November 2009 Archives

At the ITS Event Planner's meeting, we're seeing a demo of Cvent today.  It's an online hosted service for event planning (the presenter is comparing it to the MS Word for event planning, but I hope it's more like the Google Apps of event planning).  It has a web site template; registration system; personalized e-mail based marketing system with reminders and reports (e.g. opened message, click-through, bounced messages); a system for collecting fees; a survey tool for collecting attendee preferences (special meals, etc...); certificate printing; name badge printing; task management tool with reminders; and budget tracking.  So it actually has a lot more than I thought it did.

The web template has some features like an "add to calendar" button, map integration, weather, and some other widgets.  The registration form can have any fields you want - like meal restrictions, title, guest information, job title, company, attendee types (student, speaker, staff, etc...) and then base the rest of the registration form on fields that are applicable to that attendee type.  Through the survey tool, you can set up a "regret survey", which is delivered to people who were invited, but can't attend - so you know if they said no because of factors like location, cost, time, subject matter, etc...  They have seen around a 35% response rate on these surveys as long as they're very short (10 second survey).

They have a built-in CRM system with import/export system and APIs to connect to external systems.  From the administrative interface, it looks like this would work across several different types of events, which is good news for us since we would be using it for the Symposium, Summer Camp, Tailgate, speaker events, and more.  Example of a company with multiple events: http://my.epri.com  That site has an events calendar with filters, so you could see only training events, only invited speakers, faculty-targeted events, etc...

The name badge creation tool is nice for printing on standard name badge stock (like the ones produced by Avery).  The simple form lets you select fields from the registrants and place those fields on the badge in whatever font, color, size you want.  The more advanced form lets you build a template from scratch and lay things out however you want.

It's funny how many of our needs have already been taken into account with this kind of system.  We just asked whether we could have two registration groups: people from Penn State and people who are invited speakers or sponsors.  Another option would be to open a limited capacity for external attendees for a different fee.  All of these kinds of needs seem to be possible to do in Cvent.

I asked if they have the ability to identify which sessions that you're interested in attending ahead of time and then downloading to your calendar.  You can register for individual sessions and print a schedule, but they don't have the calendar integration at that level - but seemed interested in adding that feature.  From the event planning side, you can set capacities for each of the individual sessions or have people indicate which sessions they want to attend so you can use that data to put the most popular sessions in the largest rooms.

Costs are $1500 yearly maintenance plus a per-registration cost of $3-5/registrant whether we charge for the event or not.  The more registrations you do, the lower the cost.  There would be another fee for the API or maybe Shibboleth integration since that would require special programming work.

Overall reaction: very interesting tool that would add a lot to many of the events that the university runs.  It's definitely worth using for our big events and possibly for some of our training needs as well, especially if we can control the costs.

ACU has been experimenting with the use of iPhone and iTouch devices for mobile learning.  They distributed devices to their incoming freshman class.  Students were allowed to choose either an iPhone or iTouch, but would have to pay the service fees for the iPhone.  The iPhone users were mostly people who wanted a new phone or were already on AT&T while the iTouch users were more concerned about costs like the ongoing service fees.

Their mobile portal: http://m.acu.edu.  They offer links to campus news, sports, facilities, and other services.  They offer interaction tools (nano - no advanced notice) with things like quick polls: true/false, likert scale, etc... and word cloud - where students select from a list and then the most selected words are shown in a larger font (like a Wordle).  They have lists of blogs that faculty manage and let students contribute to those blogs (Wordpress) through a post-by-email function so they could include media files.

Overall students were excited about getting them and found them easy to use.  ACU asked questions related to academic and social impact and found that the iPhone outperformed the iTouch in nearly all cases, but most distinctly in areas like social interaction.  In other categories like using the device for entertainment purposes, the reactions were more similar.

When they implemented this, they ran into some issues.  One was that they provided these devices to freshmen, but in a class with about 250 students, about 8% of students didn't have a device because they were sophomores, juniors, or seniors.  This was a barrier to faculty since they couldn't assume equal access.  They ended up creating a pool of loaner devices to cover non-freshmen who didn't have their own devices.

Some of their nano tools had additional functions built in that increased interaction.  For example, an attendance tool sent an e-mail to students who did not respond that they were present. [BUSTED!] Those students then contacted the faculty to explain their absence.

Overall outcomes were reports of improved: attention, involvement, interest, active learning, contact with professors and teaching assistants, and overall class experience.  In a chemistry course, an instructor created a special lab section of only iPhone and iTouch users.  She turned the lab instructions into podcasts, which students should watch ahead of time and then come in and perform the lab with the ability to go back to the podcast for reference.  Students performed about as well in the lecture version versus the podcast version.  There were some unexpected uses as well, for example students would use their devices to look up an online periodic table for reference during the lab.

