The Auricle

By all accounts the Sony Librié ebook reader could become an object of maximum desire. Apparently, its amazing screen contrast developed in collaboration with the US E-Ink Corporation and others puts it in a league all of its own; it supposedly comes very close to the reflective reading experience of paper we all know and love. But … The device weighs only 300g including batteries which are alleged to last for around the reading of 10,000 pages. It has a resolution of around 800×600 at 170dpi (around the same as a newspaper) which compares favourably with the 70-90 dpi of the average computer screen. 'Books' are downloaded to a local PC for transfer to the Librié in much the same way as music downloads are currently.

The current business model for the Librié is that of a book club offering single titles or five books per month at a reduced rate.

Ahh, but here's the catch … you only 'rent' the books. According to a Guardian Online article Library without Books (22 April 2004):

“the sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months …”

Compound this with tying the 'books' to specific hardware and Sony and associated publishers have just irritated the hell out of potential customers.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Librié will become an Apple IPod which cares not a jot for interoperability but instead has become as much a social statement as a practical device:)

I just can't help feeling that if my paper-back or text-book auto destructed after 2 months I would be feeling pretty aggrieved. But of course if I borrowed a book from a library then I would be expected to return it within the designated period. The difference here is who is controlling the device and who is controlling the library. The business model for the Librié apparently puts Sony in charge of the device and its publishing partners in charge of the library.

I could imagine a situation, however, where say academic libraries eventually loaned the whole series of readers for a course/programme/module on Sony Librié type devices with the auto-destruct taking care of rights issues. No competing for books in that model:)

Now add a further quote from a Guardian Online article on the Librié …

“flexible electronic paper which can handle Harry Potter-esque moving images and colour is in the research and development labs and may be just two to three years away.”

… and we have one powerful medium.

Those wanting a more considered and extended treatment of e-books may be interested in a recent UKOLN Powerpoint presentation It’s a book, but not as we know it: ebooks in libraries (you are advised to download not play in situ)

Now anyone tell me where I can find my University's Sony Library and Learning Centre? 🙂

In Derek Morrison's Auricle article E-Learning: challenges to the neo conservative model? he states: “The biggest impediment I see to the vision is those vested interests who will apparently embrace the vision (of interoperable functional components) but somehow will still manage to operate a classic 'lock in' model.”

I've just been looking at a catalogue of VLE extensions (APIs) as provided by one of the commercial vendors, and I must say that I was very impressed with the additional functionality that was offered by some of these APIs … but I have a number of concerns about this approach. I'm sure that I'm not alone - anyone who has found the current genre of VLEs to be lacking, is also likely to salivate at the thought of a “powerful learning extension that enables instructors and students to create, share and comment on blogs within a course”, or “a dynamic blog and web site builder that permits students and instructors to create and showcase journals and web sites in a central location”. Functionality of our VLEs can be hugely improved through the use of these extensions, and what's even better (so we are told by the vendors) is that we can even create our own APIs.

It's rather stating the obvious I know, but commercial VLEs are long-term, and increasingly onerous, financial commitments, and since the majority of APIs only function at Enterprise Level, it can generally be assumed that anyone considering making use of this kind of extension has already paid a significant amount of money to their vendor. Furthermore, since most commercial vendors licence their product annually, this is an ongoing expense - and yet we still haven't considered the hidden costs that no one told you about at the time 🙂

Put simply, if my institution is paying huge sums of money for a tool, I expect it to have the majority of the functionality that I require. What I don't expect is to have to pay (in one of the cases that I looked at), another $10,000 (annually) for additional functionality that should have been there in the first place.

Yes, I know - the diverse requirements of FE and HE make it impossible to design a VLE that will suit everyone (which is why we have suggested elsewhere that the monolithic VLE may have had it's day, and that the way forward is through individual tools, selected for their fitness for purpose, and brought together in some meaningful way).

