TechTalks Transcript
Course Management Systems and Learning Tools - Where Are We at the End of 2002?
November 7, 2002
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 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Charles Kerns [CK] |
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk Series for fall of 2002 and to this session on Course Management Systems and Learning Tools�Where Are We at the End of 2002? You are here because it�s time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host, and our session is coming to you with the support of our CREN member institutions today. Let me welcome Howard Strauss, our Tech Talk technology anchor. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Thank you, Judith. I�m Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. Today we�ll engage our guest expert, Charles Kerns, in a lively technical dialogue that will answer your questions about the emerging�oops! That will answer your questions about course management systems. And we�ll ask Charles 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. Sam Cooke, in his song �Wonderful World,� wrote about a basic challenge facing students at institutions of higher education. In case you forgot the lyrics to this memorable song, they begin with a student bemoaning the difficulty of academia. I quote:
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Don�t know much about history��
Don�t know much biology��
Don�t know much about a science book��
Don�t know much about the French I took...�
Don�t know much about geography��
Don�t know much trigonometry��
Don�t know much about algebra....�
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But I do know that I love you�
And I know that if you loved me too,�
What a wonderful world this would be.
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I don�t claim to be an A student,�
But I�m trying to be!�
JB: Thank you, Howard. You know, I kept waiting for you to break into real song!
HS: I couldn�t!
JB: You�ve only done that one other time in the past, right?
HS: Right. I just don�t plan a singing career at this point.
JB: Or��
HS: But Charles, if you�d like to sing it, it�s okay.
CK: I just do the bass line.
JB: Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction, Howard. It turns out that certainly with all these wonderful tools that our faculty have, it still means that we have to fill them somehow and work the content into all of these tools. And with that, I think, the pedagogy. So I�m really excited that we�re going to be talking today about the vision of where we�re going with the course management systems and learning management systems, with hopefully a goal of really focusing more on the learning. And then we will all break into song, Howard!
HS: Okay. You start first, Judith!
JB: With that, let�s welcome our guest, Charles Kerns from Stanford. Charles is the Education Technology Manager for the Coursework Project at Stanford. He�s been working for the last two years on the development of an open source course management system in conjunction with the OKI, or Open Knowledge Initiative, based at MIT. I really like Charles� title which I think we should spend just a moment on. We don�t have too many of these folks out there with this kind of a title, but he is an Educational Interaction Designer and has spent a number of years, both at the Stanford Learning Lab and also was a senior research scientist at Apple�s Multimedia Lab back�when was that, Charles?
CK: �89 to �94.
JB: �89, okay.
CK: You would like my title there better. My official job title was Captain Video.
JB: Captain Video? All right! Well, welcome to Tech Talks, Charles.
CK: Thank you.
HS: Charles, we�re going to get pretty deeply into this very soon but why don�t we start by getting your definition of what a course management system is or what kind of things are in it, and perhaps you could also tell us how it�s different, if at all, from a learning management system.
CK: Well, the easiest way to talk about these is historical because they are defined by tools that are out there. The faculty and TA�s started putting up websites and they started building systems that had these features of announcements, putting up content, putting up a course webpage. So with the materials that you need to give a course in academia was what a course management system was. The learning management systems came out of training and industry where you need a catalog, you need a way to sign up, you need a way for your boss to approve it. So you end up with what we would call student information systems�I guess you�d call them worker information systems in business�and they�re integrated into it and that�s called a learning management system. There�s no more learning in a learning management system than a course management system, but those are the terms that they were given several years ago.
HS: So what do you see as the really important features, the critical features in a course management system?
CK: Well, there�s two kinds of features. One is the administration of the course features, and some people say, �Well, that�s not pedagogy.� But if you can do something that saves the faculty time and makes it easier for them to do something as simple as section signups�well, maybe that�s not simple, but to give out announcements to all students so that everybody comes to the right class, that�s really an important thing because it makes the life of the instructor a lot easier. The other kind of things that are in course management systems are activities that students engage in and it might be a piece of content that�s a tutorial that somebody has linked to the system, but it might be a set of structured activities using an asynchronous discussion forum.
HS: So this is really more than just courses online? I mean, people have been talking for a long time about �We�ll get our courses online.��
CK: I think when they say that, what they do is they put up the content, the readings for a course. They have the syllabus and the readings for a course.
JB: So really, resource materials.
CK: Yeah, the resource materials is really what happens. And in a lot of places where they say �We put 100% of our courses online,� you�ll look and a lot of the courses, it just has a syllabus and nothing else. So when they�re saying they put the course online, they�re not getting the teaching, they�re getting the resources.
HS: Okay, we talked a year or a couple years ago about course management systems. In the last couple years, what�s happened to course management systems? What new things have arrived?
