The latest issue of the Educause Quarterly has an article called “Changing Course Management Systems: Lessons Learned.” It describes the NDSU switchover from Blackboard to desire2learn. We had evaluated d2l for our campus too. It’s a nice CMS and a company with the right direction (see my ramblings here and here). Though cheaper than Blackboard, it’s still too expensive for a school of our size.
But as I was reading the article a few things started to gel in my head. First, there is a problem inherent in talking about “conversion” from one CMS to another. If you convert a course from Blackboard to d2l, you will be retaining the constraints of the old CMS that you are running away, um, getting away from. To leverage the benefits of the new CMS, you need to consider a redesign of some depth:
Or some gradation of the above.
Their findings also caused me to react. Yes, there will be costs in time and money for the faculty in switching CMSes, depending how much they invested in the CMS. If you do something like AugNet Course Docs then your content is external to the CMS so migration is much less painful. The time of CMS transition can been framed as a time for change and re-evaluation of courses. As you can tell from above, I disagree with their concerned focus on conversion tools. But I do agree with their implication of CMS-neutral design (SCORM anyone?).
With my recent posts about the articles about laptops in the classroom, this Wired Campus Blog entry seems appropriate. It points you towards a list of Universities that require laptops and provides some basic info on their programs.
The first comment posted on the blog raises the same concerns that I feel. Requiring students to bring laptops opens you up to a world of pain in IT. But with IT providing and managing the laptops you can control many of the (in)compatibility variables that can negatively impact the classroom experience with laptops, and hence the learning.
Now to article #3, Incorporating Laptop Technologies into an Animal Sciences Curriculum. This was a challenging course as the students took the laptops to farms! Amazingly the institution ran fiber to the farms and installed wireless there. That was apparently easier than getting electricity to the barns. They had some excellent opportunities for students to use laptops to document their observations of cows getting ready to give birth — the students stay at the farms for a few days (day & night) when their cow is due. It sounds like they used some digital cameras. I bet with iMovie and a digital video camera they could do an impressive analysis.
One thing that I liked was how they used the laptops to keep up on current issues in animal science — something a static textbook cannot do. This seems rather obvious to me and I know many of our science faculty use the web for current science news. My hope is with the RSS module in moodle 1.5 we can incorporate news feeds into the course sites. With the class that I co-taught with Aimee at St Kates we had an RSS feed from the Shifted Librarian in the course site in tikiwiki. Having that constantly changing list of articles was great especially when posts would come up that were applicable to what we were covering in class.
The article goes on to explain how they use laptops with the various labs and activities — basically, I could never take that class or be a vet.
I just installed the WordPress spell check plugin from coldforged.org. This was the one feature I was missing from iBlog. Of course iBlog had the nice MacOS spell check as you type going for it. But this plugin uses aspell! Aspell is a buddy of mine as it’s the same speller that moodle uses. Hopefully this’ll mean the quality of my entries will improve.
Onto the next chapter, Laptops in Computer Science: Creating the “Learning Studio.” The Data Structures class in this example looks to suffer from the problem typical of a large lecture & lab course. The lab is taught by someone other than the main faculty member and the lectures get out of sync. There was also a lack in consistency in lecture and lab due to problems with who was leading them. With a small department Augsburg should have consistent courses. The problems they’re trying to solve shouldn’t be ones Augsburg has to worry about. While our Data Structures course does have a lab, the lab is taught by the faculty member.
The redesigned course used online self-assessment quizzes in the CMS to help shape the daily lecture. It’s interesting to see this strategy again. And it doesn’t have anything to do with laptops — just a student-centered just-in-time-teaching approach. In addition to the lecture, they added a lecture exercise (lex). The lex is a directed small-group exploration of the topic of the day with the faculty and TA available for help if needed. In their conclusion, they essentially say that this is an exercise in active learning. Again, laptops not required. But flexible space is key. And flexible space is inefficient and rows are efficient. Hopefully by the end of these articles I won’t be sneaking into work at 2 AM to re-arrange the labs!