True, API integration allows us to select functionality that will be of use in our own institutions, but if this is the only way to keep all of the people happy all of the time, wouldn't we do just as well to select our tools based on functionality and not on which ones happen to integrate with our VLE? Looking through my API catalogue, some of the solutions appear to provide the discrete sets of functionality that I require, but even so, I'm not sure that I want these hard-wired into a VLE - let's face it, if I select my toolset carefully I can essentially render my VLE redundant anyway. This surely has to be the more flexible way forward.

It seems odd that it is so readily accepted that third party vendors (and developers within the HE and tertiary sector) are designing add-ons that in some cases just 'plug' the holes in the functionality of another vendor's product. Some might argue that the open source world functions in this way, but the crucial difference is that users of open source software aren't presented with a multi-layered licensing structure.

I can certainly see the attraction for VLE vendors. It enhances the functionality of their products whilst also spreading the costs - don't forget though that this approach also has the added advantage (from the vendors perspective) of further locking you into their VLE.

As the title of this article suggests what is perhaps evolving here is a variant of the business model for the humble inkjet printer, i.e. you buy the inkjet from us at an apparently reasonable cost and then we can sell you the ink ad infinitum. Even better we can get some of you to make new inks for us:)

There are undoubtedly some Auricle readers who may wish to sweep such apparently endless debating of such inconvenient 'technicalities' to the side so that they can concentrate on the pedagogy and actual student experience … faciliated no doubt by their vendor's systems.

Firstly, if we didn’t 'debate the technicalities', we would ultimately find ourselves subject the whims of commercial vendors. Isn't about time that FE/HE sector took control of their future with regards to e-learning? With the vendors (or their shareholders) in the driving seat is this going to be possible?

I agree that we shouldn’t get too hung up on the tools, and that it is our choice of pedagogy and our approach to teaching and learning that matters most. Having said that, no VLE is pedagogically neutral - the majority of mainstream VLEs have an implicit pedagogy that suits the transmissive style of delivery. You can work around this to an extent, but at the end of the day you will always be competing with a system which takes a particular view of the world and how people learn. So perhaps it’s not surprising that we see so many people using this style of VLE as a repository – it was primarily designed to replicate the lecture model.

I just had to use this Stephen Downes' quote from yesterday's OLDaily as the basis of this short Auricle article. Stephen hits the nail on the head when he challenges the Motley Fool's contention that 'lock in' to Blackboard's products is a 'good thing' (from an investor perspective).

“Oh, I know, investors leap at lock-in like slathering dogs for a hanging beeksteak, but to me when such a huge impediment as this is depicted as “great” it simply reminds me of the impoverished ethic of the business investor.” The Motley Fool for the uninitiated is an investors' site which describes it's mission as:

“to educate, enrich and amuse individual investors around the world.”

Here's the killer quote from the Motley Fool article Blackboard's Screetching IPO (24 June 2004).

“Another great characteristic of the business is that there are significant costs to switching from one software package to another. Faculty and system administrators have to learn how to use and maintain the new system. Then, all content that was generated for the previous system, including syllabi, documents, assignments, and test questions, would have to be migrated to the new system. Since such a migration is typically a complicated and tedious task, customers have considerable motivation to stick with a given solution. Consequently, Blackboard has a nice moat against competitors and the potential to raise prices as the product becomes indispensable to customers.”

Several Auricle articles have attempted to raise this important issue: E-Learning: challenges to the neo-conservative model? and E-Learning Flexible Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? and Portal or VLE?. The Motley Fool article is merely being explicit about the type of discussions which normally take place behind vendor's closed doors.

Read the Motley Fool article and reflect.

Let's not say we weren't warned.

In a previous article, 'e' for efficiency? by Derek Morrison he made reference to a report by Carol Twigg on the nirvana of improving learning whilst at the same time reducing costs. Today, I'm going to provide an overview of, and a brief commentary on, this interesting work.
Derek quoted from the article:

“… redesign using technology-based approaches and learner-centred principles can offer a way out of higher education's historical trade-off between cost and quality … transfer the focus of activity from academic staff to students – from presentation of material by academic staff to problem-solving and interactive learning by students.”

