The Interactive Campus: Administrative and Course Management System Vendors Take Up the Challenge
Administrative and Course Management System
Vendors Take Up the Challenge
Emerging media and highly interactive technologies raise
the bar for the development efforts vendors must make to remain current in a
growing eLearning environment. Possibilities for improved user interaction with
both academic information and administrative data, plus expectations for more
integrated systems, contribute to a blurring of the lines between administrative
and course management systems. Several types of companies involved with
eLearning products or infrastructure work in the eLearning space, and product
categories are not as clear-cut as they once were.
The eLearning
landscape is changing in response to interest in portals, Web-based or
Web-enabled systems, and a gradual but general evolution in academic
institutions towards life-long learning. What kinds of interactive technologies
interest vendors most, and what technology directions and market influences are
they considering as they plan for the future? To find out, Syllabus polled
technology leaders at key companies.
Blackboard chairman Matthew Pittinsky says, "The biggest
challenge when looking into the future is discerning between interesting
technologies that are eye candy, and those that are really going to impact
student outcomes." Pittinsky cites three defining technology directions that
will impact his company's future development: immersion, standards, and
specialization.
Immersion technologies will be unlike anything we now
commonly use for teaching and learning. The PowerPoint presentations and
streaming video of today are just the tip of the iceberg of interactive
learning, Pittinsky explains. Virtual biology labs and avatars are
representative of the kinds of immersion technology we can expect to use in the
future, given increased bandwidth. And the online videogame industry is
pioneering applications that could eventually be used to make education at a
distance more socially powerful.
Standards will continue to pave the way
for collaboration and sharing of content, so that institutions can discover and
incorporate the best, high-end learning materials from others into their
learning management systems. Standards will also influence how programs will be
formed across institutions and the ways in which faculty collaborate. Learners
will bring portable data with them as they move among programs and institutions.
Learner profiles will contain data about their educational history and learning
preferences, allowing for personalization of course materials and programs—this
will put the learner in charge of the educational process.
Specialization
will create discipline-based tools and pedagogical approaches, while
institutions standardize on one course management system that will offer
gradebooks, discussion boards, and other more generalized tools. Once a standard
course management system has been installed, institutions will license or build
a wide variety of additions that tailor a particular eLearning environment to
the instructional approach that makes the most sense for the professor and the
subject area. Pittinsky points to Blackboard's Building Blocks initiative, which
includes open APIs and a free SDK that has been put into use by institutions
such as Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon to develop extensions to
Blackboard.
"Adult life-long learning is adding an entire new category
of enrollments to higher education," says Pittinsky. These enrollments have
different preferences, and this is causing a shift in the way institutions think
about the types of programs they develop, they frequency of those programs, and
the mix of live classroom instruction and online learning modes. "It's the
demand side, and the catalyst for institutions to move to adopt new learning
technologies. It will fundamentally change the way we think about degree
programs."
eCollege CTO Mark Resmer says the typical student served by
his company is a life-long learner. "For eCollege, the life-long learner is
really the life blood of the company," says Resmer. eCollege is a distance
education technology provider, and most of the company's planning focuses on
distance learning as the learning context, differentiated from the on-campus
environment where course management systems may merely supplement classroom
instruction.
Resmer points out that bandwidth is a challenge in
exploiting new, highly interactive media. The industry as a whole is driven by
bandwidth. Often students are still using 56Kbps modems at home, limiting the
potential for interactivity until broadband becomes more ubiquitous. eCollege
has recently introduced a new technique called http compression in an effort to
address this ‘last mile' problem. The time it takes to render pages is decreased
by orders of magnitude, simply and cheaply.
The expense of creating
highly interactive and pedagogically rich content is another challenge. To help
facilitate production, eCollege has incorporated both synchronous and
asynchronous learning into the courses. Creating synchronous events is less
complex than structuring asynchronous ones, but students have a strong desire
for asynchronous learning. The ability to capture certain kinds of synchronous
events and then use them in an asynchronous context will go a long way towards
solving this problem. eCollege also has a large, active course development and
instructional design unit as a resource for faculty. Over time, faculty may
realize the true potential of the technology and take on more of the development
themselves.
Another area of interest is the new media capabilities of
commodity PCs, along with Web services technologies. With the advent of Windows
Media built into the operating system, and the possibility of leveraging new
tools on the desktop in the learning offerings, courses can be less dependent on
what is delivered purely over the Web. Hybrids can be created that are accessed
over the Web but take advantage of locally hosted client applications. Web
services technologies will create flexible deployment for those kinds of
applications and will open the door for collaboration, customization, and
ultimately, personalization.
