TechTalks Transcript
Course Management Systems: Today and Tomorrow
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Serge Goldstein [SG] |
 Dirk Herr-Hoyman [DH] |
April 19, 2001
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JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk Series for spring of 2001 and to this session on Course Management Systems: Today and Tomorrow. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and our session is coming to you today with the support of the CREN member institutions and Blackboard.com. Blackboard powers eLearning and related commerce in the academic marketplace. Be sure to take the self-guided tour of the course and portalware from the link on our event site.
I'd like to welcome Howard Strauss of Princeton as the technology anchor for Tech Talk, and as you all know, Howard is a well-known web technology expert, portal expert and religion expert. Welcome, Howard!
HS: Oh, my gosh! I don't know! I'm going to be doing keynotes on religion now, that's a very difficult thing to do!
JB: That's right, that's what'll happen now!
HS: Here. But thank you anyway, Judith! I'm Howard Strauss, I'm the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. Today we'll engage our guest experts, Serge Goldstein and Dirk Herr-Hoyman, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about the emerging strategic technology of course management systems and we'll ask Dirk and Serge those very important follow-up questions. You can ask your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this live webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive.
Many faculty remain skeptical today of the value of technology to positively influence teaching and learning. Universities have spent fortunes on instructional technology. While IT departments have promised a great deal, they have delivered very little beyond e-mail and web browsers with personality disorders.
In the 50's, broadcast television in the classroom was going to revolutionize teaching and learning. Then closed circuit television, 35 mm movies, hand-held calculators, LOGO, the computer language for kids of the future, personal computers and now courses online on the Internet. One technology after another has been tried and forgotten, replaced by the new newest thing.
Teaching and learning are actually quite simple things. People do it throughout their lives, starting from the first seconds after they are born, and it can be quite an enjoyable thing, too, if helpful people don't get in the way of this very natural process. Albert Einstein once said that, "teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty." Universities are all searching for tools that will make teaching much less of a hard duty and much more of the joy it should be for both students and faculty. Since most instruction on campuses today is done in modules we call courses, a system to manage those courses perhaps would help.
Many software vendors now offer systems called Course Management Systems that claim to do just that. These systems do not teach and do not, of themselves, influence the way courses are taught. They do provide basic services such as chat rooms, discussion lists, e-mail lists, drop boxes and places to put or link the web pages that a faculty member builds by hook or by crook. Course management systems are the infrastructure for online courseware like the wiring in a house is the infrastructure for modern living.
But a course management system does not provide the equivalent of any appliances in your house-no refrigerators, stereos or electric can openers. Those must be built or purchased separately. So faculty still need to find ways to develop, build or buy the online content and services for use with a Course Management System. Do we really believe that something as simple as a course infrastructure can revolutionize teaching and learning?
It just might.
Standard wiring in a house and standardizing on standard three-prong plugs for standard 110 volt, 60 cycle alternating current-at least in the United States-has enabled appliance builders to fill our homes with gadgets that they know will work everywhere. IT folks would call this an appliance API, and like any standard application interface, it gives creative people everywhere a huge market that they can fill.
Chaos theory suggests that a single butterfly flapping its wings on one continent can dramatically affect the weather on another. Chaos theory also says that it's equally possible that the butterfly will only strengthen its biceps. When a Course Management System flutters by your campus, will it dramatically change teaching and learning or will it just be an exercise for your administration and IT folks? Chaos theory can't give us the answer, but our intrepid Course Management System experts are ready to assess the capabilities of this course management butterfly on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Thank you, Howard, and it's really fascinating to hear you talk about chaos and management in the same breath!
HS: I thought they were one and the same thing!
JB: Almost sounds like it, right? I do think that just one comment as we talk about Course Management Systems today, I think one of the mantras of our technology age is that we do learn, Howard, that our tools that we use do change us in often unforeseen ways and so we'll be anxious to see and hear from our experts on this topic today.
So let me go ahead and welcome our two experts to today's Tech Talk; Serge Goldstein of Princeton and Dirk Herr-Hoyman of the University of Wisconsin. Our first expert, Serge Goldstein, is the Director of Academic Services at Princeton University and has been involved in Princeton's implementation of Blackboard's CourseInfo products since its beginning in about, I think, '97, '98. We'll hear from Serge. It is now hosting web pages for almost ever course at Princeton, almost 1,000 sites each semester. Lots of questions I'm sure we'll all have on both the past, present and future of Blackboard at Princeton. Welcome, Serge!
SG: Ah! Well, it's a pleasure to be here, wherever "here" actually might be. I guess it's a virtual "here."
JB: That's right.
HS: It's a pleasure to be here.
JB: You're right down the hall from Howard today, right?
SG: Yes, I am. Physically.