Source: Twigg C (2002), Improving Quality & Reducing Costs: Designs for Effective Learning Using Information Technology p3, The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (subscription service but see www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant.html.)

Carol Twigg has conducted an analysis of the projects supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Her report can be accessed from here Improving Learning and Reducing Costs: Lessons Learned from Round 1 of the Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign.

The original aim of the program was to redesign large enrolment introductory courses to 'achieve cost savings as well as quality enhancements.' In the original plan the projects aimed to reduce the costs by 37% on average and the resulting analysis showed the average saving on costs to be 33% with all of the projects reducing their costs.

Regarding the quality aim.

Five of the ten projects showed improved learning outcomes, four reported no significant difference and one was inconclusive. One important change was that all the projects changed their teaching approach to a more active and student-centred pedagogy.

So how was this successful result achieved and are there lessons for the wider educational community to learn especially as the dual aims of reducing costs and improving quality are extremely attractive to all in education?

Before any project was accepted an institution had to demonstrate its readiness to engage in a redesign of a course. A set of readiness criteria for the institution and the course was used to make this judgment. Demonstrating the readiness of the project showed to be very important in the success of the project. In addition to the readiness criteria applicants were also required to 'develop a plan for improved learning outcomes' and 'analyse the cost of traditional methods of instruction as well as new methods …'

A significant finding was the necessity to teach the redesign methodology. In our experience this is significant but not very surprising. Many of the early adopters of e-learning did consider that this would be the equivalent of putting course notes online. Consequently courses following this approach offered very little extra to traditional face-to-face courses, apart from a convenient repository for downloading course notes.

The Pew analysis, however, suggests that the redesign of existing courses for e-learning is not straightforward and appears to require support for academic staff to navigating their way through the process. Let's not forget that that many academics may not have any formal preparation for their teaching role and so the provision of help in re-engineeering courses should be anticipated.

When one looks at first year undergraduate courses there are often many examples where the same material is being taught across different subject areas. For example the same core mathematics is taught to physics chemistry, engineering etc etc. An opportunity exists to redesign this sort of course to save on this duplication of time and effort. This does mean that a spirit of collaboration and sharing is required. Also a willingness to use existing material, whether commercial or from another source, and not, as Twigg notes, 'be susceptible to the “not-invented-here syndrome”'. Redeveloping course materials is not and should not be considered a cheap option.

It's one thing to demonstrate the success of a funded project but this counts for very little if the project is not sustainable beyond the life of the funding.

Twigg's reports that all of the projects are committed to their redesigns and these projects are influencing the redesign of other courses within the institutions.

The Pew supported programme does seem to be achieving its goals and in many ways echoes those of the UK higher education community. Some of the lessons that have been already learned and the procedures and processes that have been implemented could well be useful to the UK HE. This is an ongoing exercise and further rounds of projects have been funded, developing on the experiences of round 1. It will be very interesting to see how these pan out when the analysis is next reported.

My colleague, Graham Blacker's, recent article on the beta release of the new TOIA system hopefully gave readers an insight into how a person unfamiliar with Computer Aided Assessment might view the system. We threw him in at the deep end really:) Now it's my turn so read on. I'm the CAA person in our team and am currently co-ordinating a small project looking into the use of Questionmark and so it was good to have the opportunity to review TOIA.

As with Graham's previous article, the caveat with the following is that these comments apply to the beta version of the system. We have, along with others, passed our feedback along to the TOIA project team, and look forward to version 1.0 in July. Also, as Derek Morrison's comment to Graham's article stated the TOIA team deserve plaudits for the open way they make available the current iterations of the key project deliverable.

Many in the CAA community have been looking forward to the release of TOIA and I for one was interested in seeing if it was showing promise as a future alternative to the likes of Questionmark and WebMCQ.

Let's start - with a discussion about money.

TOIA is 'free' to all UK HEIs and FE colleges. That is, the basic version is free. The premium version, with whistles and bells we haven't yet seen (more questions, extended reporting, LDAP authentication and support), will apparently cost £15,000. Not an insignificant amount of money.