CK: Well, one thing that�s happened is that the commercial systems have matured. A lot of the smaller companies have dropped out, so we have a small number of systems that people are adopting. The feature sets are fairly similar. Some are easier to use than others, some are more flexible. The other thing that�s happening is that there�s initiatives like the Open Knowledge Initiative where groups of schools that have large IT departments are trying to come up with a method for a framework for learning tools�I�m not going to call it a course management system�but a set of tools that are interoperable and can plug into a framework so that as you�re setting up a course, you�ll have a wide range of tools to choose from to plug in and have available to you for both admin functions and for pedagogical functions.
HS: Could you tell us about some of these tools? What kind of tools are people building to plug into these course management systems?
CK: Well, I think right now we�re looking�many people are just looking at the kind of base level tools so it�s the things that faculty have gotten used to, announcements, a tool for a dynamic syllabus, a schedule. One of the things that I�ve been excited about is that many faculty have been building�maybe not web based but client/server based and interactive tools for many years and there�s a lot of research, but none of this has ever really transferred. There are some companies�and I put links up on the web of research projects where they�ve built what�s commonly called knowledge building tools. Most of these are in K-12, but some have been used in higher ed, where it�s a structured discussion that has been shown by research to be very useful in having the students think about their postings on an asynchronous discussion, to relate their discussions to previous discussions. And one of the problems you have with just an e-mail list or a newsgroup is that students will often just stick something up and not really read other people�s work. And you have to really think carefully about incentives, so there�s a whole set of communications tools. Another area we�re looking at is portfolios, personal journals. And also some simulation building tools.
HS: And what about assessment? Are there new things happening in assessment in course management systems?
CK: Well, the new thing that�s happening for me is I�ve just gotten a grant to build a formative assessment tool. There are��
HS: What do you mean, �formative assessment�?
CK: This is a term that educational researchers use to describe what�s commonly called low stakes assessment. I guess most people would call it homework.
HS: Okay! That�s the first term I could deal with!
CK: Yeah, it�s the things you get graded on as a student and the grade is there maybe as much to motivate you as anything else. It�s a learning activity that�s scored.
HS: That�s what a formative thing is?
CK: Well, what it does is give information to the student on what they know and what they don�t know and it gives information to the class, either collectively of what problems students are having, or individually, what are the concepts that are the misconceptions that students have?
JB: Can we step back for maybe just a moment in terms of before we get, perhaps, too lost in all of these tools, Charles? There�s a lot of national projects going on, of which the OKI project is one and OCW, etc., etc. What is the vision framework for all of this work that�s going on in course management systems? Where would we like to be in a couple of years in terms of choices for systems?
CK: Well, the OCW�this is the Open Courseware out of MIT.
HS: That�s put all your courses online.
CK: That�s putting all the course materials online, and they make it very explicit that it doesn�t include teaching. So that�s one track is a lot of people want to put teaching resources. There�s learning object repositories, so there�s a whole set of activities in putting the resources for instructors online. That�s not the area I�ve been looking at. I�ve been thinking about what are the tools that instructors use when they teach and students use when they learn? And we�re just starting with the Open Knowledge Initiative, again out of MIT, to develop a set of API�s for building tools that will interoperate. Actually, I was just talking with the University of Michigan before this webcast and we�re very interested in taking the tools that we build, this formative assessment tool or homework tool, and giving that to Michigan and they plug it into their course management system that they�ve developed, called CHEF, and we�re very interested in taking tools from their system and plugging it into our framework. What we want to show is that we can develop tools that fit the needs of our instructors and that we can share those with other people. I think what we want to do is to get a wide range of tools that support different disciplines, different teaching methods, and also different research methods for the different disciplines.
JB: So the goal is really a framework where all of these tools would be interoperable and shareable between campuses, is that fair to say?
CK: That�s correct. And I think that�s probably a vision for schools that have strong IT departments and can assemble these. For schools that want a bundled package, there�s probably going to be other mechanisms, maybe like what�s happened with Linux, where people can bundle these together and provide services. But most of the time, I�ve been thinking about how do we have a framework and how do we have tools built that support problem-based learning, collaborative learning, special needs and foreign language teaching, the special needs of large lecture classes which we really don�t have yet in the more generic course management systems.
JB: What about, you mentioned problem based learning, Charles. Are there any tools that are missing that you�d like to see incorporated in CMS�s that help faculty deliver problem based learning?
CK: Well, there�s some tools that were developed�we don�t have a lot of strict problem based learning here at Stanford, but we met with the group from University of Maastricht who�s developed a system called Polaris that structures the interactions so that the students stay in touch in their groups. I think the things that we�re more interested in at Stanford�the first one, I think, is portfolios. Maybe we�ll have to move away from the term �courseware� because some of the things that are happening there are more studentware. We�re thinking about portfolios so students can collect their materials as they proceed through college and it might be something an alumni association picks up, or it might be portable and go to a business. But as you collect your papers and your work, many schools now are having a graduation requirement of a portfolio or a program like an ed school has a graduation requirement. And students use these collections, they reflect upon their work, they discuss how their skills and knowledge have changed. So you get a tool that allows mentors and advisors and even peers to work with someone and help them think about their learning in the long term, not just in a single course. So this is the big thing I see coming is the integration of course tools with these longer learning tools like portfolios.
