A difficult new year or an opportunity to reform and renew?

Posted on January 2, 2012 by mss

Phew! All done and dusted. Christmas and New Year have come and gone, and we find ourselves at the start of 2012 deciding whether to believe the doomsayers, the optimists or more likely having to formulate our own workable opinions somewhere in between.

I lean towards the more optimistic interpretations of the future, if only because I’m old enough now to remember the last recession in the early 1990’s when I returned from America to a rather glum UK. One minute I was working on some really quite interesting early electronic hypertext publishing projects, pre-Web of course, and the next I was looking for any kind of reasonably related job. The one I found was to help to build a brand new MBA programme that in ten years would reform how MBAs could be delivered worldwide. It’s still a beacon of reformation some twenty years later, and one of my personal examples of the value of making risky new investments.

So, what is there for us to reform and renew during 2012? I still think most e-Textbooks are pretty poor quality, even though the e-Reader devices themselves are steadily improving. The one exception I saw this year at Online Educa was the Houghton Mifflin Fuse math applet for the iPad which was pretty good but, I suspect, expensively hand-crafted and medium dedicated.

I still see too much emphasis on enabling e-Tutoring rather than e-Learning, in order to port the “being taught” status-quo online. I still see valuable learning contents languishing because of lack of investment in their futures.

Last year I helped convince three organisations to take a risk and invest in an XML single-source production and management for their courses and programmes. My target for this year is to increase this by an order of magnitude, by putting our new Courseworker for Moodle Cloud service into your hands, so you can get on and do XML single-source production of courses yourself.

This year is starting with new opportunities to reform and renew for me.

Happy New Year.

Posted in Martin's blog | Tagged , ,

Inescapable reasons for investing now in online distance education

Posted on November 11, 2011 by kwc

There are, I think, inescapable reasons for a university to be looking at online/distance learning (ODL). Many strategic aims are predicated on growth, but restrictions associated with resources often make growth difficult. ODL is also an obvious mechanism for achieving a global presence. Having a strategy and the mechanisms for developing ODL delivered programmes is therefore an asset. It tends to come at a price for most universities who soon find out that many aspects challenge what’s currently in place, particularly regulations and administration. However these problems can be relatively easily overcome with a culture of positive intent.

ODL materials are an investment in flexible delivery. They can be designed to entice students to interact with the content itself, through purpose designed Study Guides containing deliberate Reflection points for example. Features such as ‘page commenting’ if added to a Study Guide can have students debate issues, and there are always Forums where public debate can be encouraged.

There has never been a better time to start building your Online Distance Education business. Call us if you need some help to get going.

Posted in Ken's Blog | Tagged ,

Implementing knowledge management in universities

Posted on October 11, 2011 by kwc

Universities are ‘Knowledge Institutions’ and deliver education to an ever increasing Knowledge Society so it is odd, perhaps, to find that few of these institutions have a Knowledge Management strategy that they are able to effectively implement.

This is at odds with funding and initiatives from the funding councils where there is a major emphasis on content repositories, information architectures and the use of information standards to enable information sharing to happen within, or outside of, an institution. JISC, for example, promote activities in the following areas:

  • Digital repository development for universities and colleges;
  • Digital preservation – to develop distributed environments for digital preservation, with well-defined services, roles and responsibilities;
  • ‘Discovery to delivery’ – providing searching service across repositories using agreed standards and interoperability;
  • The development and piloting of innovative approaches to repository use and digital preservation;
  • Shared infrastructure services such as user profiling services, digital rights management, registries, identifier services, terminology and preservation services.

The implication for any institution is that there must be merit in adopting some, at least, of the approaches and disciplines that accompany these types of activity. JISC expects this to result in a range of benefits for universities and colleges, including better access to and management of their intellectual outputs, increased capability within the sector to manage these assets for education and research, and an infrastructure that will support the sector into the future. In more practical terms, good quality ‘information assets’ will support activities such as distance learning, will provide students with a better base of learning materials and it will help bring about a culture of developing assets and IPR.

It will also act as a mechanism for introducing an improved quality infrastructure, including for management and administration. When any institution adds up its cost of managing information (e.g. for the corporate web site) it comes to a substantial amount. Changes in structure, design ideas and delivery options add to this, even though the underlying content may not change. Having a strategy for this information, its use and its reuse, offers many advantages. In support of Learning and Teaching this advantage can be significant in terms of the overall student experience, but also in terms of options for flexible delivery, corporate customer branding and student support.

Does it work in practice? I think it is significant that those universities that have adopted institutional information strategies look to be both efficient and enjoying third stream incomes. The classic example is Heriot-Watt University where the MBA and the undergraduate management programmes are the products of their information strategy, which ensures that any information of value (from a text book down to a humble multiple choice question) has a structure and is checked into the formal repository. There is great use and re-use of learning materials in that institution. Over the lifetime of this strategy the quality of information has been enhanced significantly, as have the many business processes (e.g. in administration) that support the use of these assets.