It's possible to argue, however, that this compares favourably with the sums involved in, say, a site-wide licence for Questionmark. Nevertheless, I think that there is a perception amongst some academic colleagues, that TOIA will be entirely free in all its forms.

TOIA's FAQ states that the:

“TOIA project is currently funded by JISC until October 2005 and we will be providing support until then. UK FE/HE users will be able to use the system indefinitely. If demand is sufficient we will endeavour to continue the support service and issue future upgrades. TOIA has been built in conjunction with Freedom2Learn Ltd which is likely to further develop the system in years to come.”

I'll leave readers to draw their own conclusion about what this means for the long term funding of TOIA.

But what about the system itself?

Graham has made some comments, so I'm not going to repeat those here but I'll give a brief overview and highlight what I think are some issues with the system in its present guise.

The system separates the creation of questions and assessments in a similar way to Questionmark.

Instead of a hierarchial structure of topics and subtopics built into the questions there is something called the 'Content Structure' which holds the hierarchial strucuture instead. Questions are then associated with a topic or subtopic within that content structure. Unfortunately, it appeared that it was not possible to do the same with assessments which means it's not that really that different to Questionmark. The documentation also infers that you can attribute learning objects within this structure which would be useful but the documentation didn't make it clear how I would go about that.

It's the acutal creation of questions and assessments which is more interesting; it's all web based. Great, I thought, at last something that will be accessible to those academics that are not windows based.

Uh, no. The web based system employs a WYSIWYG editor (HTML and MathML) which is fantastic. The downside is that this functionality is only available in Internet Explorer, because the editor functionality takes advantage of some of the Active X extensions that are available through IE. While it supports IE 5.0 and above, this does mean that a section of the HE community (such a Computer Science/Maths) may miss out.

TOIA’s FAQ states that the reason they choose this route is that IE is used by 95% of the online community. Well, that’s true at present but it’s looking like the next version of IE will be the last, and this still doesn’t take into account all those who choose (or may be told) to use Mozilla/Firefox as their browser. While I can fully appreciate the technical reasons for going down the Windows/IE route, I hope the TOIA team strive to develop cross platform or multi-platform solutions because I think this is an under developed area.

While I found it relatively easy, as a Questionmark user, to create questions and assessments, there were areas that tripped me up and I could see a novice having more problems, as Graham found out.

The adminstration and reporting are similar to Questionmark, in that you can batch upload students and run reports on their assessments. The manual assignment of students to groups could soon become a pain - but I think this is an area that both TOIA and Questionmark could work on. The reporting looks comparable to Questionmark but being caught up with other areas of the system didn't give me the opportunity to look into this area as closely as I would have liked and I'm interested to see what extended reports the Premium version will offer.

Overall, I think TOIA has great potential. In my humble opinion, it still has some usability issues to sort out with the interface, and I have to agree with Graham, it really needs to produce some serious in-depth documentation, but if it listens to it's users and gets these problems ironed out then it's going to give the likes of Questionmark some stiff competition and, for the UK HE and FE sector as consumers, that can only be a good thing.

The multitude of JISC circulars and in particular the Technical Framework to Support E-Learning that Derek Morrison refers to in his article E-Learning: challenges to the neo-conservative model? are worth reading, especially if you're a developer considering developing any tools or applications that could work within this framework. But … I think the Technical Framework proposes a worthwhile architecture for the future of e-learning systems. However, as this is still a very new initiative, I'm a little concerned how a developer of any tool or application (User Agent in the Technical Framework) is actually going to produce the deliverables if the underlying services don't yet exist.

According to the JISC website there are presently 8 projects being funded under the Framework and Tools Strand of the e-Learning programme and I think there's some great work going on. These projects, however, are only working on a few of the many Common and Application services proposed in the Framework.

I think Scott Wilson's comment on Derek's article provides essential information on the key perspectives underlying development of these other services.