HS: What�s really in a portfolio? I�m a student in the sciences or something. It�s easier for me to imagine if the student�s in individual arts or something like that. I�m a physics major.
CK: One of the things that portfolios are used for is to have the student reflect upon what�s changed. What have they really learned in the past couple years? Most students never look back. We�ve built some systems and we�ve allowed students to use their previous work and we found they have a look-ahead of about two weeks and they never look back to see anything they�ve done. When we�re talking to an advisor, a counselor or mentor, what we really want to do is to talk to the student about their progress, the techniques they�ve used and the advances they�ve made in their learning and that�s very hard to do if you just have the latest paper, but you don�t have a record of the work. The other thing that you can have peer support groups where, especially in writing portfolios where you�re looking at the development of your writing skills over a four year period. Now, in the sciences, some schools are using portfolios, but I think it�s more commonly used right now in education schools where people are demonstrating their skills in teaching and setting up assignments.
JB: But that sounds as though if we�re talking about using portfolios for demonstrating growth in learning, that they would need to be a way to collect multiple products from the same course, Charles.
CK: What�s interesting to me is a course management system is where students turn in their work. They turn in their papers, they turn in their assignments, they have their tests. They have their projects there. And what we�re doing at Stanford with our course management system called CourseWork is everything has metadata added to it, it�s saved in a database, so we have a course view of everything that�s been done. We haven�t built this yet, but we could just as easily go into the database and collect the work from a student into an archive. The interesting process for the student and the learning process in the selection of the materials, their reflection on the learning process, their annotation of these documents telling what did they learn during this and then their sharing of these documents with other people through some informal or maybe formal publication model.
HS: So you just collect this stuff at first just by grabbing everything that goes through the drop box, then?
CK: That�s what happens in the course management system.
HS: And then to that, you�ve added some stuff so that students can comment on it, reflect on it, do this kind of stuff.
CK: And share it.
HS: I just wonder why busy students would do that. When I was a busy student, once I turned something in, I never wanted to think about it again.
CK: In some programs, it�s a requirement. You�re right, many students, they just want to chug away. I was saying, they don�t look back, they just want to get things done for today. But what we�re trying to do is to have students think about their learning and to develop�another jargon term�metalearning skills. This is thinking about your learning and figuring out ways that you can help yourself, techniques for learning better. Most students don�t really think about this much.
JB: What about when you�metalearning sounds a lot like when we talk about learning to learn.
CK: That�s what it is.
JB: And if we think about the metalearning, these are skills that would go across multiple courses. Are there plug-in modules or tools right now that you think address this or is this on our wish list?
CK: Well, this is on a wish list for most people. University of Washington, I have a link, I think, to the project they�re working on. They�re actually delivering this to their campus. They�ve been working with their advising group on campus. There�s also one at Indiana, there�s a consortium that�s building these. I think that Washington has theirs tied into their learning management system. I don�t know if Indiana does. But I guess one of the things I�m saying is that right now we have this problem with what we call stovepipe tools. They�re built from the lowest sort of common service functionality up to the exact functionality that you�re trying to build. And so you end up building icebergs where 90% of it�s under the surface and you don�t really care about. And that�s why I�m interested in tools like portfolios and personal journals, better communication tools using a framework and a set of API�s so that they can interoperate and use services, educational services that allow them to use student material, student information systems.
JB: Okay, I�m struggling a little bit, Charles, with a couple of your analogies between stovepipes and icebergs but other than that�oh, great, now I forgot my question I was going to ask.
HS: Okay, we have a couple questions from some of our listeners here. Perhaps we can take a couple of those. If you remember your question, Judith, just mail it in.
JB: There we go! All right. Well, go ahead. Which question are you going to take?
HS: I�m going to take the one from Laura Sederburg from WebCT Institute and Laura says, �How are we looking at our online courses for standards of quality and improvement?� Charles?
CK: Could you repeat that?
HS: Sure. She says, �How are we looking at our online courses for standards of quality and improvement?� How do we know our online courses are any good, I think she she�s saying?
JB: Yes or are there objective standards out there for quality?
CK: Well, one of the things about teaching, the instructor gets to close the door and what�s happened has always been pretty private.
HS: We don�t listen to what�s going on.
