Who else develops single-source courses?

Some of the largest global online distance learning providers have adopted and deployed single-source publishing solutions for their courses.

Edinburgh Business School, which currently describes itself as the World’s most flexible MBA programme, produced and maintained all of its 45 course sets and 900+ individual course components this way for 15 years. This approach resulted in a high quality course provision which the market has validated, making this non-tutored MBA programme the largest in the World (FT.COM – online MBA rankings 2011).

The ifs School of Finance in the UK, has produced most of their diploma and undergraduate degree programme materials as single-source courses from 2006 onwards, and successfully achieved degree awarding status in 2010.

The UK Open University has been single-source course publishing with XML for decades, but more recent developments have included their development of a device neutral OU XML standard for packaging their open content LearningSpace development, and outputting it in a variety of delivery formats including IMS, XMTML (for printing) the DAISY (Kerscher, 2000) accessible content format.

ConneXions is an open education resource repository of 19202 XML based educational modules, woven into 1157 single-source course sets that are freely adoptable from their cnx.org Web service.

Modern content engineering for learning materials.

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What is a single-source course?

A ‘single-source course’ is a holistic course where all the content components required to deliver and sustain it are produced and maintained within a single integrated perspective.

Good quality content is the substrate, particularly for online distance learning experiences where it supports the core knowledge acquisition and assessment processes. Multiple content components can be deployed including course descriptions, syllabi, learning objectives and outcomes, student handbooks, textbooks, workbooks, discussion papers, cases, topic tutorials, quizzes, mock exams, glossaries and other reference materials.

In a single-source course, they are all integrated within a single, semantically -rich information architecture, which provides the necessary elements, attributes and schemas that are needed for semantic interpretations of the information in the content. This in-turn allows the creation of better quality research and learning environments.

For example, if you want the learning objectives, assessment questions, answers, reflections, tasks or academic references to be searched and used intelligently in your course environment, you’d better not represent them all as dumb paragraphs trapped in files of a proprietary binary format.

If you then want to search and then hyperlink directly from wrong answers back into the place in the core learning text that deals with them, you need a link management solution that works with multiple course components and a common set of metadata that is shared across them all.

Single-source courses the future of education publishing. They underpin the semantically-rich, integrated and coherent research, teaching and learning experiences we want. They are cost-effective to produce, maintain and reuse. They address all modern publishing devices and needs. They will do to course development what the production line did to automobiles.

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Why should we bother investing in XML publishing?

There is a known issue with the slow uptake of XML for publishing books and learning materials. It is seen as technically challenging for the average user. This problem has dogged the XML tools industry for more than a decade, and the SGML tools providers for a decade before that.

In distributing relatively large volumes of XML learning materials through LearnSpace, the UK Open University discovered that the majority of their package users were not familiar with XML or felt they did not have the time to learn how to use it, and so did not return their modified units to the LearnSpace website.

Another known challenge is the “quality of XML” one, or to put it another way “there is XML and there is XML”. You can get XML out of Microsoft Word now, but in its freshly generated state, it is fit for little else than loading back into Microsoft Word. Further enhancing it to turn it into a more flexible, semantically tagged set of knowledge is not something to attempt in Microsoft Word, and also requires an appreciation of the other publishing techniques needed for true single-source publishing.

Outweighing both of these challenges is the revolutionary potential of XML based course production and maintenance, and the larger single-source publishing picture it is part of. As John Bosak of SUN commented back in 1998,

“XML can give us, in effect, a single, completely internationalized format of almost unlimited power for both print and online publishing that is fully interoperable across all products and all platforms.”

To date, humankind has developed some quite sophisticated publishing technologies and processes, including the complex typesetting languages that catalysed the development of XML. One traditional typesetting tools company that has successfully made the transition into using XML based publishing tools and workflows is Quark, who in 2011 announced:

“We continue to see tremendous uptake of XML authoring as organizations realize the significant improvements that structured content and dynamic publishing make to the accuracy, relevance, and immediacy of information delivery”
Michael Boses, director of XML products for Quark.

So why can’t we do it again, and re-invent our learning materials publishing workflows? We can, and some are already. Tune back in later on to see who…

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

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.

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Inescapable reasons for investing now in online distance education

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.

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Implementing knowledge management in universities

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.

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Steve Jobs and Hypercard

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.

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Saving the sum of human knowledge

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?

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£36,000 for a Degree means more flexibility

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.

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Need a bit more storage for your content domain?

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.

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