In sum, formal information architectures present great opportunities for institutions, ranging from addressing quality improvement issues, to cutting cost through efficiency, and to developing new outlets for their education. The lead could come from the XML related technologies, and the aims of the semantic web, but the goal must be to carry the institution on an implementable knowledge management strategy.

Posted in Ken's Blog | Tagged , , , ,

Steve Jobs and Hypercard

Posted on October 6, 2011 by mss

Its a sad day for me – the day Steve Jobs died. I’m old enough to remember the start of it all, and to regret not buying significant shares just before Apple’s second renaissance in the new millennium.

I can remember in 1987 competing against Apple’s Hypercard, a pre-Web card based hypertext publishing application that was included with every Macintosh. The company I was part of were developing GUIDE at the time, a document oriented hypertext electronic publshing application suite that was itself influenced by many prior concepts including Ted Nelson’s Xanadu.

Even in these early days of electronic publishing though, it was obvious that Apple was doing its own thing and that it was innovative and fun. Hypercard went the way of the Dodo in 2004, but not before its Rolodex paradigm and application building programming language HyperTalk inspired many software and hardware vendors including Oracle, and creative individuals such as Douglas Adams, to try new experiments in publishing and business.

This to me is Steve Jobs greatest legacy – a storm of inspiration that has been part of some of our lives for past three decades. Thank you for that Steve.

Posted in Martin's blog | Tagged ,

Saving the sum of human knowledge

Posted on September 29, 2011 by mss

My DNS was recently poisoned. What this novelty actually meant for me was that every time I tried to use my virtually extended Internet brain – in other words search for something using Google – I was maliciously taken to another spam blogsite.

This was not something I could do much about since it had nothing to do with my personal computer, but it did start me thinking again about the whole Internet using experience we have to work with, how dependent we are on it, and how vulnerable it is. If I was a student trying to research something for my essay to be submitted tomorrow, it would be very surprising and frustrating indeed.

The Web was a breath of fresh air when it started, but now it is noisy, messy, buggy, awkward to adapt and a potential legal liability. The World of information I want to bathe, soak, absorb and learn in is isolated in individual silos jealously guarded by lawyers, salesmen, proprietary systems and formats. Publishers obviously don’t trust me and they won’t let me do what I want to do as I struggle to learn from their content. It has to be their way. Electronic book projects like Google Books frustrate me because the quality of the PDF content is generally low (inflexible, multi-styled and page trapped), and even the latest eBook readers and tablets drive me up the wall with their page metaphors and proprietary operations.

Now, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson were frustrated in this way long before me (try reading about project Xanadu some time), but we still don’t seem to have a solution to these issues. Bush challenged us in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly magazine article “As We May Think”, to gather together the sum of knowledge of mankind into a more useable form. Will we ever be able to browse the sum of knowledge of human kind in our personal information environments?

Our generation has a responsibility to get all of the useful information mankind has accrued to date into a healthy state for future generations. Our parents had the same responsibility and they mostly failed. From what I can see, we’re making it worse.

If we ever get back to the Moon, we will have disappointed two generations with our delay. However its nearly three generations since Bush wrote his visionary article, and I think we are much closer to getting back to the Moon than we are achieving his requests.

Save the Planet yes. What about saving the sum of our knowledge too? Anyone up for that?

Posted in Martin's blog | Tagged , ,

£36,000 for a Degree means more flexibility

Posted on September 6, 2011 by kwc

I spent many years at a major Scottish university that is in the news at the moment. I was a Physics undergraduate, then a postgraduate student in the 1970s, and I obviously liked it so much that I went back to study an MBA part time in the late 1980s. I loved the university, and I even liked the programmes I studied — including the MBA which, I have to say, was a bit ramshackle and poorly taught in these days. However would I be willing to pay £36,000 for the privilege?

I would have to say ‘no’. This is a huge sum of money to be hung round your neck. OK, you don’t actually have to pay it up front (a popular misconception) but you do have to pay it eventually. When I finally left the university I had a wife and a child, but was still able to borrow enough money to immediately buy a first house.

What would I do if I was a student today? I would find a way to continue my education, but not at that cost. Part time, distance or on-line study would become a much more likely option; one that can be entertained while in a job. That seems to be a sensible route and one many institutions and departments are ill equipped for.

If you don’t have your blended learning materials in place and you haven’t invested at least in part in more cost-effective flexible learning options, your future value-seeking customers are more likely to go elsewhere to an organisation that has, and is at least cognisant of the strain a £36,000 start-up debt puts on a young student or family.

Posted in Ken's Blog | Tagged

Need a bit more storage for your content domain?

Posted on August 4, 2011 by rbk

Here’s an interesting company worth a mention in passing – Backblaze, who are offering an unlimited online backup and storage service for just $5/month.

Er. sorry, did you say unlimited? and £2.50 a month?!

Yep. They do it by building their own custom storage pods using commodity hardware and in particular multiple Hitachi 3TB drives in a custom cooling case. The latest version of their pod stores 135 Terabytes for just $7,384.

