content, some of which are provided by the institution and others by external parties. The VLE ceases to be a convenient term or concept at this stage. So, one could argue that, rather like the male praying mantis, the ultimate sign of the VLE’s success is its own demise.

Niall also mentions educators attitudes as does Steven Verjans, who states

not all higher ed teachers - or students for that matter - are as technologically savvy as we think them to be.

This is undoubtedly true, but I think reflects the often poor nature of technologies developed by higher educational institutions which require a four day training course to grasp. Millions of people use flickr, Facebook, wikis, Twitter, etc everyday - because they are simple to use and compelling. My response to this is 'exactly, which is why we should give them the best technologies available which are roadtested by millions, and whose developers have a real interest in making them simple.'

But I know what he means, there are many educators who are just not going to engage with this no matter how easy it is. So, I think that the university still has a role here, my vision would be that it provides a set of tools they can select from, all of which are loosely coupled, and integrated at the back end with student systems as required. I'm an academic, I want a basic course, sure, here's a wikispace wiki, with discussion board, and here's a Wordpress blog, off you go.

The point is that if I do want to use other systems, I'm not prevented from doing so because we are operating a lowest common denominator approach.

Alan Cann suggests that students want the university to provide these services:

The walled garden of the VLE provides a "trusted brand" (as Grainne Conole discussed at OpenLearn2007) which is very attractive to students. Otherwise, why would they want to pay us £3k a year for tuition - and then use Google?
Students hate PLEs (but they also hate being forced to use university services such as authenticated email accounts). "We are paying customers and we want value for money.

I'd start off by saying if the miserable use most universities put Blackboard to (or whatever LMS they have) constitutes value for money then we're all in trouble. On the more general point about students wanting this stuff provided I think that is changing - some anecdotal feedback from our digital photography course where we have provided an OU system to share photos seems to be 'yes it's fine, but we want Flickr,' because that is the tool they are accustomed to.

If universities are using third party systems I don't think students will care particularly, as long as they are getting the best experience they can.

I guess what I'm suggesting is a kind of middle ground between the institutional, one size fits all VLE and the complete anarchy of a PLE. We allow educators to use tools available elsewhere, while making recommendations, and concentrate on providing a framework to use these within (both technical and pedagogic).

I don't expect this to happen quickly, but I do get a sense we are approaching the tipping point. This will be realised through a range of tools which are easy to use and familiarity amongst educators and students.

The VLE/LMS is dead

(but we'll probably take five years to realise it). Scott Leslie has coined the term Loosely coupled teaching, for the assembly of a number of different, third party apps to do your teaching with. This differs from a PLE in that it is still the educator who provides the tools, they just bypass the institutional systems.  Scott's post set me thinking and I had something of an epiphany (okay, I know I'm slow) - whereas I have been using the odd application you could completely set up your course outside of the institution.

What might you want to use? For my course I could use the following:

• For content and discussion - wetpaint or wikispaces, upload the content, each page has its own forum, and students get to control the content. Or I could create a blog wherein each post is an activity, this has the advantage that students can subscribe. I'd probably go the wiki route though.
• Dialogue - I'd probably encourage everyone to sign up for Twitter or Jaiku, to create a low-level, non-intrusive dialogue between students. We might also need some ongoing discussion board.
• Virtual meetings - I'd use Flashmeeting and schedule regular sessions.
• News and updates - I'd use a blog and get students to subscribe.
• Quiz/informal assessment tools - there are a bunch of these around e.g. Blogquiz where you can embed them in your own page. There's a lot of commercial stuff too, so I think there is room for better free services in this area.

Apart from that I would use any tool as and when you needed it. The wikispace would be the hub, and hopefully you could hang these apps off it easily enough. An alternative would be a Netvibes/Pageflakes space.

Firstly, what are the issues in doing it this way:

• Authentication - this is quite a big one. Students are authenticated via the University database and this feeds through to the VLE and related systems. Single sign on is obviously a big plus here. For small courses you could manually enrol your students on your wiki (if you didn't want it to be open to all), but for some of our courses we have 1000+ students, so that isn't scaleable. Having said that, this is not a problem that is insurmountable. Authentication isn't really my subject area, but with openid, Shibboleth etc people are moving in this direction. What I want is to be able to apply the OU authentication to any site I want, so if I create a wiki I simply tell the OU authentication system to include that url. Maybe it can do this already? The issue of roles is more complicated, but again if we start on this now, it's not impossible to crack.
• Convenience - there is a degree of convenience for both academic and student in having all the tools packaged in the VLE. However, I think there is also an increasing frustration at being limited to these tools, and also an increased ability to cope with a range of tools.
• Support - if you have one centralised system then you can offer centralised support also. If every academic is using a different collection this becomes more difficult. However, these tools are all pretty easy to use, and one could easily have a collection of supported ones.
• Reliability - if we house the VLE then we can guarantee the server times and service level agreement. If it is housed on an external system you have no control if it goes down. This is true and something that keeps IT people awake at night, but this surrendering control is going to be one of those things we just have to get used to as we use more third party apps simply because they're better.
• Monitoring -  one of the tools that a VLE offers is the ability to monitor a student or cohort's progress. These can be useful tools in identifying problems and offering support. While a loosely coupled system wouldn't offer this at the individual level, there are an increasing number of sophisticated analytical tools available (as Tony Hirst repeatedly tries to get me to realise) which will provide much of this information.

