I attended my first CIC Learning Technology team meeting yesterday and I came away with two major impressions. First, I was proud to see how much Penn State, and ETS, has to offer. The education technology units at other Big 10 schools are very interested in what we're doing and they are closely watching our progress as we navigate the web 2.0 world, which is now in its adolescence and, therefore, experiencing the typical growing pains as it moves from infancy to adulthood. Second, I was excited to see how much we can learn from watching what the other CIC schools are doing. We're all reading the same tea leaves, making decisions based on our interpretations, and implementing a plan of action. All in the name of improving the teaching and learning experience. Fundamentally we all face the same challenges. Questions like: What is the future of a monolithic course management system? Is there a future? How do we tap into the potential offered by social computing applications? How do we harness the power of mobile computing devices to create a more authentic learning experience? How can we be agile enough to adopt to the ever-shifting landscape? How can we be there, ahead of the curve, to meet the demands of instructors and students?
One of the the immediate challenges the team discussed was the future of course management systems. Putting the Blackboard-Design 2 Learn case aside, the idea of a single application, particularly one that is inherently a closed-system, being able to meet the demands of our user community is dubious at best. These applications, whether they be commercial products such as ANGEL, Blackboard, D2L or open source products such as Moodle or Sakai, struggle to maintain content. What I mean is, the performance of each application is severely limited as the size of the content increases. At Penn State we had to put a 1GB cap on course size because of performance issues. Schools that use Blackboard are capped at 500MB. Well, this cap is just not practical in a world where it is increasingly easier and common to use multimedia files to both teach and demonstrate learning. Then there is the question of getting content out on the other side. How can content be re-purposed both by faculty and students? How can either easily place a single media file in a course, a personal website, a portfolio or a vita?
At Penn State we've chosen Moveable Type 4 as our blogging platform and now our portfolio platform. Illinois chose Drupal. Both offer a more agile platform that allows content to be used in multiple places and in multiple ways and they both play well with other applications. It is easy to drop in an image, a movie, or podcast in either of the tools and publish it. While we're using different applications to solve the same problem the challenges are identical and there is an opportunity for partnering on the process.
The other CIC team members were very interested in our community model of support. The idea of an open community that is agile enough to adopt to immediate needs and also allows in-depth conversation is powerful. Especially when combined with search and tagging capabilities. Several institutions have or are about to adopt this model. We should watch and learn from their interpretation and use of these communities especially where it concerns partnering with other separate but related areas. Other CIC schools are very interested in working with their respective libraries to find a common ground when it comes to faculty and student education when it comes to tools such as using library services and free tools such as Zotero and Refworks. This is a great idea because the librarians want to leverage many of the social applications and mobile tools for learning that we do. We've done some similar work with our instructional librarians and should continue to do so.
A common theme that evolved throughout the day was the idea of partnering our internal peers, such as the libraries, with our external resources in the CIC. Toward that end the CIC team is hoping to hold a conference in the fall at Wisconsin whose focus will be on building these partnerships. Details to follow later.
One of the the immediate challenges the team discussed was the future of course management systems. Putting the Blackboard-Design 2 Learn case aside, the idea of a single application, particularly one that is inherently a closed-system, being able to meet the demands of our user community is dubious at best. These applications, whether they be commercial products such as ANGEL, Blackboard, D2L or open source products such as Moodle or Sakai, struggle to maintain content. What I mean is, the performance of each application is severely limited as the size of the content increases. At Penn State we had to put a 1GB cap on course size because of performance issues. Schools that use Blackboard are capped at 500MB. Well, this cap is just not practical in a world where it is increasingly easier and common to use multimedia files to both teach and demonstrate learning. Then there is the question of getting content out on the other side. How can content be re-purposed both by faculty and students? How can either easily place a single media file in a course, a personal website, a portfolio or a vita?
At Penn State we've chosen Moveable Type 4 as our blogging platform and now our portfolio platform. Illinois chose Drupal. Both offer a more agile platform that allows content to be used in multiple places and in multiple ways and they both play well with other applications. It is easy to drop in an image, a movie, or podcast in either of the tools and publish it. While we're using different applications to solve the same problem the challenges are identical and there is an opportunity for partnering on the process.
The other CIC team members were very interested in our community model of support. The idea of an open community that is agile enough to adopt to immediate needs and also allows in-depth conversation is powerful. Especially when combined with search and tagging capabilities. Several institutions have or are about to adopt this model. We should watch and learn from their interpretation and use of these communities especially where it concerns partnering with other separate but related areas. Other CIC schools are very interested in working with their respective libraries to find a common ground when it comes to faculty and student education when it comes to tools such as using library services and free tools such as Zotero and Refworks. This is a great idea because the librarians want to leverage many of the social applications and mobile tools for learning that we do. We've done some similar work with our instructional librarians and should continue to do so.
A common theme that evolved throughout the day was the idea of partnering our internal peers, such as the libraries, with our external resources in the CIC. Toward that end the CIC team is hoping to hold a conference in the fall at Wisconsin whose focus will be on building these partnerships. Details to follow later.