Article on the Next Generation VLE now definite

It is now finally official: My article on 'The New Generation VLE' has now been made public. This article is based on the findings at the Educause conference in Dallas Texas, last October. The main message is that there are the first beginnings of a new generation of VLE's. They can be characterised by the fact that they are no longer a 'walled garden' dominated by the teacher, but rather a more open environment in which students and teachers can work together with persons, materials and other webservices outside of the classroom or even institution. And of course the VLE can be approached through various devices and allows for modern delivery of media.


Various vendors and institutions are working towards this solution, but none of them are there yet. There are promising developments in the field of Open Source and commercial parties (Blackboard especially) and the adoption of a Service Oriented Architecture could also be very helpful in working towards an integrated VLE with all these functionalities.

The article can be found on the WIKI at: http://82.192.89.182/~wiki/index.php/Hoofdstuk_Nieuwe_generatie_ELWO

I am sorry to say that the article is only available in Dutch at present. I am afraid that I will not find time to translate it in the near future. If anybody does require an English translation, please let me know.

Internationalising our education - use of video

We had a seminar on Internationalising our education at Utrecht University last Thursday. It was great to see the efforts being made at the WUN (World Wide Universities Network) and Penn State. We still have a long way to go...

Together with Lex Hermans I gave a presentation on the use of video in distance education both for a-synchronous and synchronous learning. The slideshare is included below.





David Pilsbury also pointed out the Research channel, a collection of high quality videos covering some serious subject matter. This would require a tad more investment than the simple recordings we have being doing of late and would also require some serious commitment at all levels in the university. Great for your public relations though...

Blackboard and Vista

A quick note for my own use, sorry guys ;-) As we had noticed Microsoft Vista and Blackboard do not always work together well. See Willem van Valkenburg's blog for a list of problems acknowledged by Blackboard.

Attending recorded lectures

An article on the Dutch Edusite pointed out that students still attend lectures when they are recorded, although the (notorious) law students do not always comply ;-)

Leidse student laat opgenomen college soms schieten

This is something we must give a try: we are going to record lectures and evaluate attendance anyway. We must see if under comparable circumstances law students show different behaviour to other students...

Presenting away for Weblectures

Yes, I know it is getting a bit boring: this blog is getting filled up with the weblectures project. I suppose this is only a correct representation on how I am spending my working hours at present...
The project is now really underway. The buzz is obviously spreading at Utrecht University. I have given presentations for the ICT in ed representatives of all the faculties and for the Heads of Education at Social Sciences. The university board visited Social Sciences and requested a presentation, so that is what I delivered. You will find the presentation here (long live Slideshare). If the embedded presentation won't load visit http://www.slideshare.net/kgrussell/weblectures-presentation-for-university-board/1




Next week there will be a seminar on internationalising our education and we will be present of course ;-).
It is very interesting to see the interest expressed by different departments within the university. It is also interesting to see the differences in motivation. Chemistry wanted to give some part time students a chance to watch lectures, Social Sciences' Graduate School is collaborating in a distance learning programme and they are creating short lectures specifically for this purpose in our studio. Maths wants to document lectures so students can view whenever they want, at any point in their studies, Studium Generale offers public lectures which they want to be accessible to a wider audience, students are bugging teachers to have their lectures recorded so they can revise before exams, and so on....

Kick off meeting project group Weblectures

We had a kick off meeting for the project group (and a few other interested staff members) of the Weblectures project. Although the project started back in January it was good to take the time to stand back and look at what everybody had accomplished in only a short time. I am extremely chuffed to see how far we have come! Of course we are not there yet and it isn't perfect but we definitely out on the road recording. (A careful estimate is 30 lectures recorded to date).

For more information on the project visit http://gathering.let.uu.nl/weblectures soon to be moved to http://www.uu.nl/weblectures

Sakai SIG meeting, Oracle gives its views

Last Wednesday the 4th of April we had a meeting of the SAKAI Special interest group at SURF in Utrecht. I couldn't attend the whole meeting but I was glad I could at least listen to the presentation given by Peter Bavinck of Oracle. He gave Oracle's plans on their Academic Enterprise Initiative. This is (my interpretation) an iniative to create a SOA framework which will cooperate with the Sakai framework and which can easily exchange information (for example from the Peoplesoft SIS).

See the blog and website.

Sometimes the smallest titbits of information can be extremely useful. I had been mucking about with the portfolio in Sakai but was stumped by the request for .xsd schema's. In the meeting someone tipped the xsd weaver. It seems brilliant, create your own forms online, save them locally and then add them to Sakai. (I haven't tried the last step out yet, but the rest works!).