That might seem like a big enough list to make you stick with your VLE, but wait, here come the benefits:

• Better quality tools - because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.
• Modern look and feel - related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.
• Appropriate tools - because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel - as an academic if I want a particular tool I don't have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.
• Cost - using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn't it?
• Avoids software sedimentation - when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.
• Disintermediation happens - this isn't really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.

On balance then, I think this shift to loosely coupled, freely available third party systems will happen. It won't happen overnight, and it will follow a succession model, but I would place money on this being the direction things take. Thank goodness I haven't just published a book on VLEs eh? Doh!

Software sedimentation

I came across this term from Jaron Lanier (in an essay in the book The Next Fifty Years). He writes:

"Software sedimentation is a process whereby not only protocols, but the ideas embedded in them become mandatory. An example is the idea of the file.... Files are now taught to students as a fact of life as fundamental as a photon, even though they are a human invention."

I think there is truth in this, and I like the mental image of sediment building up within the concepts built in to software and technology. To expand the idea out somewhat, the same might be true of many educational practices. The lecture for example (stop groaning at the back), is mandatory because of the physical and cultural sedimentation embodied in university campuses, so that to many academics and students, it seems natural. But like files in software, there are other ways to approach the particular problem (how to move someone from a position of not knowing to knowing in this case). InLanier's example software is part of the problem, but for other examples, software and technology can be part of the solution - because by using new technologies it makes practitioners think about new ways of doing things. Sedimentation can be very hard, and costly, to remove, and potentially new technologies offer a means of achieving this.

This does however, argue for a more radical shift in our deployment of e-learning technologies than my succession model proposes. The danger of a slow change is that it allows sediment to build up - as an obvious example, VLEs that simply mirror the lecture practice.

Democrats and Revolutionaries (in a technological sense)

Due to popular demand (okay, Scott Leslie asked me to expand on it in a comment), I thought I'd say some more about the notion of democrats and revolutionaries with regards to VLEs. It's set out in chapter 2 of my VLE book, but here's a summary.  I borrowed the idea of technology following a normal distribution curve as it moves in to the mainstream from Wolfgang Greller, (although it all comes from Rogers), particularly the idea that at a certain point institutional responses kick in, such as staff development.

Either side of this institutional tipping point are two distinct groups of academics - the democrats and the revolutionaries. These groups want different things from their technologies. The democrats don't really care how it works, who makes it, what its architecture is and so on - they just want it to work. To them the important characteristics are robustness, ease of use and reliability. Now the revolutionaries are a bit different, they like to know about the technology, to tinker with it, to get it to do what they want. They look for things such as flexibility, adaptability, and a certain amount of technological flair. They like cool stuff, but are happy for it to be a bit flaky.

Now the interesting thing from a centralised VLE perspective is that these two groups are forced to coexist in the same virtual space. This is why those introducing an institutional VLE often have the feeling of not meeting everyone's needs. There exists along the institutional tipping point a creative tension between these two groups, which can be beneficial to both parties. The democrats make the revolutionaries more aware of issues such as rigour and usability and the revolutionaries introduce new technologies and ways of working.

As an aside I think, rather like those sea creatures that survive along deep sea volcanic vents, I have pretty much made my career straddling the line between these two groups.

The centralisation/decentralisation dilemma

In my previous post I talked about future learning environments. One of the things about the 'future' scenario (apart from it never turning out quite how you expect it) is that it's very decentralised. It is likely that there won't be one VLE, but rather different flavours of one, depending on the subject area and the individual student. This begins to sound rather familiar - in fact it's rather like the situation many universities are currently shifting away from with their VLE provision. They had a confusing array of VLEs dotted around different faculties, with each area or individual having their pet favourite and now want to consolidate on one centralised system to offer uniform experience and support.

This is entirely appropriate, it saves money, it allows the university to offer staff development and it facilitates integration with other systems. So why would you want to go back to a decentralised state? The point is that in decentralisation 2.0 (sorry) the user is more in control. Previously it was individual academics or faculties who decided. And, it is decentralisation with a centralised underbelly. This is a key point - having first centralised, the systems are in place to provide a blanket framework within which decentralisation can occur. The first wave of centralisation controls everything - all content, all tools, all roles. The second wave moves to a creating a framework (think Netvibes/Pageflakes) within which there is more freedom over content and to a lesser extent, tools. The third wave is totally user controlled. At the moment most universities are in the first wave and just beginning to see the second, I'd say.