Are academic e-learning sites losing out to mainstream tech?
June 20th, 2008 by Paul NikkelArstechnica has posted some interesting commentary about Martin Weller’s e-learning article for “On the Horizon”. Weller argues that the university is as much an facilitator of collective learning among the student community as it is a conduit for knowledge. The university combines the interaction between students with the university material and gurus.
He then points out that the online communities we are seeing explode in recent years are fulfilling a parallel function. The “web 2.0″ focus on collaboration, conversation and community is increasingly playing a parallel role to the classroom.
The point seems to be less that Facebook is going to replace the university and more that what students expect from their education community is changing rapidly. As Ars writes,
Weller notes that the software systems that many universities deploy have strict permissions limits that leave the posting of materials and launching of discussions strictly in the hands of the professors. “Why will they [students] accept standardized, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?” he asks. If the students can’t meet their expectations through these systems, the students will just ignore them and start their own Facebook community; Weller paints a picture of university systems with “digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums.”
I’ve got to agree. All my experience with educational “enterprise” software is that it is a rigid platform with a poor UI. It seems too often it is built by committee with attention to control and features rather than looking at how communities actually interact and communicate.
My question though, and what I would be interesting in hearing, is how many people involved in education are abandoning “approved” e-learning tech for mainstream ones. Are you provided with a university CMS but instead use a Wordpress blog? Do you use YouTube instead of integrated video modules? What about sharing documents, lecture notes or audio recordings? Are your students forming study groups on Facebook instead of on the school’s group software?
June 21st, 2008 at 4:25 am
Our seminary uses an iteration of Blackboard. Those who are doing online course work use it because they have been using it for a while, all the students are enrolled for them, they know how it works…
I find it terribly constricting. I’ve gone to blogs and wikis for most of the online aspects of the course work. Students have set up their own study groups using Yahoo or Google groups. The only thing Blackboard provides that I haven’t found a good free blog/wiki can do is threaded discussions.
But I agree with you: in Blackboard, I the prof am the initiator and thread-starter. My students show much greater autonomy on the blog/wiki, and I have a better chance to see what questions/issues they have.
June 21st, 2008 at 1:51 pm
blackboard doesn’t have blogs or wikis?!
I use Moodle which has that stuff. I agree that teachers need to initiate much of the stuff, but it is not hard to start a general discussion forum in Moodle for students to discuss things if they wish.
The thing I find most constricting right now is size. I want to upload larger video files than moodle allows— though admittedly I don’t know if the restriction is moodle or my university.
July 5th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I couldn’t agree more with your and Weller’s assessement. I chair a grad.ministry department that uses Blackboard and last fall we commissioned one of our prof’s to do an online class solely using the web 2.0 resources that are easily accessible for free on the web, So with a combo of youtube, blogs, facebook, wiki’s etc. he taught the entire class with very few hitches. The things he missed most were insider features like gradebook, quizzing etc.
If Course Management Systems don’t migrate to become WEB 2.0ish Learning Platforms indeed they will become “tumbleweeds.”
August 5th, 2008 at 5:57 am
I am very late answering this, I intended a full post, but got waylaid by a new semester starting.
Our Moodle installation also has an upload limit, so (although it was recently generously increased 10 fold - it is set by the institution) I still paste in videos from Blip.tv (better quality than YouTube and copes with either traditional or widescreen) and host recordings on my own site.
Running a class on facebook could be fun, but half our students have hardly heard of FB, Moodle is enough of a stretch for them, and on the whole it seems OK for others, it is bit by bit adding more interactive features. Though sadly my popup blocker blocked the IM client for half a semester, why can’t it integrate MSN and/or Yahoo etc… There have to be a limit somewhere to the number of wheel designs we can stand, and Pigin doesn’t “do” Moodle.
So in short for me integration is the key:
great: they play together nicely.
a pain, it does not integrate with the clients I (or my students) already use, what’s the use of that?
Moodle and Blip.tv -
Moodle’s own “built in” IM -