For those developers keen to develop their applications to take advantage of these web services, it seems they will have to wait a little longer until the services present 'vapourware' status solidifies into something a little more concrete. Nevertheless, if the JISC initiative delivers then there's a lot to be gained.

If you're working in the learning technology arena and feel pretty satisfied that you've got things pretty well bedded down in your institutions, based on a good well established relationship with your VLE vendors, then you certainly don't want to read this. Since the inception of Auricle I've argued in one form or another that e-learning as we currently know it has for many institutions been largely defined by whatever major proprietary VLE the institution has selected and supports. If you are new to this thread of argument or want to revisit it then select 'View by Category' from the right-hand menu and you'll find all the relevant articles in the VLE/MLE/Portals category.

So you don't believe me and want to counterclaim that the VLE is unimportant because it's the pedagogy which people focus on?

Then select a senior member of faculty or the executive and ask them to tell you about e-learning in the institution. The chances are that early in the response will come back the name of whatever VLE.

“Off course we've got the e-learning we've got product xyz to prove it!” 🙂

Excluding the learning technologists or faculty e-learning champions, for many faculty e-learning is the VLE.

Also, how much so called e-learning is really a proprietary VLE being used as a convenient content repository? If so, such services should surely be provided by simpler systems not attracting annual licensing fees?

But the winds of change are beginning to blow and I'm sure at least some of the current e-learning 'establishment' aren't going to like it. E-Learning is still relatively new and we could perhaps assume it's proponents are innovators, risk takers, change agents, challengers of the status-quo.

But is this actually the case?

One of the consequences of the headlong rush to off-the-shelf proprietary VLEs has, I would argue, created a level of conservatism and potential resistance to change that is, to understate the case, 'unfortunate' and may yet cost us dear. Anyone who has invested considerable time, effort, reputation and university finance in locking their institution into a long-term 'relationship' with a specific vendor is hardly going to find it easy to recommend their institution should now contemplate changing horses or courses. Instead they will opt for 'evolutionary change' in line with what their chosen vendor will allow. As we know, however, evolution is characterized by apparently long periods of stability interspersed with short extinction events followed by new species moving into the niche so created 🙂

So into this milieu comes the absolute flurry of programmes, projects and papers emerging from the JISC E-Learning Programme and Distributed E-Learning Programme. From here we find such enlightenment as: A Review of Learning Design: Concept Specification and Tools; Strategic Overview: HEFCE-Funded Distributed E-Learning Programme 2004-06 (Word document); A Technical Framework to Support E-Learning; and, most recently, JISC Circular 3/04 Call for Projects to Develop E-Learning Tools for Learners and Teachers (Word document). And that's only some of what's available.

Now whilst the quantity of the above could easily induce cognitive overload I do encourage readers to persist. You may be looking at the future shape of e-learning infrastructure and you wouldn't want to miss that would you?

At least read as much of Scott Wilson et al's paper A Technical Framework to Support e-Learning (Word doc) as you can digest and then follow that with the Sakai project's White Paper A Comparison between the JISC and Sakai Frameworks (PDF document).

Now it seems to me that much of recent JISC output is at least exciting and full of promise but I still have the concerns I expressed in my Auricle article E-Learning Flexible Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late?.

Also, the JISC 3/04 E-Learning Tools for Learners and Teacher call perhaps indicates that the barrier to entry to e-learning development is getting higher with development teams needing to be grounded in the minutiae of web services, interoperability, and technical frameworks, as well as pedagogy … this is way beyond questions of what VLE is best and perhaps implies the presence of significant teams (distributed or centralized) who can tackle major initiatives such as this. How many institutions now support such teams, and does this, therefore, bias such development towards bigger institutions?

Now while I like much of what JISC is proposing, let's now kid ourselves that it's a nice tidy interoperable world out there where everyone will get behind the services, tools and components model. The biggest impediment I see to the vision is those vested interests who will apparently embrace the vision but somehow will still manage to operate a classic 'lock in' model.

Finally, if we could but synergize the JISC vision and the nascent Higher Education Academy vision then that would be even more promising, but that's another Auricle article for another day.