JB: Okay. Well, let's welcome our second expert, Dirk Herr-Hoyman, who is from the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Division of Information Technology there. He is a Project Manager in the Library and Information Retrieval Applications Group. I noticed, Dirk, by the way, that your title has a sequence of titles, about four or five of them, in fact. You are also called a member of the institution's web-based Learning Systems Team. You are using another well-known CMS called WebCT, so welcome, and where are you today?
DH: Where am I today?
JB: Yes.
DH: Sitting in not-so-sunny Madison.
JB: I bet it's cold, huh?
DH: Oh, it cooled off a little bit today.
JB: I thought that the best software was developed at places that were cold and dark.
DH: Exactly!
HS: [inaudible]�
JB: In caves, right?
DH: Exactly!
HS: [inaudible]�
JB: Well, thanks for being with us here today, Dirk.
DH: Very good! You're welcome.
HS: Dirk, could you start out by telling us what you think a course management system is?
DH: A course management system. Well, today what it looks like to me is products that come-that help us deliver instruction in the classroom and it seems to apply to systems that are delivered over the web. And these are bundling a set of tools that presumably made your life easier.
HS: You said "presumably" make your life easier?
DH: Well, right. It remains to be seen, but for us, it defines a class of software package that we know we're going to use, just like we have an HR system, we have a student information system and we have a library automation system. Now we have a CMS.
HS: Serge, you want to-do you think this-
SG: Yeah, I think in common parlance, course management systems-CMS's-are maybe distinguished from a thing called an LMS or learning management system. Course management systems, I think, focus on course content. They're basically web-based systems that let you create, manage and control access to course websites and learning management systems provide a lot of the back end of that, the actual management of courses, enrollment in courses, integration with your back end enterprise systems.
Now, of course, it's not a hard and fast distinction. Course management systems will usually have some enrollment component and some course catalogue components and what we sometimes call learning management systems-things like the PeopleSoft Student Systems-will have some content management component as well. But I think the distinction, nevertheless, is somewhat useful and to talk about a course management system as something that really focuses on allowing you to manage course content through the web.
HS: But Serge, you're saying that a course management system and a learning management system really are two different products? You'd buy them separately?
SG: Yes. You can buy them separately, and then you have the task, of course, of trying to integrate them.
HS: But are there people that make them where you don't buy them separately, where you just buy one of them?
SG: Well, yes. I think that there are course management systems like the Blackboard course management systems that have a lot of LMS-ish features. They try to be kind of a soup-to-nuts product. They try to have some level of course cataloguing, some level of enrollment capability. But generally, those will not be as sophisticated as in a pure learning management system which will have more sophisticated facilities for actually managing enrollment and course cataloguing, but maybe less sophisticated facilities for actually managing the course content.
HS: Dirk, if you wind up buying these things separately, if you wind up buying a separate CMS and LMS, do you have to worry about these things working together? Does buying one limit the other one that you can buy? How does that work?
DH: Well, certainly that's going to be a consideration at this point because we haven't really seen this area mature enough so that we get true plug-and-play interoperability, if you will. It's really only a few years old in this genre here, and we've done some of this ourselves here between WebCT and our PeopleSoft Student Information System.
HS: You mean you've kind of built some bridges between the two of them?
DH: Yes.
HS: Is that a common thing? Is that what a lot of people are doing?
DH: That's a story I've heard. Quite a few people do like us. I've also heard people-well, now we're talking about putting who is in what courses, which students are in which courses in because you're under authenticated access-which is one of the distinguishing features of this sort of a system compared to just a plain website. You know, you've kind of got to say, "This person is in this course and you get to go in." We've seen folks just try to manage that sort of outside of their official student data systems. That's another approach we've seen.
HS: But do you think that the people who make course management systems are going to grow in the direction of including this learning management system, or is it going to work the other way around, or is it going to be a big battle as both people try to grow into the other area? How's this going to play out?
DH: I think to me, it depends on which sector of the market you're looking at. You know, we're a certain type of a higher ed institution and we have a certain way of doing things. My feeling with some of these products is they're often addressed towards smaller, self-contained entities that it would kind of make sense to have it all do everything. So that's kind of, that segment of the market might be good for a department, for example, that was offering its own series. But I think if you get into more the established institutions providing education for degrees, we already know how our business is supposed to work, the business of higher education, if you will. And in that market, I think there will be a clear distinction between the two.
SG: I think it's right. If you look at a product like Blackboard, I think that in smaller schools, Blackboard will advertise that they have enough LMS functionality to handle the needs of the smaller schools, and it does have some considerable amount of LMS functionality. But for the larger schools with more complex needs, they'll want to marry the course management product with a full-blown learning management system. And Blackboard and WebCT advertise that they integrate well with the major LMS vendors like PeopleSoft and SCT and others.
HS: Serge, it looks like all of the big CMS's have pretty much the same components. Could you talk about the components that we're going to see in any one of these things?
