EDUCAUSE | Open Source and E-Learning

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & IT at The University of British Columbia

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:21:27 -0600

In this 21 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology at The University of British Columbia. He has recently been involved in a project called Ancient Spaces at UBC, which uses gaming and virtual world technology to recreate locations from antiquity. He also participated in a session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "Indigenous Cultures: From Observing to Experiencing, from Videography to 3D VR Immersion".

Ulrich Rauch organizes the implementation of educational technologies for instructors, students and staff in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. As the director of a technical and an instructional support unit, and as trained sociologist, Ulrich combines his experience as an instructor with his perspective on learning technologies to research and apply e-learning strategies in support of collaborative learning.

E2005 Podcast: ePresence for E-Learning

podcaster — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:23:26 -0600

This 39 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled ePresence: An Open-Source Interactive Webcasting and Archiving System for E-Learning.

A Cautionary Tale....

StuartYeates — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 10:37:00 -0500

A cautionary tale about a developer, a university and some software that became a VLE.

The message seems to hold valuable cautions on several levels.

The tale

tags: opensource vle elearning virtual learning environment

Elgg personal learning landscape

StuartYeates — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 04:26:00 -0500

Elgg is a pedagogic combination of electronic portfolio, blog and social networking and represents a move away from content-driven VLEs such as Moodle and Bodington. Built from PHP, MySQL and Apache it should play nicely with other Open Source systems, especially Moodle.

http://elgg.net/

tags: opensource php vle pedagogy mysql elgg eportfolio elearning

OSS Watch Edinburgh Event

StuartYeates — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 03:55:00 -0500

The OSS Watch Building Open Source Communities conference seemed to go pretty well yesterday. We had a broad range of people, with a broad range of interests and everyone seem to find something useful.

I had a great day, catching up with old friends and new, including: Gustav Delius University of York; Jim Farmer, Sakai Educational Partnership Program; Sean Keogh, OXILP; Bill Olivier, Development Director (Systems and Technology) JISC; Andrew Savory and Helen Sharp, Open University.

Using Skype for Teaching and Learning

catherine — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:05:00 -0500

Great to see that Auricle, the University of Bath's e-learning weblog, has a new piece on "Skype Recordings as Learning Resources." It provides a neat compendium of different ways to record Skype calls: Skype's own voicemail service, sound recording/editing software (including the nifty open source Audacity), Skypecasting... and all have been tested by the author, Derek Morrison.

The really interesting bit is Derek's own solution, which uses Alex Rosenbaum's SAM (Skype Answering Machine). It works like this: A SAM-linked Skype account is included as a participant in a Skype conference call. As a new conference is started, the SAM account "intercepts" and records the call. Neat! The only trick is that you need two computers: one to create the Skype account, and the other to initiate the conference call.

Derek goes on, quite rightly, to ask how this technology could actually be used for teaching and learning (he offers some nice suggestions, too). Then he asks the big one: how might schools and institutions use the potential of VoIP?

For example, how many HEIs have yet bothered to install VoIP gateways in their exchanges? Such gateways don't appear to be particularly expensive and would enable calls to be routed to non-telephone devices, e.g. computers, thus opening up the possibility of some interesting work.

I've thought about this, too. VoIP services could be a boon to online collaboration, as more teachers and students start to use CMS/VLEs (I suspect Skype et al. are already well-established among science researchers). If introduced more broadly, VoIP telephony has the further, non-negligible, potential to deliver significant cost savings for university managers.

There are significant issues to be addressed, though, before this could happen in practice. Political and technical issues, like whether (and how) commercial VoIP deals with quality of service, the availability of specialist hardware, and the demands of regulatory bodies like Ofcom, should get settled fairly quickly. But cultural and managerial issues will take longer. For example, in my own institution (and, I suspect, in others), Internet/Web/IT provision falls under the administrative category of "academic resources", whereas telephony is managed as "critical infrastructure." IT departments may not have the power to introduce VoIP telephony at anything beyond the local, small-scale level. A bit of grass-roots campaigning and awareness-raising by academics and learning technologists might start the ball rolling, but it's all going to take time.

Try it first ...

penrose — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:01:00 -0500

With the ongoing competition between commercial CMS (course management systems) and OpenSource CMS, I am suprised that Blackboard and WebCT do not host "try-it-out" shell accounts for faculty. Why? Faculty who can, at their leisure, build sample courses will likely use their influence to encourage their institution to adopt that particular platform.

One problem that I have observed with the commercial packages is that administrators have typically been more restrictive in allowing faculty to have a non-productive course shell. While the latest versions of the popular systems may have tried to make accomodations, the bottom line is that faculty need a place to "experiment" with the features.

Evidence of this being true? Consider the growing popularity of CMS's like Moodle, WordCircle, Claroline, ATutor, and Segue.