CK: There is a review process where people look at teaching in the university but it�s a pretty private activity. So one of the things that�s happening now is teaching is becoming more open. Also that there�s efforts to look at the scholarship of teaching, if you look at the Carnegie Foundation and what they�re doing. So they�re trying to bring teaching out from behind the locked door and it�s something that research faculty can even talk about. Now, one of the things is because that large research institution�s teaching has not been this public activity, there are no real public review standards for teaching and faculty who use course management systems to supplement their teaching. There�s been models of best practices and I think there�s some up on�I don�t have the sites in my head, but there�s a couple of sites of best practices and if you look around at different schools, they make suggestions of how to use your course management system. In eLearning or distance learning, where you have instructional designers, there are standards and that has been a more closely viewed process, especially in England. So the standards there, I think, are better defined.
HS: Okay, Laura had another question. She wondered if we�re involving students in the online course evaluation process. Are folks doing that, Charles?
CK: Well, I think the student evaluation form is the main way that faculty and the deans get information about teaching. Some of the online courses do have questions in their student evaluations about how it was used. The other thing that is happening right now, there�s a lot of research and ed schools that are looking at online teaching and effectiveness in online teaching. One of the problems is that many people think online teaching is taking your lectures, putting them in streaming video and then giving a test at the end of the course. There�s no real rethinking of what the learning activities are that students might go through using the possibilities of communication on the web. That�s starting to change right now, so one thing I think a lot of people say, that you can�t just put up your lectures and give a test. That�s not enough. But they haven�t really come up with a set of standards of what they should be. The activities should be.
HS: Okay, can we take another question here, Judith?
JB: I think that would be good.
HS: Okay, we have a question from John Farquahar from�actually a very pretty place�in Washington, from West Washington University in Bellingham. And John says, �At our institution, the CMS has truly been a phenomenon of �build it and they will come.� Unfortunately, with hundreds of courses and faculty using the system on a regular basis, we are forced to consider how to best manage the demand, given our small support organization. What characteristics of a CMS support organization make support easier and more effective?� So how in the world do we support these things, Charles?
JB: Well��
CK: Boy, that�s a �today� question rather than a �tomorrow� question, huh?
CK: Yeah. Well, one of the things is that faculty have gone through a long apprenticeship in teaching, in face to face teaching. So even if it hasn�t been�they�ve maybe gone through a one semester explicit teaching course that they had as a graduate student. But for the most part, they�re following models that they had before. So the real problem here is faculty come into this and they don�t know what to do. So you�re really in a program where the faculty have all the authority about what�s in the course but they really aren�t sure what to do. The best kind of support for this has been expert faculty members who have done this before helping other faculty members, and there are many schools that have programs or workshops where faculty can come in and talk to other faculty about what they�ve tried. Another approach is to structure the tools so that they actually have some sort of embedded pedagogy within them. If you go to a newsgroup, it�s like going to an empty room that you mentioned earlier. But faculty know what to do in an empty room because they�ve been there many times before. If they�ve never been to a newsgroup, they don�t know quite what to do with it. �And what do I do when the students aren�t saying anything?� So all of that knowledge that faculty have about teaching face to face, we have to help them learn and there are websites that do it, but most faculty have trouble with that. I think it�s just a steep learning curve and we just need to have pedagogical support people for the faculty.
HS: It sounds, though, like we have to train the trainers. I mean, it�s easy to tell faculty what to do with an empty room. It�s a lot harder�I think in the IT staff, where�s the expertise to tell people how to deal with a chat room in some pedagogically effective way. It seems like that�s an expertise we don�t have.
CK: That�s correct.
HS: Where do we get it?
CK: Well, one thing, there are courses. I think�I was talking to one of our faculty support people here and he had a language instructor who�s taking an online course in how to use online courses.
HS: Wow!
CK: This is great! Because you actually
JB: Sounds like a good idea.
CK: �get someone modeling how to teach in the course. The trouble is, most faculty don�t have time to do that. So what we really need is to have faculty go through the experience of what a good online course is. Usually they find out after two or three tries, when it wasn�t so good.
HS: What about the other problem? I mean, this is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed, that the faculty have to be able to know how to use this communications infrastructure effectively. How do we address the problem of content? How do we get faculty to put good content up? As you said, most of the courses online are just a couple sheets of paper that have been put on the course management system.
CK: Well, one thing we�re trying to do is to involve the library so that the bibliographers of the library who do electronic reserves�I mean, that�s where the faculty often go when they�re looking for material. So we have our electronic reserves and our paper reserves tied into our course management system. Another thing, I guess, is the intellectual property issues. Some faculty are scared about putting material up. Helping faculty understand what they can do and what they can�t do�and actually, that�s one of our responsibilities under the new law. I think most of the things that are being put up right now are probably being printed and read. There�s not a lot of interactive learning activities that we saw that were developed that are being used extensively. If you look at learning object repositories like Merlot, you�ll see a lot of simulations but for many of the courses, the faculty are putting the equivalent of sort of hand-built course readers up. I don�t have anything against that. It�s just that there are other possibilities and it�s hard for faculty to learn about these. And again, the best way to do it is from other faculty members whom they meet who are teaching similar courses that are using the materials.