SG: Yeah, I mean, there's-you can break them down into sort of a set of categories. There's a set of components that have to do with facilitated communication between faculty and students and among students, and those are things like chat facilities and discussion boards and e-mail facilities, list management type facilities. And then a set of facilities that have to do with actual exchange of documents and information, digital drop boxes, file upload facilities. And then another rather large area is assessment. Most of them typically have tools for creating quizzes or creating surveys.
Those are some of the big areas and I think that most of them offer something in all of those areas, and that the differences in features are not that great. I mean, one product will advertise, for example, that it allows you to do math equations with its product while another one might not, but then a year later, the other product will announce that now they support that, and in addition, they support something else. So the feature sets, I think, tend to be quite similar across the products and in point of fact, I don't think feature set really is a strong basis for making decisions about which of these products you might or might not want to go with.
HS: What is?
SG: Well, I think you have to look at the way the product will integrate with your institution culturally and with the back end systems. We talked a little bit about that. I think that when you start running a course management system, you run into a whole bunch of issues that are not really technical in nature, but they're more cultural in nature. They're like how well does a course management system fit in with the way you run your courses? Does it let you create websites in a fine enough granularity for what you want to do or does it have enough flexibility in terms of the way access is controlled or does it let you distribute administrative responsibilities? You want as good a match as possible with your institutional culture, and you have to realize that you won't get a perfect match and that one of the real challenges in running course management systems is trying to adapt these systems to your culture, to, if you will, your business rules or let's call them your educational rules. And you run into some really interesting situations when you try to do that, some interesting problems.
JB: Serge, when you are starting at an institution with a course management system, you know, sometimes I've heard that the leadership can come from different places to make this happen.
SG: Yes.
JB: How did this happen at Princeton?
SG: Well, I think we started out like many schools, with just sort of a small effort-let's call it a pilot effort-which was run mostly out of the central IT organization. And we brought in the product. When we started, we had already written our own. We had been writing our own course management system for a few years and we had something like, I don't know, 50 or so websites using it. And we made a decision that we just didn't want to keep supporting our own and we ran a sort of faculty bakeoff. We brought in the products that were then current and based on mostly ease of use-�
HS: [inaudible] faculty like Pillsbury.
JB: Yeah, we're going to lose some faculty in a faculty bakeoff here. You probably--
SG: Oh, sorry! A faculty, you know. They looked at the products and they said, "Let's go with Course Info," I think mostly largely on ease of use. So we brought it in and we started running it and we saw adoption grow quite quickly. And then last fall, we had something on the order of about 150 course websites at that point. And last fall the provost said, "Well, look, why don't we go ahead and try and build course websites for every course at Princeton, at least as a template, as a basis from which faculty can work." And we did that and we've been doing that now, this will now be our first year, and we've seen active use of those sites grow quite steadily. So initially, it was done out of the IT shop and then once it was visible, we got a higher level sort of endorsement of what we were doing and also endorsement of the notion of using one standardized product for the entire institution.
HS: Dirk, one of the things I see missing from a CMS-and maybe it ought to be-is things to help faculty build the websites that they're going to hook into a CMS. How should universities be addressing that problem>�
DH: Well, we've been thinking all along that you actually want to be creating your content and managing what ends up going into the course outside of the course management system. And then you put it in. So for example, if you're creating web content, you would create it outside in a package like Front Page or Dream Weaver, and then you put it into the package. Now, the packages here are kind of of two minds, WebCT and Blackboard both kind of have this, where they can facilitate you actually creating your site right within the package. But we've encouraged people to actually think about doing it outside of it and as you get into more sophisticated ways that you're going to have your content, you begin to see that that's more and more of an issue. And I think this is one of the directions to look for these products to evolve, too, kind of a little less "we're going to try to do everything on the web" and a little more, "oh, we're going to integrate into these more popular authoring systems."
HS: So you think people are doing this outside of the course management system because the course management system just really doesn't have the tools and you're think that it's not even appropriate for it to have the tools to do that kind of thing?
DH: Well, it's also kind of a question of what can you do through a pure web interface vs. what could you do with a native application. There's still that distinction.
HS: Dirk, a lot of people listening to this are going to say, "We have a lot of web pages out there already. We have web pages for every course. Why not just keep doing that?" I mean, why have this whole new genre of software? Why not just have a web page for every course and people do have e-mail and they have Instant Messenger and they have all this stuff. Why isn't that a good solution?
DH: Well, our basic thing there is the kind of authentication security envelope that you get out of the CMS system, in our case, WebCT. And we're going to provide this and think about security and you don't have to. Typically, when websites are created, the security is an afterthought and there's quite a bit where people are just creating this, putting it out there, and that's fine for content you're willing to let the whole world get into. But it's not so good when you actually don't want others to get into it for a variety of reasons. Then you also have a much better way to bring in other tools, the non-pure web pages, be it discussion groups, chats, quizzing. Actually, quizzing is probably at the top of our list as something people come in for. The gradebook would be another one. But for us, it's sort of the message is, "Look, we're going to provide this infrastructure for you and you won't have to worry about it." And it just kind of makes sense to funnel people that way.