So, no excuse not to backup those precious course domains offsite now during those quieter times of Internet use.

Posted in Richard's blog | Tagged ,

Our entry for the 2011 National eLearning Awards

Posted on July 29, 2011 by mss

We’ve never entered in a national awards competition before. Here in the UK, eLearning age magazine conducts an annual awards competition, and our British Council customer has persuaded us to enter their Global Schools Partnership service in the “Excellence in the production of learning content – not-for-profit sector” category.

Global School Partnerships (GSP) is funded by UKaid from the Department for International Development and managed by British Council in partnership with Cambridge Education Foundation, UK One World Linking Association and VSO. It is a is a collaborative effort drawing on the expertise of the four consortium organisations, Global Learning NGOs across the UK, international development and environmental NGOs such as Oxfam and World Wide Fund for Nature, universities and academics with an interest in the field and hundreds of global school partnership practitioners.

Around 7,000 schools in 58 partner countries participate in the GSP programme including some of the world’s poorest (Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Liberia, Bangladesh, Somalia). Although GSP has some training presence in 17 of these partner countries to provide face-to-face input, the explosive rate of growth in participation has merited the development of a new solution which can expand access whilst maintaining quality.

The result was the development of three highly interactive hypertext courses, targeted at staff in schools and authored for a truly global audience. The 1200+ Teachers who have used the service to date share experience by using the pragmatic activities provided, and learn from custom texts, illustrations, web links and forums.

The course materials gather as much valuable information as they give out. Teacher’s study reflections are recorded in personal workbooks which are used later on by the British Council to award certificates to reward effort and contributions made, and to gather ongoing feedback and best practice – mining the responses for individual questions and generating Wordle’s from macro content queries.

The courses were mastered semantically in Docbook XML, produced in Courseworker, and batch loaded (and frequently re-loaded) into a combined Moodle and Joomla delivery and administration environment, for the British Council staff to operate themselves. This has turned out to be a very cost effective solution for what is essentially a global training and knowledge gathering service.

School partnerships can provide innovative and powerful learning contexts but they are complex undertakings which require a high level of expertise. Providing an accessible and inclusive eLearning platform, on a popular open source learning environment base, allows considerably more educators to develop this expertise and at more advanced levels.

I think it is a good use of eLearning and open source tools. Judge yourself by logging into this service yourself if you like by visiting http://www.global-schools.org/.

Posted in Martin's blog | Tagged , ,

Collaborate to compete

Posted on June 6, 2011 by mss

There’s an interesting phrase. It’s actually the first part of the title of a UK Higher Education Funding Council Online Learning Task Force report, the full title of which is:

‘Collaborate to compete: Seizing the opportunity of online learning for UK higher education’.

But does it actually make sense?

Imagine you want to derive lots of third-stream income from launching your academic knowledge and expertise onto a demanding World. You start by thinking about whether there is a paying audience for it. Suitably encouraged, you then think about what exactly what you want to deliver to whom, where. Then you work backwards from that point, till you get to the processes and technologies you need to actually produce and deliver it – at a distance.

In CAPDM, we call this process being “delivery driven”. The end result configures the actual processes, people and organisations required to produce and sustain the product and its surrounding business.

If you undertake this thought process for yourself, pretty soon you will identify parts of the required solution you just aren’t equipped to do. Either you don’t have the right systems in place, the right people with the necessary skills and experience to make it happen and successful, or you don’t have the content or business assets you need.

At this point you either choose to invest, partner, change and/or collaborate. You might invest or partner to achieve something new for yourself. You might choose to change to something you know you can do well with the assets you have. Collaboration may help with some capital investments and ongoing costs, but will it help or hinder your ability to compete?

Successful sustained competition requires clarity of business thinking and purpose, a close relationship with your customers, and the ability to respond to their needs swiftly with your product or service. This is hard to achieve if your key business processes – product development, customer support and sales, are distant from them in any way.

Collaboration is a hindrance if you don’t recognise the need to resource key business processes for yourself and manage your new business actively – yourself. Where it can help however is with sharing access to expensively developed assets – reusable, good quality course materials that take a lot of investment to build. Academic textbook publishers are an obvious source of such materials and are eagerly looking for new University partners in Online Distance Learning. They aren’t going to help you build your business though, so if you need help to do that, get it.

Posted in Martin's blog | Tagged

Trading on status alone

Posted on February 4, 2011 by mss

There are lots of changes coming to the UK higher education market, and implementing them for September 2012 is presently focusing much debate and concern. Much of the current debate about why institutions are setting the maximum £9000 fee seems to involve the view of most ‘experts’ that higher education is essentially a positional market and that universities compete for status rather than high-quality education.

I hope not, because we really do have to concentrate on the quality of provision, now. In the very near future, quality will be judged on our ability to provide students with better courses, more flexibly and in a sustainable way that keeps people employed, motivated and productive.

Status is reputation and ephemeral. Good quality product selling globally is not.

Posted in Martin's blog | Tagged ,