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October 26, 2005
CIT Sessions 10/25/2005
I went to a number of sessions today at the League's CIT conference.
Got RLOs? was a presentation discussing what they were, how they can be found and created and discussed some of Florida's efforts at definind and using RLOs. For more details read below.
Sakai: An Open Course CMS presented on the Sakai project, the features it has and how it is evolving. More details are below.
The General Session was the History of Video Games by Andre LaMothe, founder of Xtreme Games, LLC. and is available via streaming video to member institutions of the League, I encourage you to check it out - it is definitely a walk down memory lane!
10-25-blog
Today, I started out with a session titled, “Got RLOs?”
The presenters were, Vicki Westergard of St. Petersburg College and Elspeth McCulloch of Brevard Community College.
They’ve defined RLOs as an interactive WWW-based resource based on a single learning objective which can be used in multiple contexts. This definition was from SONET at the University of Nottingham. For more information on what they are doing, visit:
www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/rlos
They indicated that RLOs can:
Be static or dynamic,
Have high, medium or low interactivity
Provide practice, explanations or evaluation
Be used online or face-to-face
There was great humor by the presenters – the entire room was engaged and enjoyed the presentation.
They indicated that their own obscured RLO definition requires that RLOs contain:
Objective
Content
Practice and assessment
It should be smaller than a module and bigger than an asset ~15 minutes and can be loaded into your LMS
Additionally, they believe that RLOs should be standards based
I found that what they were saying was quite inline with what we are doing with the RWLOs project.
They provided information on the following standards:
SREB Guidelines for Digital Media
SCORM (see ADL Co-Lab)
SCORE Guidelines for Meta-Data
They demonstrated examples of RLOs in the following formats:
Web pages
Flash cars
Drag and drop
Video lecture
Puzzles
They have a RLO repository at St. Petersburg College
They had some great interactive RLOs with streaming video, etc. – check out the RLO on unrinary histology! They have FLASH developers on staff.
They indicated that there are three ways to get RLOs:
Hire someone to make them
Find them
Make them yourself
They had a federal FIPSE grant, Project Diesel ~ $10 million dollars – for the creation of anytime anywhere education – they created an ed tech department focused on tech and have technologists that work with the faculty. They have technology design specialists, programmers (flash, cold fusion, director, etc) and they also train faculty on how to do their own with a template. The project is called Project Eagle.
They indicated that you can find them, they provided references to:
Wisc online
Merlot
SPC it.spcollege.edu
BCC/UCF list of digital assets
http://tux.cdws.ucf.edu/dlss/index.php/Digital_Asset_Repositories
may be clss instead of dlss
they have a great list of repositories on a wiki site as well as NSF sites to find open source digital assets to build RLOs
This was a great use of a wiki!
They introduced The Orange Grove, which is Florida’s K20 Digital Repository
This repository includes the repository itself, copyright management and versioning control. There is not that much in it yet but there will be soon
They also indicated that you can make them yourself using the following software:
Course Genie (owned by Horizon WIMBA) – works through MSWord (learning object assembly tool) – does assessment and is SCORM-based so gradebook interactivity
Camtasia – use for guided tutorials
StudyMate
SoftChalk LessonBuilder
Question Writer
Demonstrated use of Camtasia,, Course Genie and LessonBuilder.
They referred to the blog. “IT Confessions of an Instructional technologist” by Evan Straub.
They talked about the MLX and indicated that it was a repository by Maricopa that faculty contribute to and anyone can access.
They described a funeral services RLO that they do not have in their repository but helps funeral directors set up for culturally different funerals. They also mentioned that they have an interesting Physics soundwaves RLO
The presentation can be found at: www.spcollege.edu/eagle/research/presentations (it will be available on Thursday)
Sakai: An Open Source CMS
This project is based on work of initial grant. MIT, U Michigan, Stanford, Indiana U, uPortal Consortium and Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) $2.4 million from Mellon and HP for a Total of ~$7 million 2004-2006
The presenters discussed that this distributed approach to a LMS gives us the ability to rapidly innovate, way to be able to keep legacy systems after individual proponents leave. It is built on open standards in collaboration with others. Sakai partners contribute $10,000 per year. MCCD is a partner. They encourage commercial partners.
It is based on the OSP Open Source Portfolio Initiative.
They feel that Sakai is a collaborative learning environment – suitable for use in teaching and learning, research collaboration and as hoc communication
Some of the tools that are included in Sakai are:
Chat room
Email
News/RSS
+ regular BB stuff
Wiki
Blog
Shared display
Shared whiteboard
Multicast audio
Multicast video
Open portfolio
Twin peaks – library resources
Meletes – navigation, licensing – authoring tool
Sakai supports teaching and learning and distributed collaboration
Peaked at about 4000 users at U Michigan,
-this is 30-40% of capacity
They currently have:
2645 classes
4588 project sites
848 gradtools student sites
~20000 unique users on a busy day
Everyone can set up a work site
They have a number of colleges/universities in the process of adoption. For more information on this google “Sakai Adoption Plans”
It appears that the community colleges are focussed on tool development
Want to keep the cost down, drive innovation up. Some tools that have been developed include:
Sis integration
Account management
Hosting
Help desk support
User community
Training & pedagogy
Melete – lesson builder
Conducted gap analysis to see what were deficiencies between legacy system and sakai
Wanted lesson builder
Composing on web
Linking to web sites
Uploadaing docs
Metadata – accessibility
Built in licensing
They did not like the discussion tool – lacking collaborative features – now beta testing a new discussion tool
Adding Built in messaging.
Adoption options include:
Do it yourself
Outsourcing options
Consortia efforts
Distributed development
Shooting for 99.9% of up time = ~ 3 hours per year. This is a young project 18 months old.
The presenters recommended the book by Steven Weber “The Success of Open Source”
They indicated that the open Source Community in higher education is awakening and that collaboration, community participation is impacting the academy as a whole
For more information check out sakaiproject.org
Andre LaMothe presented at the general session on the history of video gaming. His presentation chronicled the evolution of video games and he demonstrated some of the games as well. It was fun to watch as I had played all of the games being the geek that I am. I encourage you to view his presentation via streaming video at the League's iStream portal.
He drove the presentation home by providing some resources for creating video gaming curriculum.
Posted by lyoung at October 26, 2005 09:07 AM in category
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Comments...
Important to remember moodle in any discussions of open-source LMS. Moodle has an established base of over 6000 installs worldwide, is a single installation that is portable across all platforms (that is, courses can be backed up and restored) and supports over 60 languages.
There is a lot of back end interest by the SAKAI folks in moodle because it is spreading rapidly and if nothing is worked out, moodle may well eclipse sakai.
Regards, and thanks for your good work. Takes a lot of energy to summarize these conference sessions- wouldn't it be great to have a consolidated conference summary site for every big conference.... sigh...
d.i.
Posted by: D.I. von Briesen at November 12, 2005 09:59 AM