HS: Serge, do you have a comment?
SG: Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, Dirk is focused on some of the wins, I think more from an administrative and faculty perspective. But one of the real wins with running a common course management system is the win for the students.
Having a common toolset, a common presentation, a common navigation interface is a huge win for the students. I mean, Princeton offers about a thousand courses per semester and to have every single one of those courses having a completely unique website with a completely different set of content, different kinds of navigation tools and so on is really quite complicated for students to deal with. So that's one win.
The other win is that it makes it a lot easier for IT shops and others to focus their faculty support efforts. If you have a common course management system, you can target your support around that and instead of having to worry about supporting many, many different flavors of course website engines, you can focus your support and I think ultimately that's a win for faculty. And there are some others. Integration with back end is much easier and also making sure that your course websites are meeting developing standards like the ADA standards. I mean, if your faculty is all building individual websites you now have to worry about thousands of different websites, all of which have to be potentially looked at in terms of ADA compliance.
So I think there's a lot of wins. Maybe the biggest is, I think, on the student side, but there are also wins in terms of the IT side and faculty on the support end.
HS: Serge, since you brought up the ADA issue, we just happen to have a question that Sid Lefko from Queens College CUNY wrote in. It's a longish kind of question but I'm going to try to condense it down to just a few words. Sid says, "What accessibility provisions have the CMS's in them now or will they have that facilitate using CMS's for people with certain kinds of disabilities?"
SG: Well, up to now there's been mostly talk, but I can't speak for all of them. Blackboard has told us that they are committed to ADA compliance. The current version of the software we're running has a kind of text-only feature that is useful for people with disabilities, people who are going through some kind of screen reader facility, but later versions may or may not have that.
But I think that it's critical that the vendors be responsive to needs of disabled people, people who have various kinds of difficulty accessing these websites. And I believe that most of the major ones-certainly Blackboard-have made some statements about commitment to that. Part of the difficulty with this, of course, is that these standards are themselves moving targets. ADA compliance is, it's unclear exactly what it means today to be ADA compliant.
HS: Well, there are the W3C standards.
SG: There are emerging standards and I think that'll be another win with a common course management system is that you can hope that that system will implement across the board some level of compliance.
JB: I think we'll probably see a little bit more. We did get the question in early enough that I sent a note off to Cindy Jones at Blackboard and she did come back with a reply saying that they had had the two folks, Norm Coombs and Dick Benks in from EZ to do an accessibility audit on the software. So I think those folks are putting some real effort behind this.
HS: And of course, we should note that even if the course management system folks make these things W3C accessibility compliant and ADA compliant, unless your university insists that faculty who develop the web pages that hang onto the course management systems also follow those guidelines, it's not going to be all that useful.
SG: Sure.
DH: Which actually we've-starting the beginning of this year, we now have a formal policy that every website, all the things on our website must be accessible.
HS: That is, it meets the W3C accessibility requirements?
DH: Yeah, roughly speaking. As it turns out, we even have on campus here the Trace Center, which is some of the authors of that very same guideline, so we'd kind of like to be in compliance! But as you said, it's both packages like this and the content that people are developing. I'd also add just real quickly that some of the same considerations come up when we start thinking about output devices like handhelds. You know, if you're going to be able to address that, it's really very similar to the accessibility considerations. So again, having a course management system can help you have a structure that will guide you to do the right things. That would certainly be what we're looking at any vendor providing.
JB: I think these questions maybe are a good segue into talking a little bit about standards. Is that where you were going, Howard?
HS: Nope, but that's okay, Judith!
JB: Okay.
JB: Well, here we go! All right. One of the concerns that has arisen with these course management systems is the ability to both plug and play and also to have standards for the objects and all within them. Let's see, Dirk, did you want to address maybe the SCORM standard?
DH: Well, sure. The SCORM is a relatively new entrant into the standards game pertaining to these systems. That stands for Scalable Course Object Reference Model and it's something that's actually been initiated out of the military sector. But pretty much all the communities doing online learning are getting behind this, including some of the existing standards efforts, which for higher ed would be IMS.
JB: Okay, so they're kind of-that's coming together then? [inaudible]�
DH: Yeah, so really, they're all talking about the same thing now. So to me, IMS and SCORM now pretty much mean the same thing, although I think if you dissect it, you may find some differences. But they're certainly talking together and trying to move things forward.
HS: Perhaps this is the time we should comment briefly on OKI as another possible standard or a standard that might appear in the future. Serge, you want to say a few words about that? Does that fit into the SCORM-IMS thing?
SG: Well, I think it does in a way. OKI, for those who don't know, stands for Open Knowledge Initiative. Open Knowledgeware Initiative, I think. And it is an initiative that's coming out of MIT and Stanford. And OKI as I understand it is an effort to create a sort of an architecture for course management systems. An architecture along with a reference implementation. And OKI is trying to define how course management systems should work, what they should look like internally, what their components should be. And it focuses on sort of building systems that are modular so that you can take different pieces and components of one, if you have an OKI compliant system, and plug it into another OKI compliant system. And what's exciting about that is once OKI is in place, there will be this reference implementation which a number of institutions, I think, are interested in looking at.
