Learning Content Management at Seneca College
Spread throughout the greater Toronto area, Seneca College (http://www.senecac.on.ca/)
has five major campuses and several smaller ones. With a combined student body
that now exceeds 90,000, Seneca has been in a long-term growth mode in the use
of technology to support teaching and learning. As their eEducation infrastructure
has expanded, Seneca encountered two major challenges related to effective management
of learning content and course materials.
The first challenge involved managing the update and distribution of content
and course materials used in Seneca courses. Typical of other large institutions,
Seneca offers numerous introductory level courses with multiple sections every
semester. If each instructor independently manages course content, when the
inevitable mid-semester content change is required, updating the course materials
across multiple sections becomes time consuming and a process fraught with error.
A centralized management and version control of the common course materials
is required to increase the efficiency of such a complex system.
The other challenge involved creating appropriate mechanisms for users on campus,
particularly faculty, to share content with each other. Providing department-specific
repositories so members of a department can make materials accessible to their
colleagues is one goal, but sharing at the departmental level is just a first
step for Seneca. In fact, the campuses see department-level sharing as part
of a more sophisticated, long term plan for leveraging re-usable learning objects
(RLOs) in a system-wide content repository.
Seneca had experimented with different approaches to this for some time. Their
Centre for New Technologies in Teaching and Learning created an application
called SLOPE (Shared Learning Object Portal Environment), a prototype repository
that allowed faculty to submit and re-use digital learning materials. The experience
with SLOPE helped Seneca identify hurdles related to effectively rolling out
a learning object repository. They concluded that faculty are more likely to
use a learning object repository that is easy to use and access. The campus
came to believe a successful content repository has to be implemented within
an application environment the faculty already knows, such as their course management
system.
To address learning content management needs Seneca chose the Blackboard Content
System to complement their Blackboard Learning System and Blackboard Portal
System. "With the Blackboard Content System," says Joanna Hunt, Seneca’s
application systems administrator responsible for Blackboard, "it became
so much easier. Now we post a document or learning object once and all course
sections simply link to it." For example, when a syllabus has to change
mid-semester, that change is made in just one document, not 15 or 20 times,
once for each section. Being able to store course materials in a single location
also makes better use of digital storage space.
Content sharing with the Blackboard Content System was initiated in a Spring
2004 pilot program with the Biochemistry and Nursing departments. Instructors
posted their content to shared course folders and gave their department colleagues
access to it. The Blackboard Content System also tracks changes to individual
resources, so faculty sharing resources with each other are able to maintain
multiple versions of a single resource, further facilitating collaboration.
Future Development
The initial pilot program was so successful that Seneca has decided to roll
out content sharing via the Blackboard Content System campus-wide in September.
To help inspire continuing creative activity among instructors, Academic eLearning
Liaison Valerie Lopes and teammates will be working with faculty members during
upcoming professional development workshops and sessions. The "My.Seneca
Stars" program will seek out people who are using unique and creative techniques
and encourage them to share those ideas, projects and learning objects with
colleagues.
It’s worth noting that both Lopes and Hunt practice what they preach.
In addition to her role as eLearning Liaison, Lopes teaches Business Communications
and uses the Blackboard Content System to share and test ideas. Leading a team
of content experts and student developers, Hunt and Lopes just completed a major
project to provide My.Seneca help content. They used the Blackboard Content
System to manage both the project and the content, using built-in collaboration
and security features that supported multiple authors while controlling which
parts of the project each person could access.
Seneca will begin building its new repository soon, based on the Learning Objects
Catalog feature in Release 2.0 of the Blackboard Content System. Seneca has
deep experience with using Building Blocks, Blackboard’s open architecture,
to extend the Blackboard platform with custom developed features and applications.
They plan to use the Blackboard Content System APIs to add functionality and
create meta-tags on the fly.
According to Santo Nucifora, Seneca’s manager of systems development
and innovations, the goal is ultimately to create wizards that will ask the
instructor simple questions and automatically create the metadata tags based
upon their answers. Instructors shouldn’t even realize that they are creating
metadata. Seneca’s long-term vision is to allow faculty at other schools
to search the Seneca repository and access its learning objects.
For more information on Seneca College’s use of the Blackboard Content
System, please contact Valerie Lopes, professor, eLearning liaison, at [email protected].