JB: Howard and Charles, I think there�s two questions that have come in now from Neil Kaidin from the Center for Instructional Technology at Duke University. And he mentions�both of his questions center around the open source initiatives and tools area. I think I would take his second question first, just to keep us all on our toes here. He�s asking about whether�going back to the vision that you described earlier about the planned model to develop new tools and then maintain and extend them in an open environment, he�s asking if you develop your assessment or homework tool, what commitment do you have to further development and extension and supporting it? Or do you just hand it off to institutions that want to manage it? That�s a pretty good question, huh?
CK: Well, we�re starting the exploration of that right now. We�re having a workshop in November. We�ve invited six schools to come and they�re all going to take a version of our Coursework course management system back to their schools, set it up and give us feedback so we can get some sense of what�s needed by these schools if they adopt it. I think just putting it up on source [inaudible] and saying, �Here it is��I think there�s 16 open source course management systems available right now. I don�t know whether they have scaling problems or not but they�re not very heavily used. What we want to do is to put a system that we think is scalable, robust and usable and we don�t want to just hang it out on a site and let people download it. We really want to think about what the issues are.
JB: But can you maybe address the issue of standards as one approach.
CK: Well, we�re part of the Open Knowledge Initiative where they�re developing API�s that will allow tools to be plugged into different systems so I can take a tool developed�hopefully�at Duke and plug it into my system. They developed something for the med school that our med school really would like and we don�t have anything like it. That�s the vision that we have. Now, the API�s, if we all build to the same API�s and we have a framework that is common, then we can share tools.
HS: I think that one of Neil�s concerns is that he wants to be sure that we�re going to give continued support to this thing. In essence, I think he�s saying �What are the plans to �productize� this thing, to turn it into a product rather than something that�s something interesting developed by a bunch of universities?� Are there plans to �productize� this kind of thing?
CK: This is one reason we�re doing this study is to understand what people need. We�re talking with representatives from some of the Mellon-supported liberal arts schools that have their own technology support centers so they might be able to package something together that would be available for other schools. I think when you move out into the world of universities that don�t have large IT groups, you�re probably going to need something like what�s happened with UNIX. People who can package this and provide support services.
HS: In fact, that was Neil�s other question, if we could take that now. He says, �In these open initiatives and sharing tools initiatives, you mentioned that an institution would need...� And he has quotes here. � �a strong IT department�.� Could you talk more about what that means?
CK: Well, I guess one thing is when you install a system and you try to integrate it with the other systems that you have on your campus. You want to integrate it with your student information system, you want to integrate it maybe with�we have AFS file systems so we�re trying to do that. We end up having a programmer or two that just provides the glue to get the course management system to work. And I think people that have bought commercial course management systems have the same thing. They have to have a couple programmers. So you need to have an environment where there�s a couple programmers that can work on this, that it�s not just a system admin person who takes it out of the box and plugs it into the server. Now, this is for the building of tools. You just asked me if it�s going to be productized. The productizing is putting in the box where the person can just plug it in and that�s the part we really don�t know yet.
HS: Yeah, I think that�s part of productizing and the other part is that there�s somebody who kind of owns the product so it looks like there�s somebody who�s going to give it continued support as opposed to saying, �Well, Charles, when you feel like it, if it strikes you, you�ll work more on this thing or somebody at Yale or Harvard or MIT will do that,� whereas if there�s some kind of little spin-off company, OKI International or whatever, then there�s a bunch of people whose job is to do this, not to work at some university and do this part time.
CK: Well, I think the way we�re approaching it with coursework is we have a course management system. We�re looking for a group of other schools that would like to use it and share the maintenance load and make a commitment that this will be the course management system that they use. In terms of the ownership here, it would be a consortium that would be�we haven�t figured out the governance rules of it, but I think a lot of these systems will require either a business or a consortial arrangement among schools that makes a commitment to support the product for a period of time.
HS: Okay. One of the interesting things that you mentioned when we talked to you much earlier was you talked about these things called responders and it seems like they�re just one of the kind of things you can use with a course management system or by itself to improve learning. Could you tell us about responders and things like them?
CK: Well, there�s been a movement called classroom assessment techniques in which faculty get feedback from students during the lecture or during the period that they�re meeting. Responders are a technical way of doing this where you have a small device where a faculty member can ask a question and then you can enter either a numerical or a multiple choice or in some cases a text answer. And then these answers are evaluated and in most cases anonymously displayed. When we were talking about it earlier I was saying that these tools are being developed in, again, this stovepipe model, that they�re totally independent of the course management system. They�re really just a support tool for the lecturer. They�re ephemeral, the data is not really plugged into the course management system in a simple way. It�s been shown that doing this in lecture is very effective, but what we�re interested in is how do these innovations like this get integrated into the system so that the faculty member isn�t doing cutting and pasting and having to add to their workload to show the results of these kinds of activities.