One interactive technology application that
eCollege finds intriguing, says Resmer, is in the area of online labs. Virtual
labs go beyond simulation- they allow the student to do real work. The lab is
integrated into the student's learning environment, providing virtual access to
a physical resource.
eCollege also stresses Section 508 compliance, so
that learning experiences are designed to be accessible to users who may have a
wide range of disabilities. "eCollege is fully 508 compliant," says Resmer. "The
challenge is to maintain that compliance as content becomes richer and more
interactive."
WebCT CTO Chris Vento explains that enterprise academic
software infrastructure is key to his company's strategy. "It's important to
build an enterprise academic application infrastructure as a flexible platform,
not only so that we can provide the technologies that WebCT builds, but more
importantly, to leverage the variety of technologies that are already available,
or that will become available externally." WebCT will offer a platform that will
provide this type of integration, whether the technologies are built by WebCT or
available from outside sources. The platform will take advantage of Web services
and XML messaging to allow different systems- such as WebCT and other learning
platforms, communications systems, media servers, and VoIP servers—to
interoperate much more easily. For example, on the administrative side,
XML-based messaging will allow interoperability with calendaring, collaboration,
content management, and mail systems. WebCT is just beginning to provide
interoperability via XML messaging or Web services. "It's a great way for
systems to interoperate without having to have perfectly aligned architectures-
something that is never going to happen," adds Vento.
WebCT will focus
on technologies that map to learning in useful and functional ways, says Vento.
Interactive messaging, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer communications
technologies will extend the reach of the learning experience. There is also a
set of applications that may best be delivered via a mobile device—course
calendars, assignment listings, or any communications or messaging related to a
course will be enhanced as mobile offerings. Role-based access and student data
points now allow students and advisors to tailor a learning experience for the
student. In the future, additional profile and learning context information will
enable further personalization, e.g., a tailored curriculum can be made
available to a student based on a profile correlated with various other
administrative data.
WebCT is working toward a distributed content
management learning object framework that allows the sharing of all types of
content objects. WebCT Vista, released this past April, is a scalable enterprise
technology framework with significant content management capability built in.
Rich sources of learning object content, both local or external, can be managed
and integrated into multiple learning contexts. "WebCT Vista is an
enterprise-level platform that drives highly scaled, distributed learning
implementations. It provides the integration capabilities with these extended
technologies that allow us to broaden the functional base both internally and by
working with partners and other external technology vendors," says Vento. "It is
a critical step toward moving forward and offering new, interactive technologies
that are varied and useful in the learning context."
Element K has its roots in content development and
instructional design rather than in content management systems or administrative
systems. Although the company communicates that its 20-year heritage and primary
focus is in teaching, instruction, and workforce training, it has built a
substantial learning management system and provides a number of different
eLearning products.
Element K's director of product management, David Snider,
explains that because the company is exclusively an ASP, its strategy is based
on the assumption that all its eLearning products will be delivered over the
Internet. The company's product development efforts therefore focus on improving
the customer's experience on the Internet—optimizing bandwidth and designing
instruction specifically for use on the Internet.
The company has shaped
its instructional design strategy to take advantage of new interactive media.
"With our current instructional design model, called SPARK, we've combined the
very best of instructional design with experience design," Snider states. One of
the first courses done in the SPARK model can be seen in a product developed
with Harvard Business School Publishing, called The Harvard Interactive Manager
Series. Snider says, "Aside from being very rich in interactive media, we use
streaming video, branching scenarios, inline projects, and assessments. An
important aspect of the SPARK model is that, included with these interactive
elements, there are numerous choices of learning modes that the student can make
dynamically, based on learning style and what is appropriate for the exercise at
hand."
VLabs ("Virtual Labs") serve as another example of how Element K
incorporates different types of interactive elements into instructional design.
For the study of Information Technology, it can be a challenge to get access to
live equipment on which to learn to solve real problems. In addition to
simulations, Element K uses real equipment which is "scrubbed" and then set up
in a particular configuration for use in the problem scenario.
Snider
adds that since the company is a content developer, it is also in a unique
position to offer services to customers who wish to develop their own
interactive content for the Internet.
Jenzabar CEO Bob Maginn relates the vision upon which the
company was founded: to enhance higher education through the introduction of an
online community and online learning technologies via the Internet, and to
integrate administrative data and functions. The company soon grew to include
both a portal gateway and a course management platform. "The Jenzabar strategy
evolved into what we call I3: Internet, Intelligence, and Integration," says
Maginn. "In order to draw people into using technology, they have to find it to
be useful in their daily lives—powerful and meaningful in advancing whatever
goals they are trying to accomplish."