But in addition, there will be something for the vendors to look at and target in terms of the development of their own software. We can hope that someday the chat engine from one vendor might actually plug and play in the course management system from another vendor. And that is sort of the promise of OKI, if you will, that we'll be able to specify an architecture for integrating all the different pieces that you might or might not want to use within a course management system.
HS: In fact, we just got a question from Graham Glynn at Creighton University in Omaha. And I think he carries the thing just a little bit further. He says, "A company like Blackboard or WebCT cannot produce the best software in all areas and tools. Is an approach that glues together the best of breed software not better?" My question would be, just to expand on that, do we have to wait for OKI to use the best of breed software or are the existing vendors allowing us to do that?
SG: The existing vendors-well, let me talk about Blackboard-have an initiative where they hope to become an infrastructure which will allow for this kind of modular plug and play. Their current product and forthcoming products have a set of API's and other vendors can write to those API's. So for example, I could write a calendaring product that would work and one that would talk to the Blackboard API. So yes, I think some of the vendors are saying "Absolutely, we will."
But the problem is, you know, Blackboard's API will be Blackboard's API. WebCT's will be WebCT's. And so vendors would have to develop unique interfaces. The idea behind OKI is they can establish, if you will, a standard API and if vendors like Blackboard and WebCT support that, then the other-the third party, if you will, providers wouldn't have to write 16 different versions of their software. As it stands right now, they do. You can't write something that just plugs and plays with Blackboard without specifically designing it to work specifically with Blackboard.
HS: But if Blackboard has an API and WebCT has an API and OKI has an API, why would we decide that OKI's is the best of the three API's?
SG: It isn't so much that it's the best. It's a common one that we can-if it's good enough, and I suspect-�
HS: Can't we use the Blackboard one?
SG: If it's coming out of MIT it's likely to be at least very good. But the idea is to pick one, to have a common one so that everybody can write to that and now you can get this kind of modular interoperability. And Blackboard and WebCT, from the statements I've seen from them, sort of welcome this effort. I mean, in that sense, it gives them something to write against. They can write their API's against that standard. Now, how it'll actually work out, you know, vendors do have a vested interest in making their stuff a bit proprietary so the proof will be in the pudding here.
DH: I can speak a bit to WebCT without, I suppose, giving stuff away because I do have some nondisclosure stuff.
HS: [inaudible] quiet [inaudible].
JB: Everybody's listening real carefully now!
DH: Yeah, listen real carefully!
HS: [inaudible]�
DH: But we have had quite a few in-depth discussions with WebCT, partly through a product advisory board that I had been on the last couple years. And they, too, are trying to move in a direction to provide a bit more of an open architecture. But when pushed to commit that they will publish their API and stand behind it, eh, you know, I kind of saw some waffling. Well, this is understandable from their perspective because it's kind of like what do they get out of it from doing that? They're not sure. So that's partly where they OKI could be a factor here. It can maybe encourage the right thing to happen because there isn't the same vested interest in my product being the one and I want to tell you how to get into it because you might get some advantage out of it. Which is a very real factor for these vendors!
JB: Okay, I'm almost concerned to remind everyone that now is a good time to send in their questions. We may get overwhelmed here, but now is a good time to send in questions and comments and we've had some other ones coming in. We had one request, and let's perhaps go this route, from Richard Danielson at Laurentian. He was saying that he'd be interested in hearing what each of you think is the best unique feature of the product most familiarized by the other expert on today's session. Did I get that clear enough, in other words, Dirk? What you think is the best feature of Blackboard and Serge, what you think is the best feature of WebCT?
HS: That's awful!
JB: You want to go there?
SG: Well, I'm not sure I know all the features of WebCT. The one that I will point to that I believe is how WebCT works and we certainly like is I believe in WebCT there's this idea that if you have some content, you can load it up into sort of-I'm not going to call it a digital library, but a central area in WebCT and then make it available at a number of different course websites so you don't-content isn't specifically associated with a website, it's associated more generally with the system. In Blackboard, content is currently specifically associated with a website so if I want to make the same document available in six websites, I essentially have to load it up six different times and that's a problem. It's one that Blackboard is addressing, I think, in version 6 of their product, but it's a feature of WebCT that we'd certainly like to have.
JB: Okay, well, that's a good direction.
SG: Is it there, Dirk? Did I get that right?
DH: That would be a new feature!
SG: It would? I thought that's how WebCT worked. As I told you, I'm not very familiar with WebCT.
DH: And on Blackboard, they provide a kind of a one size fits all user interface model which is good to get into, easy to get into with a bit more navigation aids that are sitting right there that you actually can play with. So this is good for people getting in quickly into doing something, so that seems to be-that has been traditionally the strength of Blackboard.