The Hogeschool Utrecht is looking for a replacement for their Cascade system. Taking a quick look at their design I was surprised to see that they had not yet looked into LAMS, as they are looking for a system to deliver case based learning through a series of learning activities. And this can be integrated into all sorts of VLEs (not just Sakai ;-)

Blackboard User group meeting on Building Blocks

I attended a very interesting meeting on Blackboard Building Blocks organised by the Dutch Blackboard usergroup. It was held Thursday the 29th of March (yes I have some catching up to do:-).

What struck me most was the amount of initiative being put into the development of Building Blocks. If you see what various institutions are creating it is great. Some building blocks are large and very complex and require separate databases (there is even a 'Setter Getter': a building block which collects the settings you need when updating your building block.) One specific example is the Blackboard Management System which has been created by ROC Midden Nederland and Leiden University (also proudly presented at the Nice conference).

On the other hand this made me wonder why these extensive features are not included in the core code of Blackboard. I am pleased to see that Blackboard attended the meeting and I hope they will take the wishes of the Dutch e-learning market into account. This does pose questions as to who ownes the ideas and the code, would it not be fair to reward/gratify the developers that spent so much time developing the building block.

The Dutch situation:

We are at times decentralised, hence the BMS, have large courses (500 plus students) which we subdivide into groups (requires extensive group management and group grading) and we do a lot of Collaborative Learning in our courses. These are just a few differences which make the features available in Blackboard insufficient at times.

A day at home with the Net-generation

I was supposed to attend a meeting of the CWIS group today, but life can take a different unexpected turn. My son caught a tummy bug so I spent the day at home, playing Triominos and other games and giving Second Life a go... So I ended up working with the netgeneration after al, but not quite in the manner I expected . I hope all the attendees had a great time and I really missed the meeting :-( I must look around on some blogs to see how they got on...

8 days a week, ironing is a chore

Last Thursday was the annual symposium organised by IVLOS at Utrecht University. The theme was 8 days a week, how students and staff can manage to do learning and teaching in the amount of time that seems available for this task. I am pleased to see that the IVLOS has picked up on this (see article by Robert Jan Simons on Edusite). As far as students are concerned the picture is pretty obvious: Students in the Netherlands are trying to combine studying (approximately a meagre 20 hours a week) with all sorts of jobs to add to their grant and support their lifestyle.

Inez Groen gave a presentation (again) on the Einstein Generation. The story did not contain much new information, but it was interesting to hear it again and to add it unto experiences I had gained lately. One interesting aspect was the attitude the new generation of students has regarding university. University is now commonly called school. Spoilt as they are with all the wealth they have been surrounded with they are used to having many choices available. They will choose the easy choice, they expect to be involved and engrossed in the study they have chosen for. (Please note: this does not necessarily mean they are lazy!) They expect good teaching. The teacher should certainly be a subject matter expert, otherwise they might as well spend their time on the internet where you can find almost anything.

And IT is extremely boring, it is a tool not unlike an iron. You plug it in and it works. This does not mean you should not use IT, it means you should only use it if it makes sense, IT for IT's sake is only fascinating for digital immigrants, duh!

Staff on the other hand are suffering from the demand for a more involved style of teaching. In many cases this has been translated into giving the students many more assignments. Sadly this means teachers have an awful lot more checking of papers to get through. There was a session specially directed at this problem which I certainly enjoyed. What about letting students doing the teaching in turn. They are the ones that are setting up the presentation, organising excersises and getting the students involved. It seemed to work really well. It brought back happy memories from a class I attended using the same formula. It was definitely the most interesting and involving module I followed during my masters'.

Repository on offer...

Surfnet and Kennisnet are two organisations supporting respectively lower and higher ed in The Netherlands. They organised a meeting in which they offered a new repository facility for schools or colleges that might be interested. Moqub has also written about this meeting.
First of all I think it is a very good initiative. It offers schools a chance to try out a new technology they do not yet support. This also has been offered by Surfnet in the past (Breeze for videoconferencing) or JISC (Turnitin for plaguerism detection).
For Utrecht University the offer is less relevant as we are already running DSpace as a repository. Our challenge is to get learning materials into DSpace...

A wiki elsewhere...

When thinking about a new generation VLE, it became clear that are different roads that can be travelled to attain this goal. Typical for early adopters is to go out on the web and find a tool that does it for you, and there are a lot of them around.
I was shown the wiki http://bbamusic.wikispaces.com which was set up by the Burr and Barton academy in the free wikispaces environment. Quite amusing to have a look around and to read their ear training assignments.
In fact I once, long ago, gave two honors students a space in wikispace to write a public essay. It can be found at http://fswhonours.wikispaces.com I must give it a read.