Faculty got the devices as well.  In their faculty survey, faculty 87% considered the program a success and felt that the students were more engaged.  They thought it was useful, but not for every class session.  After one year of use, the vast majority of faculty were on two or more pages of applications that they added. Students and faculty alike were very likely to always have their iPhone with them, but sometimes left their iTouch at home since they thought of it more like a traditional iPod.

Some lessons learned:

• Don't underestimate the bandwidth requirements
• Devices need to be ubiquitous before faculty feel comfortable using them for required class activity
• You need to invest in the development of applications
• There were a lot more than this...They have a year-end report and I'll grab a copy.
  

They formed a consortium for further exploration: http://www.opencircl.org

I'm at a session where Judy Caruso is presenting the findings of the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology.  It's a survey done across many institutions of higher education (community colleges through universities).  The 2009 report was just released last week. Some thoughts on the notable results below related student mobility.

Student Use of Mobile Devices:
About 10% of students say that they are using their cell phone in class for course activities, but about 30% are using them in class for non-class activities.  This is even higher (up to 40%) for students in the 18-19 age range, who are also less likely to agree with an instructor's right to ask students to turn their phones off.  Part of this is that students said that they are connected to campus emergency alert systems through their phones, so they wouldn't want to turn them off.

Internet on Mobile Devices:
Over half of students own an internet capable device (including phones) and about 30% more were planning to buy one.  Only about 10% said that they never plan to get one.  Half use this feature once per week or more. Portraits of student mobility:

• 35.5% don't own and don't plan to own
• 1.5% don't know
• 18.1% own, but don't use the internet
• 33.1% own and use the internet (or 25% of the total use on a weekly or daily basis)

The main reasons that students don't take advantage of the internet are:

• Plenty of other ways to connect
• Cost
• Usability of internet on a mobile device

Student Use:
In the next three years, students expect to be doing more things on a phone that they currently only do on their desktop or laptop this year.  Currently, students mostly use their phone most commonly to check info (news, weather, sports, etc...), check e-mail, use social networks, look at maps, and instant message.  They said that they would be most likely to use campus e-mail (63%), student administrative services (47%), and course/learning management system (46%).  Other uses were under 30% such as checking administrative systems, paying for services (like LionCash), and using phones as clickers.

What I thought was interesting was that students are using their phone for text messaging, but when asked if they were using their phone for instant messaging, only 40-50% of the mobile internet-using students said that they were.  Judy also said that Twitter use was very low.  So during the Q&A section, I pointed out that a lot of students will be using the internet without knowing that they are.  In a session that I attended yesterday, a lot of students said that they didn't think of Facebook as a web site.  Likewise, I have dozens of iPhone apps and nearly all of them use the internet, but they aren't web browsers. 

I think surveys like this may get more difficult to administer if they use a binary Internet/not-Internet language.  The network has faded into transparency to the point where students are doing a lot of things without thinking about getting connected - they're always connected.

Overall: good discussion.  I'll have to take a close look at their report.

I spent some time at the ELI member meeting and I'm back to regular sessions now.  Currently, Josh Baron from Marist College is giving a presentation about Sakai.  He went through an LMS analysis and implementation between 2005 and 2008.  Some take-away points:

Open source tools are decoupling code and service - meaning that the people who contribute code to Sakai are different than the people (often consulting companies like Unicon and rSmart) who are offering services like hosting, training, consultation, integration, etc...

To evaluate the tools, they did a gap analysis between their existing home-grown tool and Sakai with categories of desired, essential, or critical.  Their goal was to make sure that there were not critical gaps and solutions for essential gaps.  Faculty appreciated being a part of the gap analysis and followed the committee's progress.  Through today, Marist has been able to close all of the essential gaps that they had identified such as a global student view (activity across all courses), grade import, weighing grades in the gradebook, and the ability to edit published assignments.

The evaluated staffing requirements by talking with other institutions and asking them about the number of FTE staff they had dedicated to Sakai, Java programming resources, instructional designers, end-user support, interface designer, etc...  It depended on the institution.  Michigan had 14 FTEs assigned to across various roles.  Rice was more like 2 FTEs.  Marist didn't need a lot of permanent new staff since they worked with rSmart to get started.

In the end, they were able to save money compared to a commercial LMS, they used the license fees to invest in human capital (e.g. an instructional designer), technical issues were quickly resolved, and student suggestions were incorporated into the tool.  They are also using more than 20 tools that have been contributed by the Sakai community such as the citation helper that integrates their research journal database with the Sakai discussion tool.

How healthy is the community?  They look at the size of the Sakai community, whether goals are being met, commercial affiliates, and potential threats such as the Blackboard litigation.  They have also given some thought to reliability and scalability issues - such as giving all of their students lifetime access to their portfolio, which would grow their number of active users over time.