HS: Okay, Dirk, just going off in another area here, we have a question in from Don Garelli at the Washington Research Library Consortium, so you can bet this question's going to be about libraries. And his question is, "What opportunities and mechanisms exist for integrating course management systems with online library resources?" We think of these CMS's as managing courses, but libraries are now an important part of the university and how do these things fit in?
DH: Well, at this point, they're pretty much two distinct systems and we hope to see them come closer together, too. What we need are some interfaces or standard ways of having-let's say, typically this is what happens with a library, like say the course reserves, right? There's course reserves for your course and that gets managed by the library and they put it up on a website somewhere. We have to get cooperation about, well, how do we get to that website and what do we name it and everything? HS So that in every course, there's some little icon that says Web Reserves or [inaudible] Reserves, something like that.
DH: Yeah, and then it's just there as a facility and for our instructors, they just sort of say, "Oh! I want to get something into my course reserves. Here's the place that I put it in" and the request goes over there. That type of integration isn't there today but it's certainly something that we've been thinking about here.
HS: Serge?
SG: Well, yeah, there isn't any kind of smooth integration. We have done some amount of integrating our e-reserve systems. They're two separate systems but we essentially link them just through URL's and through a bit of common authentication.
That's one of the issues you need to solve is, you know, someone logs into your course management system and then goes to access some restricted library resource like an e-reserve. You don't want them to have to login again to the [inaudible] of the credentials and we're doing that through a rather hokey fashion right now, sort of seat of our pants. That level of integration doesn't exist and it needs to exist. The other thing is what I was referring to earlier. The WebCT feature I thought was there but may not be is this whole notion of a digital archive, a library, and ultimately you want that tied into your library systems. And in fact, OKI explicitly, for example, talks about the storage system, the digital storage system as being quite distinct from the course management system and being possibly part of what the library is managing.
HS: Could we talk briefly about using these CMS's for other things, other than courses? Like if some student organization looks at the CMS and says, "Hey, that's a neat thing! It's got all this communications stuff and things like that. I'd like to put a presence out there that is the student organization out there, not a course." Is that being done? Can it be done? Is it a useful thing to do?
DH: We've encouraged people to not go there ourselves! Partly because we didn't feel the product was quite good enough to deal with all of that. Wasn't really designed for some of those other non-instructional needs. So that's been our view.
HS: Okay, Serge?
SG: Exactly the opposite! We've seen quite a bit of use outside of courses. I think partly that has to do with the way you run the systems. Our system is centrally managed and we don't charge for creating course websites so a lot of groups on campus look around and say, "Hmm! Here's a system, you guys manage it, you guys support it, the disk space is free and it's got a document upload and a digital drop box and a discussion facility and chat and all this. And yes, the buttons are called COURSE DOCUMENTS and so on, but we can get around that." And so it's a packaging of a lot of attractive features that make it very useful for various kinds of organizations. We even have some faculty using it, for example, who are writing a book and want to collaborate with others and find it is just a useful kind of central depository of different kinds of information.
JB: That's an interesting use! What about it being used as a portal? Should the CMS system be your campus portal?
DH: Well, my view is-or our view here is that the portal is going to be a portal for the entire university community, not just for the instruction, not just for students. So this is going to include staff, it's going to include faculty and it's going to include integrating with all those systems, the HR and so on. So we see this as basically a whole other class of software package, although there are overlapping components to it.
HS: Though a place like Worcester Polytechnic in New England has taken Blackboard and said that's their portal.
DH: That's right.
HS: So some people have done that.
SG: Well, Blackboard packages the epicentric portal. It has a kind of standard portal that you can use in a variety of ways. It has a whole set of channels and you can use it as a core portal.
But even if you don't, if you use some other portal, I think the vital thing is that you integrate your course management system with whatever portal you're using because, quite frankly, one of the big wins for your students and others is the ability-since you're running a common course management system-for the students at a glance to be able to login and sort of see a cumulative view of everything that's going on in their courses, all the announcements, the events, everything associated with their courses in an integrated fashion.
HS: Is that true of faculty, too? When you say students should be able to do that, should faculty, too?
SG: And faculty as well. That's what a portal gives you and you definitely want that. You want your academic information included in that. And by the way, that's another reason why using a course management system as opposed to having everybody roll their own is advantageous because you can integrate these things through a portal view that provides everyone with sort of a snapshot of what's of interest to them at the university.
HS: Dirk, we've talked about the benefits to students. What about the benefits to faculty? Do faculty get a big benefit out of using one of these course management systems?
DH: Well, the faculty that we've seen using them, of course, are the early adopters, the more technical-savvy ones. And for them actually, it's more work.
What we're trying to get to, though, is that this is actually something that'll save you, that makes it easier to manage your course, really thinking about it in a course management way. And it might not be that you'd use all the features and all of that, but admittedly there's a lot more work for the faculty side because they're the ones that are responsible for building it in. They're the content producers, if you will.
