thanks for your comment, as ever you raise excellent points. And tbh I don’t think any UK HE IT policies are up to doing what you outline. What I was trying to say was that they could if the right policies were in place. As they said about Steve Austin “we have the technology” but just now the policies need to get sorted out and people shouldn’t just take pot shots at our IT support staff.

Sheila

Are university IT departments prepared from both a policy and technology standpoint to run educational software developed by researchers on behalf of faculty at scales approaching entire departments and whole universities? (I suspect a few do this, but most aren’t prepared to do so. This is a lot of what’s going on right now in MOOCs.)

Do IT systems in the UK let a student, or x00,000 students, run arbitrary code on their servers and evaluate that code securely? (I’m guessing in a limited number of cases faculty and departments are supporting this, such as computer science departments. But I’m guessing this isn’t going on at the scale that MOOCs are, which might just make this a scale argument.)

Do VLE’s or question and test systems let faculty create parameterized items and offer those to individual students? (Some might, but I think that most don’t. To me this is one of the bigger differences in what we’re seeing in MOOCs.)

Can anyone easily view a course in university system? (This is as much policy as it is a technical limitation of the VLE that requires the viewer to jump through a lot of hoops or the faculty that wants to allow it.)

Brandon

Sheila

Interesting post, and I joined in the discussion with @dkernohan on Twitter at the time.

My initial response was that IT systems couldn’t cope with MOOC madness, but I suspect it’s a blend of both ‘systems’ and ‘policies’. At many institutions, VLE areas are created automatically on the back of central student record systems, etc. Further, often students have to be registered for the correct amount of credits to be pushed through to the VLE. How would this cope with MOOCs?

Whilst that is very much more likely a policy decision, I’m sure a lot of people working/managing online systems can recite those occasions where system x (read VLE/portal/assessment system/etc) collapsed under the load of students submitting work, etc. I’ve seen it at 3 HEIs in the last 8 years (probably less actually), and across systems that are hosted internally and externally.
When the user numbers increase to MOOC proportions (even if hardly any of them submit work), the systems will undoubtedly struggle IMO.

P

Sheila

And so, as @mhawksey points out above, the policies don’t cope. Not just IT policies, but also others. Yesterday I was called with a query which I won’t detail for privacy reasons, but it related to flexible provision which simply couldn’t cope with the demands of a quality system which is geared to N people doing a course for a year, rather than N/10 people completing the same course 10 times a year.

Online courses which still hold (compulsory) physical course committees and wonder why/complain that students don’t turn up.

I could go on…but the VLE itself is entirely capable of being used to organise learning resources.

Just on a factual note, we don’t have 100k online submissions a year yet, but we do have to cope with 800k assignments generally and we do handle all of the submission records and marks electronically. We are using the data i presented to help us to specify a complete electronic assessment management system. Also, the 8.3m figure was from Jan 2012. And the usage data is from a collection of sources, including @thestubbs.

Our IT systems are definitely not up to handling that lot, yet, but when they are we are hoping that our policies will be ready….

Sheila