JB: Maybe it would be good at this time, Charles, to go back. We had a kind of long question, or suggestion shall I say, that came in early on this week from Frank Crist who�s a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. And he has a suggestion that is coming in from what he calls learning support professionals, really coming at course management system from a student�s perspective, saying �What if I�m a student working on one of these systems and I need help with managing my time for writing essay answers and research papers and just kind of study hints?� Is there any development going on there that would help students be more effective learners with these kinds of tools?
CK: Well, I think there�s bee a lot of efforts to develop tutorials and systems to help individual learners learn some basic skill. This has been going back to Plato and Skinner boxes before that, with a previous technology, before we had electronics.
JB: That�s going way back!
CK: Yes. I�m too old for these kind of shows. And so these kind of tutorials, what we found is that making one is very difficult. You need instructional designers, you need lots of testing because usually what happens is there�s misconceptions and problems and you don�t find them until you have students who use them and then you have to modify it. So they�re quite expensive to build. When microcomputers first came out and even when we had terminals, this is the kind of learning machines�as they were called then�that people built. I think that they�re great to have, that you can get access to a tutorial just when you need it, but it�s expensive and it�s time consuming. I think it�s a task that people should be doing. We�re actually building one in information literacy that can be used that way here at Stanford.
JB: But it seems like those are very similar to the meta-learning and learning to learn skills that we talked about earlier.
CK: Yeah, and another thing to look at is there�s other skills like I�ve had students saying, �I�m taking this economics course and they expect me to know how to use a spreadsheet.� Actually, it�s been several years since they told me that. And I said, �Well, look at the manual,� and they said, �Isn�t there a tutorial?� And I said, �Yeah,� and I found them a tutorial. So there are some tutorials that you can get for basic computer skills and basic sort of operation of a program skills. But these higher level skills for learning to learn are something that we should be addressing.
JB: Okay, thanks. I think we�ve got either some comments or other questions coming in. Howard, is there anything else or should we�let me invite people to go ahead and send in�it�s a good time to send in questions to Charles at expert@cren.net.
HS: Yeah, Charles, the way we�re talking about this stuff, it sounds like all this stuff is working on desktop and laptop computers. What about PDA�s? Are people thinking about doing this course management stuff and using PDA�s or other devices like them?
CK: Well, there�s some schools are trying to get their calendars and some of the admin materials so that they�ll display on PDA�s. We haven�t really made an effort to do that at Stanford so far. I think that a lot of the administrative information it probably makes sense to do, where you could look and see what your class schedule is. But most people can�t read the documents that are up there. They print them out anyway. A lot of the interactive things are visualizations of complex phenomena that you actually need a lot of space to look at. So I�m not sure how well they translate.
HS: But for things like knowing what class I go to next or for something like that, which would be on a course management system, I mean, it would be handy just to have your class roster and things like that or to be able to read and send e-mail through the course management system. I mean, are people who are doing course management systems thinking about interfaces to these things, or are you folks?
CK: We�re thinking about completely separating out the business logic of the system from the interface. So once we�ve done that, then we can start thinking about displays in different systems.
HS: Another question about course management systems is when you�re working on these things, are you folks considering W3C accessibility guidelines? And are there things in course management systems that actually make this easier?
CK: Well, we�re working with a group here on campus and we have students testing our systems with readers and giving us advice on how we should make the system available to students. We�re also making a skin that will not have many of the visual features and have a very simplified navigation for students who have trouble using a visually complex screen. So we�re paying attention to it. I know that the commercial products are now, but I haven�t really paid attention to that. I guess the other thing is I listened to one of the Educause sessions where people hadn�t thought about privacy laws with these systems. Just putting up a roster of students in your course might not be legal. So there�s a couple areas where we really need to think about students� rights and student access.
HS: Yeah, you mentioned earlier when people were just putting things on the web, one of their concerns are the intellectual property rights and things. How is that being dealt with, with OCW?
CK: I can tell you how it�s being dealt with on our campus.
HS: Okay, that�s good enough.
CK: OCW is really working on higher level API�s right now. When you upload material to the web right now, you go to a screen that asks you to say, �I own the rights to this,� �I have licensed the rights to this.� So you have to categorize the material when you put it up on the web as to what the intellectual property state is. We�re working with our library right now, who has a lot of experience in this because they do digital reserves, and so they�re helping us and giving us the sort of templates for what we need to have faculty do before we can put the material online. The other thing we do is we have a very strict access system where only members of the course can get in and look at any of the material.
HS: What�s your faculty reaction been to all of this course management systems stuff?