So Serge was talking earlier about it being a big obvious win for the students. From the faculty side, it's a less obvious situation and there's more reluctance there to get into it. But still, I think over time, we'll see that it will become part of the standard toolset, if you will, much like PowerPoint, I think, has become part of the standard toolset that people are using for instruction.
HS: Serge, would you agree that if there's some reluctance on the part of the faculty, what will make them get by that?
SG: Well, I think you have to lower the barriers to entry. I mean, I think for most faculty, this is a cost-benefit analysis and they don't necessarily see the benefits as being that great. Yes, there are benefits and it is beneficial to their students and so on, but these are course websites. These are not research sites, they're not scholarly sites, so they're not going to help a faculty member get tenure, or are unlikely to. So the benefits are not that clear, so you want to make the cost as low as possible, which means having very good support, which means in our case, we pre-build the sites and make it as easy as possible for faculty to use them.
There's another benefit which I think will start to become clear over time and that is a lot of faculty will build a course website on their own and they get very excited about it and they put a lot of effort into it and it might be a very jazzy site with flash and so on and so forth. And then you get this, a year or two, they start to kind of get a little disenchanted. You know, it's a lot of work and continuing to keep it up to date is a lot of work and you get this sort of faculty fatigue and you end up with these orphaned websites. You see them all over. You click on them and nothing's been posted to them in years and years because there was initially a lot of excitement and then it kind of wore off.
But with the course management systems which are more centrally managed and organized, the idea is that your IT support organization can keep moving these things along. Because of the support there, these are more long-term investments and to a faculty member teaching the same course year after year after year or every other year, something like that, it's going to become a real resource and ultimately, I think, can facilitate instruction.
JB: Well, I think we have another question and it is linked to perhaps the benefits of the central management that you might be able to address. It's from Kitty Rings from Arizona State and she said that she would be interested in comments on how long a student should have access to a course site and their course documents and homework. We'd kind of talked about this during our prep session and I think it's an important issue to get on the table.
HS: Serge, want to talk about it?
SG: Yeah, Judith, I think this is one of those big cultural issues, institutional business role issue that you have to deal with when you run these systems. I mean, a traditional course ends at the end of a semester and that's that, but what do you do when you have a course website? When does it go away, if ever? Who should be able to access it and for how long? Should a senior be able to look back at a course website of a course that he or she attended as a freshman, which might be relevant to what they're doing now? How do you manage in the long term these websites? Because what you're really doing with these course websites is you're building up this digital store of instructional data and instructional resources. And these questions are just beginning to be asked.
I don't think there are any clear answers, but they are certainly ones that should be addressed by institutions as they think about course management systems. They're the ones that are giving us the hardest time. I don't think there is a clear answer to that question because it involves issues about copyright, it involves a lot of issues about authentication. What happens when the student leaves, as an alumnus? Should they still have access to these sites? And how would you even manage that if you wanted to do it?
JB: The IT shop might have more things to do, right?
HS: Dirk, could we talk just briefly of the cost of getting one of these things up on a campus? What does it cost to do this?
DH: What does it cost to do it? Well, it turns out the licensing cost of the software, at least at this stage, has been a relatively minor cost. So has the hardware to put it up. The real costs have been in the staff time, in not so much managing the system but managing the users, if you will, and most of our costs are there. Interacting with the faculty, talking about both in training and in support, how they deal with it. And this is the kind of product that's different than, like, a word processor where you feel like you can just have a little training and go off and use it. This is like, you do a little bit of training and then you've just started! And you expect to get more support costs after that. You just will.
HS: Okay, Serge, do you have any comment on that?
SG: No, I absolutely agree. It's the ongoing support costs, the people costs of training and getting people out to work with faculty. I know everybody saw the announcement about MIT's OCW, Open Courseware Initiative. So we're talking about huge amounts of money, I think something like a hundred million over ten years, and clearly those are not going to be software or hardware costs. Those are going to be the costs of providing support to the faculty, of getting people out there actually helping faculty digitize their material, organize it, put it up in a compelling fashion.
HS: Okay, we're-believe it or not-getting toward the end of this session here. I wonder, since we're getting toward the end, Dirk, if you would comment on where you think these course management systems are going?
DH: Well, one trend that I'm seeing is toward the best of breed model. For example, we're looking at using Question Mark as kind of an upgrade to the quiz module in WebCT.
HS: Question Mark is a software product?
DH: Yeah, it's basically a best of breed quizzing, exam tool and they're a vendor that's been in this market for quite some time and recently have done something in the web space. And I believe that Blackboard is also supported by them, too, if I'm not mistaken.
SG: It does or planned to be. I don't think it is right now but I believe they're talking about making it something that you'll be able to plug into Blackboard.
HS: Serge, do you have any ideas about where this whole thing is going?
JB: That's a sigh!
