Open Source Objects for Teaching and Learning
Michigan State University’s Learning Online Network with CAPA (Computer-Assisted
Personalized Approach) is building an open platform for the development and
distribution of online content. The network, dubbed LON-CAPA, would make online
content freely and openly available to any instructor in the sciences or social
sciences. LON-CAPA was developed at MSU’s Laboratory for Instructional
Technology in Education (LITE), and grew out of earlier MSU initiatives, including
the successful CAPA and LectureOnline platforms.
The online content is composed of a resource pool of educational objects, applets,
or small slices of content that are written, created, and contributed by instructors
participating in the program. Gerd Kortemeyer, director of LITE and principal
investigator on the LON-CAPA team, describes the platform as a resource assembly
tool, “a shopping cart,” with which an instructor can go through “aisles”
gathering content until the entire instructional piece is complete.
LON-CAPA is analogous to a coursepak or a jigsaw puzzle, he says. Users decide
how much content to take: as little as a single animation, or as much as an
entire semester’s worth of material.
Think of LON-CAPA as a digital library with an instructional management system
built in. Currently, it includes material for courses in physics, calculus,
chemistry, biology, food science, and psychology. Some disciplines, such as
physics, contain quite a lot of material, enough to fill entire semesters. The
platform offers automatic checking of homework problems, with helpful feedback
available to those who come up with incorrect answers.
Each component is independent. “Instructors can choose the level of granularity
desired,” Kortemeyer says. Some teachers may want to select single GIF
files, animations, chapter sections, and problem sets, carefully crafting a
personalized approach to the course. Others can adopt online textbooks, complete
with problem sets and figures.
LON-CAPA’s flexibility and adaptability are important features. Since
anyone can contribute content, there is unlimited potential for growth. The
open source platform is deliberately set up for ease of use, so that selecting
and adopting content is very simple. Rather than screen content before it is
posted, Kortemeyer’s group has opted to let users determine the quality
of each posting. “Much as visitors to Amazon.com post their reviews of
books, our users will evaluate material that is put into LON-CAPA and will not
only assess it but can actually make improvements to it,” he says.
“We have at least 10,000 physics resources,” Kortemeyer notes. Other
disciplines contain fewer content bits, but more is being added all the time.
He notes that the platform isn’t specific to the sciences and d'esn’t
deliberately exclude the humanities. “It’s just that certain aspects
of it, such as the automatic checking of homework problems, lend themselves
better to the sciences and mathematics,” he says.
Users might draw from LON-CAPA for a distance education course where all of
the instruction is delivered in a virtual environment, but they might just as
easily use material as part of a lecture course or as lab materials. The adaptability
of the platform makes it appropriate for all sorts of situations.
At first glance, one might think that piecing together a course from a number
of small fragments would require a large investment of instructor prep time,
but in actuality that isn’t the case. Kortemeyer says that the granularity
options allow teachers to get as detailed in developing the course syllabus
as they wish and that building the syllabus takes as long as adopting a new
textbook. Once the course gets going, he notes, “there’s no homework
to grade, which saves a lot of time.” As with any online course, however,
instructors using the platform should expect to spend some time communicating
with their students via e-mail or the built-in communication tools.
At the moment, 18 institutions belong to the LON-CAPA network, and the group
hopes to have at least 30 partner institutions within a year. Kortemeyer hopes
that in addition to contributing content, many of the users will contribute
open source tool code as well, ensuring that the platform will be self-sustaining.
Member institutions have to agree to maintain a “library server,”
storing some of the content, and larger institutions host an access server as
well.
Member K-12 institutions have actually been given a server as part of the NSF
grant supporting teacher research within the project. MSU has hosted a two-week
training session of the first four school districts to join the program, and
plans to continue training new partner institutions. Next year’s LON-CAPA
conference will be held at Florida State University, where Kortemeyer says they
hope to draw at least 80 participants.
Their long-term goal is to spin the program off into a not-for-profit self-sustaining
organization that maintains the network, manages content royalties, handles
maintenance of the library, and provides technical support and regular training
sessions. With NSF funding, the group hopes to attract the attention of potential
member organizations and quickly build a large base of participants.
For more information, contact Gerd Kortemeyer at [email protected]
or visit www.lon-capa.org.