CK: We have gone from close to a third of the classes on campus using the system in one year so it�s been a very rapid acceptance of this. I think partly because when we put our coursework system, a lot of people were putting up course websites or they build their own course management system a couple years ago and they were getting tired of maintaining it. So the idea of putting materials up on the web and using e-mail and announcements is around and it�s part of the culture that faculty are in. So we aren�t trying to convince them. They�re saying, �I need something.��
HS: Do you folks only have one course management system out there or do you have lots of them?
CK: Well, our faculty have complete control of what they want to do so��
HS: That�s a common thing.
CK: Yeah. We support one system. The faculty can, if they want to negotiate and get another system, they can do it but we only have the resources to support one system so we support one system centrally. But some departments have bought other systems, some faculty�one I know uses Yahoo Groups, so it�s really up to the faculty as to what they want to do.
HS: Do you think that�s a problem, having multiple systems? I mean, if there�s a university out there listening, should they cause a big fuss trying to make sure there�s only one of them out there?
CK: Well, I think faculty are very sensitive when it comes to who controls instruction and if they feel that IT people are telling them how they should teach, they�re going to be upset. So one of the things that we do is we tell them, �If you use this system, this is what it can do. You�ll have good support. It will always be up.� Well, almost always. �But very seldom will you have any technical problems because we�ll watch out for everything. We can�t guarantee that for other sources.� And we leave it up to the faculty to make the decision.
HS: Okay. We have another question here. It�s from Kevin Lowery at Duke and he says, �What are the pros and cons of open source systems like OKI compared to commercial systems like WebCT and BlackBoard?��
CK: Well, OKI is not an open source system. It�s a set of API�s that I suspect will be commercial and open source tools in it, first of all.
JB: So before going off for that, though, I think some folks have been kind of �waiting� for an open source system from OKI, so they shouldn�t be waiting for that. Is that fair?
CK: You know, I�ve been working on some parts of OKI. You really need to talk to the people at MIT to find out what the plans are there and to look at the OKI website. I put it up. What we know is that courseware we�re making available as an open source system. And what we�re doing now is implementing the OKI common service API�s in our system.
JB: And at Stanford, you�ve got a system called Coursework and there�s a link on the site for that. And then at MIT they�ve got, it�s Stellar, right?
CK: That�s correct. And Michigan has another system. I have a link for that, too.
HS: Why aren�t you folks all using the same system?
JB: Good question!
CK: One of the things is we�ve started at different points and we�re figuring out how to work together right now. We had a special set of needs and a certain timeline that the other schools didn�t have when we started and so we�re�like I said, we just met with Michigan, we�re figuring how to work more closely with them and rethinking our architecture.
JB: Okay, and with that, Howard, since I interrupted, maybe we should let Charles go back and answer Kevin�s question.
CK: Can you read it to me again? I�m sorry.
HS: I think��
CK: Oh, this was about the open source, yeah.
HS: Yeah, but now that you�ve said it�s not open source, I will take the liberty of rephrasing Kevin�s question.
JB: Oh, there we go, okay.
HS: To avoid this problem here.
JB: All right.
HS: Okay, I�ll just simplify it. He�s saying, I think at this point we have universities and colleges out there and they�re saying, �Hmm. Should I use OKI or that kind of thing or should I use WebCT and BlackBoard? How do I decide?��
CK: Well, the one thing that you shouldn�t do is say �Open source is free, so I�m going to take the cheap one� because what open source really gives you is freedom to control the system, not low cost. That once you have a system in place, you�re going to probably need programmers and sys admin people. You�re probably going to need some programmers and sys admin people if you adopt a commercial system as well, but once you have a system that faculty can come and say, �I�d really like this feature added� and you have the capability of adding a tool, I think it�s going to be very tempting to start doing that sort of thing. So one thing I just wanted to say upfront is don�t think of it as a free system, but one that gives you more flexibility, better ability to integrate with your campus infrastructure and also the ability to add your own tools and to modify tools that exist to fit your special needs. So if you feel that having a system that you control and that you want to closely integrate with your IT system, if that�s really important to you, you should be thinking about these systems. If you really are worried about managing a system and don�t know whether you have the resources to actually set up your own systems, you really need to think about whether a commercial system or maybe in the future a packager of an open source system is what you need.
HS: So this is back to your point that you really don�t want to get involved with something like OKI unless you have some appropriate IT staff available. Is that correct?
CK: If you want to be a tool developer. So if you want to be a developer, you need to have an IT staff and I�m not really sure�because there is no model right now for a packaged open source�what you�ll need. That�s something out in the future.
HS: And so we�re still kind of early, then, in this OKI stuff. I mean, somebody can�t go out tomorrow and say, �Great! I�ll take one of these OKI�s and I�ll go to work.� They can�t do that.
CK: No, we�re still early, and like I said, there�s several open source implementations coming out. The Michigan one and the Stanford Coursework implementation and then there�s MIT�s Stellar and we�re all sort of working to implementing the OKI API�s right now.