Overall, nothing too surprising, but it's interesting to have him walk through their process.  It also makes me want to get an evaluation account on Sakai 3 to see if they have done some work on the instructor flow issues that I noticed in Sakai 2.

UNC has recently done an evaluation of Sakai in comparison to Blackboard, which includes faculty interviews and a final report.  I'll need to take this with a grain of salt - they may be evaluating an older version of Blackboard, not version 9, which is the version that I tested.

I thought I'd take a break from the CMS sessions and catch this session on implementing and assessing social networks for teaching and learning.  The presenter (Diane Sieber) is using a combination of MediaWiki, SharePoint, GoogleSites, Google Apps, and Ning.  She is exploring the impact of these tools in blended learning courses - which other research shows have more of a sense of community than traditional or distance education courses.  Class sizes vary between 12 and 150 students.

Results from students: peer editing of student work, more frequent access to the instructor, and instructor-written contextual descriptions of content were all rated as unimportant.  However, students did rate increased peer interaction and peer-written contextual descriptions as useful.  Other important features: ease of use (syntax, intuitive commands, search, quick start) especially if the interface is similar to something like Facebook, customizable interface per student, commonly-established rules of engagement (social contract) which is created every semester for a sense of ownership (covers things like texting in class, can be amended by a 2/3 vote), periodic instructor feedback, and frequent peer feedback.  Google Sites and Ning scored well on these tasks.


[SP = SharePoint, MW = MediaWiki, GS = Google Suite, N = Ning]

Assignments that can't be done in another medium such as anchored collaboration (discussion with links and collaborative editing) were very useful.  Other ideas: hot pages where students can recommend books/movies to each other to help them practice using the environment.  Peer reactions to instructor and other students' points of view.  All of this was pretty easy in Mediawiki and Ning compared to the other tools.


[SP = SharePoint, MW = MediaWiki, GS = Google Suite, N = Ning]

Additional social effects: Students developed more consideration for others when writing for their peers (or the public, I would imagine), students gave more sources for what they were posting, grading was more fair since the instructor could track changes and see who contributed what, the online environment helped increase the in-class engagement since students had already been thinking about a topic and writing about their opinions.

Learning outcomes: topics discussed online were 19% more likely to be explained successfully on a final exam than topics discussed in class. At the beginning of the class, 71% had concerns about the online environment, but by the end, 76% rated the online environment as necessary or very important to learning.  Students requested that the course remain online after the course was finished and over 1/3 of students continued to interact in the online course space.

Best practices:

• Establish common goals and a culture of collaboration
• Seed the content before opening the space
• Orientation is required
• Start with an opening activity: personal pages and hotlists (non-course discussion)
• Allow a variety of forms for handing in assignments
  
• Instructor must contribute content at least every 3 days
• Expert reviews - bring in external people to review class projects
• Allow self-forming group project and informal collaboration spaces
  

Into the questions now.  I asked about the importance of having students establish the rules from scratch at the beginning of every semester (she agreed that it should start over, but students may get stuck at some point and ask for examples).  For the actual class interaction spaces, she has typically cleaned them out every semester or started new ones, but will be investigating how things can change if one group of students can see a space from a previous semester, which may still have an active discussion.

Another question about using Facebook: she says no, students have requested that she not use Facebook.  Students see it as an artificial attempt to be cool.  It's a social space, not an educational space.  However, Ning has similar features and interface plus it scored very well in all of the questions that she asked her students.

Orientation takes about 1 class for introducing the tool and other times for reinforcement and introducing new features.  Also, you need a space set aside to describe how you do things like add your pictured, edit your own comments, and then ideas for creative uses of the tool, which may not be related to the course.

Overall, a very interesting session.  I'll have to post the recording and the charts that she used here when I get a chance. 

This afternoon, I went to a three-person panel session: one for Moodle, one for Sakai, and one for Blackboard.  I was hoping for a knock-down drag-out fight that would leave one clear winner in my head, but frankly, the people on this panel were too polite for anything like that to happen.  [Recording here if you want to watch it.]


Even without the fight, they had some interesting points.  The first was my favorite.  To paraphrase, a free open source course management system is more like Free Puppies than Free Beer.  There may be no up front cost, but there is still an ongoing cost of ownership.  All three agreed that the cost of the software should not be the most important decision point.  The ability to support the chosen tool within your infrastructure is much more important.

The other issues that they discussed included support, risk involved with one product or another, roadmaps/innovation, and looking toward the future.  The overall sense that I got was that on each topic, the issues were different, but fairly balanced.  Again, I think they were just being a little too polite.  I don't think that you can look at the list of tools or the number of people on each platform (although Moodle has 30 million users world-wide). 