SG: Well, one of those things that's happening is the realization that this is a strategic product for a lot of institutions and that it has to be treated that way, so you have to be willing to dedicate the manpower and the equipment and the resources to really run it and run it well. I think these systems will mature and integrate ultimately better with other parts of the strategic-if you will, the enterprise software at institutions. But beyond that, no, I think it's hard to predict. I mean, who knew the web was going to be around five years ago? I mean, where things like this are going, I think it's be very hard for anyone to say. I'm challenged enough to just know where we're going to be a year from now, much less long term.
JB: I think when you said "strategic" that may say it all, though, that somewhere, someone in either the IT shop or central administration-it's a budget area that needs to be factored in, don't you think?
SG: Yeah, you don't want to do this on the cheap. I mean, if you're not willing to invest the resources that need to be invested, it's probably not a path you want to take.
JB: Okay, great. Howard, we have so many questions and yet we're virtually out of time.
HS: Yeah, we're virtually out of time here. So you want to ask me if I want to ask a couple last questions here?
JB: Yes.
HS: Okay, I do.
JB: Now is the time!
HS: I want to get two more questions in.
HS: Then we'll end it here. Serge, if a university doesn't have a CMS today, what should they be doing? What steps should they be taking right now if they don't have one of these things?
SG: Before they talk about instituting a CMS, I think the institution has to decide what it wants to do overall, what its strategy is in terms of education and where it's going. A lot of institutions have plunged into distance ed, for example, thinking that this could be a moneymaker and that's turning out in most cases not to be true. I think you have to look at your institutional culture and decide what it is you're trying to do, what are you trying to accomplish with instruction in general and with course websites?
One of the things we haven't discussed, by the way, is that many people feel that course websites and course management systems do have an unintended effect, if you will, and that is that they tend to push people a little bit more towards a learner-centered model of teaching. And that's one of the things you have to think about. I don't believe that if you implement one of these things it's going to be "neutral" in terms of your instruction, at least not in the long term. I think it will have an impact so you have to think about what you want to do in terms of instruction, strategically where your institution is going and does it make sense to you in that context to run a centralized course management system? And then look at your culture and if you do think it does, pick one that is going to integrate well with your strategic goals and the culture of your institution.
JB: Can I jump in right here?
HS: Sure.
JB: One impression that I'd certainly like to kind of share with our audience is the fact that even though both Wisconsin and Princeton have made great strides in the use of these systems, by no means is 100% of the faculty really using it wholly. So just quickly from each of you, what is the percentage of faculty that are really into it right now?
HS: Dirk?
DH: Oh, gosh!
HS: That's a good number.
DH: We have about 600 out of 4,000 possible courses in WebCT, so we're 20, 25%, in that range.
SG: Yeah, all our courses have course websites, but that number is about the same here. Maybe a little bit more, maybe about 30%. Maybe about a third of our faculty are actively using those sites and a small number very casually using the sites.
HS: Okay, one last question here, if we could get a brief answer from each of you. Dirk, how do you measure the success of a CMS? You put one in, how do you know that this has been a good thing to do?
DH: We would measure success based on both student and faculty feedback, basically. Did this help?
HS: And are you getting it?
DH: We're getting that from the students, certainly. They like it and appreciate it. I think the faculty keep using it and the numbers keep growing, so I think that's perhaps another measure.
HS: Okay, Serge, want to say a couple words about that?
SG: Yeah. I think success is relative to a goal and you have to first ask your question, what is your goal and have you achieved it? My goal with the systems was essentially centered around students and providing core course information to students in an easy-to-use fashion. In that sense, we've been successful. Secondarily, making it easy for faculty to upload their basic content. Not as successful, but we're sort of moving in that direction. JB: Okay, great! Howard, a final question or comment?
HS: I just asked a question.
JB: Those are just wonderful answers!
HS: This is certainly interesting stuff and I think it was mentioned a couple of times during this talk that we are on the beginning of this kind of stuff. This is not a mature technology yet and I think we're going to see a lot of stuff happen in this area.
JB: Okay, thanks very much, Howard, and I'd like to just thank everyone who participated with us here today and sorry we couldn't get to all the questions, but we will forward some of those to our experts for perhaps a comment after the session. Be sure to plan on joining us two weeks for today, on May 3rd, when our topic will be interestingly called "Pandora's Box: Firewalls and Campus Security," and our two guest experts will be Claire Goldsmith from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Randy Marchany from Virginia Tech.
Many thanks to the CREN member institutions and to Blackboard for their support of CREN and these Tech Talks. As I mentioned, Blackboard powers eLearning and commerce in the academic marketplace. A special thanks to our Tech Talk experts today, Serge Goldstein and Dirk Herr-Hoyman; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; and finally a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, Serge. Bye, Dirk. Bye, Howard.
HS: Bye. Thank you, this was fun.
JB: See you all in two weeks and thanks to the audience. Bye.
HS: Bye bye.
DH: Very good.
END OF WEBCAST