David

Blackboad Building Blocks

penrose — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 06:01:00 -0500

The functionality of Blackboard Learning System and Portal System are expanded with the implementation of Building Blocks. You can download the Software Development Kit (SDK) for free. However, I am curious if there are individuals in this group who have actually created products to share.

If not, based upon the catalog of available Building Blocks, what seems to be missing?

David

OSPI 2005: The pitfalls, the pluses

catherine — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 10:34:00 -0500

So, OSPI 2005. I could talk about the weather: hot and humid. Or the numbers: 145 people, 8 countries, 2 days. Or the people: including Darren Cambridge (George Mason U), Chris Coppola and Janice Smith (r-smart), Jeff Haywood (U of Edinburgh) and Susan Kahn (IUPUI). So...what's next, what's new...?

With OSPI 2.0 unveiled, we learned that its future is now pretty much bound up with that of Sakai. This is not just a question of architecture and admin underpinnings, it's also to do with the way the project will be managed in future. Word is, the OSPI board may disappear altogether; the project may be managed via an Apache-style foundation. This could be a real turning point for the OSP development. For the moment, I'm reserving overall judgment as to the costs/benefits of this apparent convergence. I do have questions about the financing aspect, and I also wonder how OSPI plans to balance "collaborative" development with development that is driven by lead institutional partners.

Most interesting "user" development, from my perspective, is the portfolio matrix tool - looks great, and is flexible enough to support a range of activities. IUPUI has invested time/energy in developing a pedagogy of "matrix thinking", drawing on Stanford's Helen Chen's work on "folio thinking". This is something to watch.

Some immediate thoughts/reactions:

We need to think hard about what constitutes "success" for the open source development model. More obviously: does "success" mean simply that we held the conference, and the people came? Or that the OSP is financed sustainably, develops in a coherent way, and is being used by multiple institutions in 3 years' time?
We need to keep the diversity. OSPI 2005 attracted academic teaching staff, educational technologists, faculty liaison, software developers, and vendors. This diversity is a major strength of the OSPI community. I have to say it stands in marked contrast to the Sakai conference - held in the same venue, immediately prior to OSPI 2005 - which is much more developer-centric. To this end, I floated the idea of starting up an evaluation group as a way of keeping faculty involved and making sure the OSP fits their diverse needs. This may be coordinated through EPICC (European Portfolio Initiatives Coordination Committee) - watch this space for details.
We need less architectural change, and more tools. This one kind of follows on from the second point. If you're showing a faculty member a VLE/CMS, it's hard for them to see the benefits of an "empty box": they want tools and content. But unless we slow down the number of releases and the number of major changes to the "plumbing", in Brad Wheeler's phrase, we'll never get to the tool-making stage. (I believe this point applies regardless of whether we conceive of e-portfolios as a "tool", a "practice", or a "community").

So my holy trinity is: focus on sustainability, talk to the end users, and work on creating the tools they need... (So, that's all? Nothing more, then? ;)

Open Source VLE discussion on slashdot

StuartYeates — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:56:00 -0500

There is a discussion on slashdot (a very high traffic technie news site) entitled: "An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard?" Many of the comments are of low information value, but there are also many with good links to various sites of one kind or another.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1429257

CETIS release open source VLE interview

StuartYeates — Thu, 19 May 2005 08:33:00 -0500

CETIS have released an interview in which they asked me about open source VLEs. Much of the content revolves around Moodle and Bodington, since these are the system I know.

CETIS: http://www.cetis.ac.uk/

The interview: http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/oss

Polytechs migrate to Moodle - REUBEN SCHWARZ, New Zealand Stuff

buridan — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 22:48:00 -0500

Polytechs migrate to Moodle - REUBEN SCHWARZ, New Zealand Stuff:The Open Polytechnic is leading a consortium of polytechs in a $1 million project to deploy open-source e-learning software.

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we need more moodle!

Open source surgery at the JISC e-learning programme meeting

StuartYeates — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:36:00 -0500

I recently attended a meeting of the JISC e-learning programme projects. The projects have been pushed down the open source route by the funders (the JISC), so I was attending to hold an open source surgery to iron out any problems they were having. Only a small number of participants attended the surgery, but all of them bought questions and all of them got answers. Even better, all but one got the answer they wanted. Most of the projects are working with Java and service oriented architectures, so many of the questions revolved around the relationship between Java and open source, which has been getting some press recently.

I attended the project presentations and was pleasantly surprised by both the mean and minimum level of technical competence displayed by those presenting progress so far on their projects. I'm in no position to comment on the e-learning aspects of the projects, of course.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/programme_elearning.html

FLOSSE Posse

buridan — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:07:00 -0600

FLOSSE Posse:This a blog, with several podcasts of interesting people in the field of free/libre open source software in education