HS: And if somebody wanted Coursework, is that available or is that just yours or��
CK: We�re hoping to have something out the end of this academic year.
HS: That you would make available to other folks?
CK: Our target is sometime like that. What we�re really doing is this study right now to see what people need and then at some point, we will make it available for open source.
HS: Is that true of the other schools who are doing this?
CK: You know, you�d have to ask them. I don�t really know what their timelines are. But I think all of them announced that they�re doing open source development.
JB: We have a question coming in from Joseph Vitt from the University of South Dakota. And since it is so late, he�s wise to say he hopes this isn�t too late. \�
HS: Never too late, until we�re done talking here!
JB: Almost! But anyway, he was asking a question�it�s fairly long. I�m going to try and make it a little bit more concise. He�s basically asking�his question focuses around the costs associated with course management systems from the student variable, Charles. Do you know anything about how the models of costs for the various systems?
HS: Yeah, one of the things he�s saying is do you have students pay for this? Do you charge students to use the thing? How do you pay for this thing?
CK: Well, ours is paid for out of our central academic computing budget. I don�t know what model other people have but I don�t think that there�s a for-fee cost for using the system anyplace I know of.
JB: Well, he was mentioning the one that was like a student subscription, like a textbook cost or something like that. Have you seen that anywhere?
HS: There�s a�Charles, do you know about these cartridges that some textbooks manufacturers make available where they�ll actually sell the rights to this information. They usually don�t sell the cartridge itself, they just sell the student a key and then the student can come in for this course for a fee and look at the material. Maybe that�s what Joe is talking about.
CK: There�s groups like Xanadu that do online course readers and clear the rights and charge you. So there are a lot of people. I think some bookstores are even doing online course readers. And I think some of the commercial systems are looking at bundling content for a student fee that has an analogue of a textbook with the course management system.
JB: Okay, so they might be not a cost for the course management system itself but for the content within it.
CK: I think that�s what they�re getting at.
HS: Yeah, and I should mention to Joe that one of the problems you have there is if you add this content to your course management system for some particular course and the students have to pay, oh, even $8 which is typical to look at the thing, unless you can get all the students to do it�unless you make it a requirement for the course, it�s going to be difficult for a faculty member to say, �We�re going to put lots of extra content out here and only those who are willing to pay are going to get this extra content� because then the faculty member really can�t use it. I mean, you can�t use it unless all the students have access to it.
CK: One of the issues right now is that our library is subscribed to lots of online journals and it�s difficult in many systems because you have to go through another authentication process to link these materials directly into course management systems. And we�ve already paid the access fee so you don�t want to have the students pay again for some other subscription service so one thing I�d advise people to do is to work closely with their libraries because they have collections of materials that might be the same things that you�re paying for.
HS: Okay, I think we�re at the end of our time here.
JB: Are we almost at the end? We are at the end, all right!
HS: And I have��
JB: A final question, Howard?
HS: I have a final stump-the-stars question here. Okay, are you ready Charles?
CK: The answer is �two.��
JB: Forty-seven.
HS: Definitely not. How do you measure the success of a CMS? You put one of these things in. How do you know that you�ve done a good job and that things are working?
CK: Well, there�s some simple things. That it�s reliable, it doesn�t go down. That the faculty and students aren�t complaining, �I couldn�t get my test in on time.� So there�s some measures of performance that you should have. I think the other thing is that it�s fitting faculty needs so that faculty are able to put the kinds of materials up that they want and that the students are able to access them. The raw numbers of how many faculty are using it always make you feel good, but if you look at how faculty are using it�in foreign languages, for instance, here we have everybody that�s doing online quizzing and testing. And we look at some other departments and they�re just putting up course materials. You might feel that they�re making better use of it in languages, but really the other faculty might be using it in a way that�s appropriate to them. Since we don�t know all the teaching needs of the faculty, it�s very hard to do kind of nose counting of different uses of tools and say that it�s being done well. I know when you talk to the evaluation people like the TLT group, they say that you should have your objectives out ahead of time before you do this. Our objectives really were to satisfy faculty demand to put course materials online, to have a central access point where students could go get their materials and to have communication tools for courses all in a central location. And I think that we�ve done that, so one thing is to know why you�re putting this up before you start.
JB: And with that, let me do the close here. Thank you all for being with us here today and Charles, thank you. Join us again on November 21st for a session actually on student privacy issues with Barbara Simons of ACM and Chris Hoofnagle of the EPIC organization. Thanks to our CREN member institutions for making these Tech Talks possible. Many thanks to our Tech Talk expert again, Charles Kerns; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk web guru; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis, our audio file transcriber; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it�s time. Bye, Charles. Bye, Howard.
HS: Bye, Judith. Bye, Charles. This was great fun.
CK: Bye.
JB: Take care.
HS: Bye-bye.
JB: Bye.
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