Maginn cites an example pertaining
to how the I3 strategy supports interactivity. "You have to have all three
elements," says Maginn, "You have to have the Internet and accessibility, you
have to have Intelligence in the system, and you have to have Integration with
what is already built into the enterprise software and database layer on
campus." A junior wanting to find out what courses to take in order to work
toward graduation might use a handheld device to interact with schedules,
calendars, and program information, and then register for selected courses. This
is an intelligent, integrated system: in order to provide the proper information
to the student, the system has to access a database to find out which courses
the student has already taken; it must find the requirements in terms of the
courses the student must take to complete a given major, and in what sequence;
it has to know the schedule of what classes will actually be offered and
available; and it needs access to a calendar to push the information onto to
make sure there are no conflicts.
When the student is ready to register, the
system must also facilitate that process. This scenario also requires having an
Internet gateway, and mobile computing environment.
This integrated,
interactive environment can be extended to other constituent groups, such as
faculty, staff, and administration. Jenzabar offers Constituent Relationship
Management engines that take advantage of its I3 strategy to enable complex
interactions—the example above is just the beginning.
SCT senior vice president Anne Keough Keehn explains that
the 34-year-old company, once considered primarily an administrative systems
vendor, is now looking to provide an entire e-education infrastructure to unify
teaching, learning, and administration. "Much of the transformation of higher
education has taken place on the learning side," says Keehn. "The way
administrative systems have to evolve is to determine what will help administer
teaching and learning. We believe that an e-education infrastructure is needed
to leverage both the course management system and administrative system to
provide more user-centric experiences to the different constituencies, including
faculty, students, alumni…the entire community."
The types of
interactive applications now being developed by SCT center around self-service
and anywhere access. In the broader view, this may be considered Web enterprise
management. As an example of a specific application, Keehn cites the newly
launched E-Recruiter Pocket PC- an interactive tool for college admissions
recruiters, accessed via a handheld device- and she states that similar
applications will be developed for students and other user groups.
One
key technology area is content management. Rich multimedia content, robust
streaming video, and other interactive media assets can be leveraged in a
content management system. Sharing and learning asset management will be counted
among the elements of a total e-education infrastructure.
The problem of
integration is also key. The ability to serve up not only course information,
but also administrative information in an integrated system will be a user
expectation and an area for continuing development. Interoperability of the
tools and interactive technologies across campus is part of this integration and
will include common calendar, e-mail, and course management systems.
For
future development, additional areas to watch include collaboration and
community-building technologies. Keehn notes that technologies developed by the
gaming industry along with real-time, persistent connections for interactive
multi-user environments may ultimately contribute in these areas. "This can also
be seen from an administrative standpoint." Keehn points out. "As people are
interacting more and more online, it's important to consider how best to provide
that capability and create communities of interest online."
Campus Pipeline defines itself as an infrastructure player.
David Murray, CTO, and Darin Gilson, COO, share their views on implementing new
interactive technologies on campus. "We are excited and anxious to see these
emerging technologies and to find out how they are going to take hold in the
education market, but first and foremost, our focus is on building the
infrastructure from which the technologies can be deployed," says Gilson, "And
that is the chasm that needs crossing right now in higher education- making sure
that the infrastructure is suitable for the broad deployment and development of
new technologies.
" A tremendous amount of activity has already been made
possible by Internet-based architectures, and that will continue at an
accelerated pace into the future. But Campus Pipeline sees its role as helping
schools build the foundations and the infrastructure upon which they can build
their digital campus.
Infrastructure might not seem very tangible at
first to many constituents, who will be concerned with their immediate needs for
specific applications. "But the purpose is for all of the different applications
to be deployed and delivered in a manageable fashion," says Gilson. "If you
start at the application level, without having that common foundation in
infrastructure, you are going to create a ‘soup sandwich,' and obviously that is
what needs to be avoided."
One technology area that is of particular
interest is security. "People are grappling with security issues- not just
surrounding the initial login, but across all different applications," noted
Murray. How credentials are managed, what the points of vulnerability are, and
how to determine the right tradeoff between security and convenience are among
the top concerns.
Whereas the technology decision is critically
important, the decision is as much about the function of the technology as about
the technology itself. "Getting technology in place and implemented is the easy
part—what is more difficult is to have that technology accepted as part of the
fabric of the institution, seeing that all the constituents understand how they
can take advantage of it, and finally to find that it is truly delivering for
the mission of the institution," says Gilson. "It is remarkable to see the
difference in results of technology implementation between schools that take a
mission-oriented approach versus schools that take a very technology-centric
approach. The returns are vastly greater to those who have a broad vision of
what the technology can accomplish if deployed correctly."