The real differences will emerge as you look at cultural activity: the culture of the central organizing body (if there is one), the composition and activity of the developers, the degree to which an individual institution can be heard or even make changes, and the affordances of the tool itself.  How do all of these mesh with your institution's culture and the teaching and learning activity that happens there?  Does the tool assist with an academic workflow or does it fight against it?  These are questions that are as important - maybe more important - as the questions about initial cost versus integration within an infrastructure.  In this case, it's the cultural infrastructure.

A final note: If you listen to the recording, you may be able to faintly hear me bring up this issue of flow around the 44 minute mark.  I brought it up by comparing course management systems to operating systems.  They all have the potential to write e-mail, browse the web, play movies, edit documents (that checklist again, right?), but the user experience is very different between Linux, Mac, and Windows.  Anyway, I didn't get a very good response, but after the session, I was approached by four people who were interested both in my question and with what Penn State was planning to do. I told them that we hadn't made a decision yet, but gave them my card and invited them to check out this blog to keep tabs on us.

Before lunch, I spent some time in the vendor area, spending the most time at the Moodlerooms, Google, and Blackboard . 

At the Moodlerooms booth, I talked with them about their hosting service and then stuck around for a presentation about Joule.  Joule is a tool that they built to extend some key functions of Moodle that are in high demand by their customers.  The main features that I caught were an alerts function that could monitor Moodle activity and send automated alerts if students are falling behind on assignments, a tool that monitors course activity (content hits, etc...) and does some item analysis, and a tool that allows you to search and add materials from content repositories.  So this is something to consider if those types of activities show up in a gap analysis.

I went over to the Google booth (staffed by young and informally dressed staff) to talk with them about Google Apps and Google Wave.  The Apps discussion wasn't anything new - mostly what is included in Apps for Education.  Regarding Google Wave, I told them that we had a group of people looking at it and we had some issues when trying to do something like simultaneously edit the same document.  We talked about using two Waves, connected waves, wavelets, widget pallets, etc...  They're putting together a research session this evening to discuss how Wave can be used in education, so I'll go to that.

Finally, I went over to Blackboard and saw what they did with Stanford's iPhone app (built on Blackboard mobile).  It was really slick - location aware maps, athletics, course search and registration, sports scores, news, campus photos and movies, and a campus calendar.  They're working on an integration with Blackboard Learn now (the course management product).  I'd like to see a mobile application like that at Penn State.

I'm at Educause and I'm currently at a Lightning Round discussion of ePortfolios: five presentations at 7 minutes each.  I'll try to capture some of the key points here.

Patrick Lowenthal, University of Colorado Denver
They created a staged gate system where students would have to assemble a portfolio at various stages in a teacher training program before being able to continue taking courses.  This portfolio would be assessed by an evaluator, who would then approve the students progress to the next group of courses that would lead to the next gate.  This is a much better system than the previous one, where students would create a paper portfolio at the end of their learning process.

Geoffrey C. Middlebrook, University of Southern California
Their approach is blog-based, similar to ours.  In addition to static profile pages and ongoing blog posts related to their field of study, they create a list of sites in their sidebar that should be sources of reliable information for their field.  Students are also expected to make comments on the blogs of other people in their fields and link to those external posts/comments in their own blog.

David L. Stoloff, Eastern Connecticut State University
Using Google sites to have students create their portfolios.  Elements include a resume, annotated transcript, commentary on their program's goals, and a five-year plan.  It's the kind of ePortfolio that we used to ask students to build, but using some newer tools.  One interesting point is that when they talk to their students about an ePortfolio, they use Facebook as a point of comparison - their "social portfolio".

Ivy Tan, University of Saskatchewan
Online version of a traditional paper portfolio for people who are identifying their clinical practice skills. It was built using Mahara.  They have also integrated a search tool that instructors or programs can use to find students who have/have not achieved a goal as well as identify gaps in their courses.  Their system has a very administrative feel.

Lorna Wong, University of Wisconsin System Administration
They have 13 comprehensive and 13 two-year campuses.  Some of the campuses were already using ePortfolio systems, but they decided to look for a centralized system to get central support, documentation, consistency, save money, etc...  They launched the D2L ePortfolio product in 2008 because they are already using D2L for some of their courses.  They had some initial problems (training materials, faculty training needs, production environment, etc...) but seem to be running well now.

Out of the five presentations and the following discussion, the USC approach is the most exciting to me.  It looks great and blends students' development and interaction with professionals in their field.

Edit: I talked with Geoffrey Middlebrook after his presentation and he said that he knows about the Blogs at Penn State project and has been "borrowing" ideas from it.  I said that's great as long as we can borrow ideas back!  He has some additional thoughts related to building connections with outside experts - it's worth a conference call between him and Jeff Swain.