The great advantage of using external facilitues is you can choose just the one you want at no cost. The great disadvantage is that they are not imbedded in your technical and administrative infrastructure. Think about backups and account administration for example...

Apreso recording set is now on wheels!

Our AV guys were not very happy lugging the Apreso recording PC around so they screwed together this very straightforward but practical solution. In fact the screwing was very literal! But the result is a quick and easy set up that can be rolled about and set up in hardly any time at all! The timing function makes it even more practical: they can set the timer, walk away and pick it up when its done!
It is not exactly the way the set up was intended to be used but it works a treat.

Dappit graph

With thanks to Moqub for her posting :-) I have no idea what these three values stand for, so I will follow them for a while and see how they develop...

Swedes on a visit

Last Thursday we had a group of Swedes on a visit to Utrecht University. They were on a trip from the NSHU. Renée Filius and I organised a round table and we discussed a number of propositions on ict in education. We did not disagree on many points though. One major difference between Sweden and the Netherlands appears to be their experience in distance learning. Another difference is their focus on getting everybody involved in education. This is something which has received a lot less attention in the Netherlands of late, though I hope the new government will focus more funding on this. So not just life long learning, but learning for everybody.

After the round table we listened to some comparisons on student participation in decision making and forming the curriculum in higher ed. I was very impressed by the amount of attention that is directed at this.

Apreso recording set in use

This is a photo of the Apreso recording set in use. It is hidden away in the booth behind the Theatron lecture hall (the largest lecture hall we have seating 500 students). It has already been put to good use as in its maiden week of recording. It has already recorded six! lectures.
The audio visual staff are very happy with its ease of use. Recording is very straight forward.

We have not got round to publishing yet, but this has nothing to do with the Apreso set up, but is simply related to local firewall settings...

We are already thinking ahead as we are getting a number of requests for recordings. What can we record and what can't we manage? What are the priorities? How can we turn this temporary set up into something more portable if we are going to have to lug it around?

A pictorial representation of the Next generation VLE

So following up on my last post: what should the next generation VLE look like?

To give you a clue I have added a pictorial representation of the next generation VLE.

In my opinion it should offer engaging visual content and interaction on matters which interest the net-generation student (for example climate change). It should allow networks to be formed between students, teachers, but also outsiders e.g. professionals, experts and students from around the world. It should be open ended and allow interaction with all sorts of tools like blogs, image and video repositories, social bookmarking (hence the tagcloud) , blogs, (lifelong) portfolios and profile sites and many, many more. These tools can be incorporated using webservices (and RSS feeds are included as an example). All this should be delivered not only on a computer but on all sorts of mobile devices...

If you feel I have left anything out please let me know!

A pictorial representation of an old generation VLE

When writing my chapter on the next generation VLE I felt the need to collect all the information I had amassed into an image/schema. This is the first image I built:

It is a pictorial representation of the older generation VLE. This is a stereotype, in fact most VLE's are already much more modern than this representation would suggest.They are strongly text based. The teacher controls what happens in the VLE, interaction is mainly the teacher telling the students what to do, there is no room for interaction between students unless the teacher decides it might be necessary. The VLE is a closed environment and offers no real interaction with the outside world. Simply getting a guest lecturer into the system is quite a job...
And all this is built to be delivered on a computer, and nothing else....

Ruppert building, the aftermath

The Ruppert Building at Utrecht University was severly damaged during the storm last Thursday. A building crane was blown over and wrecked a classroom and a number of offices. This means at least some classrooms will be unavailable for the time being. As a lot of teaching takes place in this building this means new locations have to be found at very short notice. I have a lot of respect for the people redoing the schedules at short notice.

There is an interesting repercussion: all of a sudden recording lectures could be a great asset in tackling the shortage of classrooms. A number of teachers have already approached with requests. We will have to see what is feasible at this short notice though, as we don't even have the recording sets up and running...

Two starting periods at universities

An interesting item was in the Dutch papers. They are running the first experiments allowing students to also take their final exams in January rather than only in May as is the case at present. It seems like a great idea for the students in their final year at secondary school as they can pace their learning better.
On the other hand it does set a challenge for Dutch higher ed in the long run. This means perhaps offering some or all Bachelor modules twice annually. This is going to tax the teaching staff and the organisation further. It may on the other hand also imply a greater demand for reusing learning materials and teaching activities. Of course you can also be snobby and decide you are such a popular course that you will only offer your course once annually. Students will simply wait and gain some real life experience before starting your course.