The WIDE project was part of the Jisc DVLE programme which I supported, and developed a number of fully accessible widgets. The team then got further funding and were able to develop their methodology and practice into an authoring tool for widgets.

Earlier this week I joined the team and about 25 others for a “WIDGaT in Practice” workshop. We had a chance to see some examples of widget from both the HE and FE sectors and were able to get hands on and create our own widgets. Having taken part in their design bash day about 18months ago to help the team scope the design for the authoring tool, it was great to see and have a play with a useable tool which pretty much covered all the design elements the “expert” group came up with.

There are a number of pre-built templates to chose from or you can start with a blank canvas. One of the common designs for widgets from practitioners has time/task management widgets to help students be more independent in their studies/life. We were shown a number of examples including a really nice simple visual reminder of key steps for each day for a student with autism and another with key stages for final year projects. The editor also includes a number of components such as embedding youtube videos and images, and social network components such as Facebook likes and comments. Examples of using these features included a widget which embedded a number of videos with a Facebook comment link so that students could share comments on content directly into their course Facebook group. There is also a simple quiz component which is proving also proving popular.

WIDGaT authoring stage

The interface is pretty straightforward but I did find manipulation things a bit tricky and the team are working at improving layout options. However as a quick and easy way to develop and share resources online it does have a lot going for it. It also has a lot of design support functionality built in to help users think about what they are creating and who they are creating it for.

WIDGaT Personna description function

At #cetis13 next month the team are also running a workshop at the end of day 1 where they will be actively looking for new components to add to the tool as well as any other ideas for enhancements. As the tool is open source, it is a great example for the Open Innovation and Open Development session on day 2 .

Claire McLeod from Guide Me Tours gave an overview of the app they have developed for the museum. For those of you not familiar with Glasgow, Kelvingrove is one of the city’s main museums and is consistently in the top five visitor attractions in Scotland.

However like all (municipal) museums developing new income streams and improving the visitor experience is an ongoing challenge. And so to the power of three bit. The business model of Guide Me tours exploits the power of three. They develop the app (at no charge to the museum, but obviously working with museum staff) and then when the finished app is available, the income is split three ways – a third to the Apple/Android store, a third to the museum and a third to them. Seems like quite a good deal to me.

The new app (available on the Apple store just now and the Android version will be available in the next few weeks) gives a two hour audio tour of the museum. A free version gives a taster of the full experience and some of the highlights of the collection.

Screenshot of GuideMe Kelvingrove Museum App

The team are now working on extending the user experience to produce other versions which are more inclusive with features for hearing and visually impaired visitors, and different language versions.

Currently there is no wifi in the museum, which gave rise to quite an interesting discussion about wifi provision in council buildings. I do find it disappointing that although we have wifi provision in our libraries, the City Council are still reluctant to widen provision to museums. This is just my personal view and I don’t know all the ins and outs of the decision process, costs etc. But I think wifi provision would increase visitor numbers and return visitors; as well as making downloading the app a lot faster (until we all have 4G on our phones!). It seems an interim measure of a wifi hot spot for access to the apple/android stores might be the first stage. There’s also a cafe across the road from the museum which has wifi – so you could just go there get a coffee and download the app there

Effective Learning in a Digital Age: is an effective practice guide that explores ways in which institutions can respond flexibly to the needs of a broader range of learners and meet the opportunities and challenges presented by lifelong learning.

Crossing the Threshold: Moving e-portfolios into the mainstream is a short guide which summarises the key messages from two recent online resources, the e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit, developed for JISC by the University of Nottingham, and five institutional video case studies. This guide and accompanying resources explore the processes, issues and benefits involved in implementing e-portfolios at scale.

Enhancing practice: Exploring innovation with technology in further education is a short guide that explores how ten colleges in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (SWaNI) and England are using technology to continue to deliver high-quality learning and achieve efficiency gains despite increasing pressure and reduced budgets.

Developing Digital Literacies: is a briefing paper that provides a snapshot of early outcomes the JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme and explores a range of emergent themes including graduate employability, and the engagement of students in strategies for developing digital literacies.

Extending the learning environment: is a briefing paper that looks at how institutions can review and develop their existing virtual learning environments. It offers case study examples and explores how systems might be better used to support teaching and learning, improve administrative integration or manage tools, apps and widgets.

All guides are available in PDF, ePub, MOBI and text-only Word formats. Briefing papers are available in PDF.

There are a limited number of printed copies of each guide for colleges and universities to order online.

SRC
*Project Prod entry

In terms of organisational change, SRC (Supporting Responsive Curricula) is part of larger set of project EQAL which is radically changing the way the MMU provides learning services (in the broadest sense) to its students. Other JISC funded initiatives e.g. the W2C project are connected to this major organisational change, of which SOA approaches is key. Professor Mark Stubbs’ keynote presentation at this years CETIS conference gives an overview of their overall technical approach.

MMU is in the processes “introducing a new curriculum framework, new administrative systems and processes, revised quality assurance processes and new learning systems to transform the student experience” and the SRC project has been at heart of the complete revision of all undergraduate courses, through developing a processes and workflows for a common curriculum database which feeds into a range of other learning services a part of their “corePlus” learning environment provision.

All course module and assessment structures have been completely revised (starting with first year and now extending to 2nd and 3rd). A new course database is now being populated using a common set of forms which provide a common set of tags (including competencies) and unique identifiers for courses which can be used a part of a wider set of “mash up” activities for students to access. When redesigning the course database, extensive stakeholder engagement and mapping was undertaking (using Archimate) in relation to QA processes which formed a key part of the project’s baseline report. A case study details this work and this blog post provides a summary of the new course documentation and QA processes including a map of the new peer review process.

A key part of the project has been to explore effective ways for students to showcase their experience and abilities to employers. A number of systems have been explored and an institutional e-porfolio strategy produced. A decision has now been taken to provide institutional support for Mahara, beginning in September 2013.

In terms of standards/specifications, this being MMU, XCRI is integral to their systems but hasn’t been a core part of the project. Like other projects, the institutional demand for xcri is still not widespread. However members of the team are key to developments around the integration (and thereby extension) of XCRI into other specifications such as MLO and various competency related initiatives.

Now the major technical implementations have been implemented, the team are now focussing on the wider cultural changes, engagement with staff e.g. the development of the Accrediation! Board game which I’ve written about before, and evaluation.

Coeducate
*Project Prod entry

“Coeducate is a cross institutional project that will focus our staff on a re-engineering of the professional curriculum. It will develop new processes and technical systems to support curriculum development and design that start with the needs of the learner and their organisation. This will be negotiated and delivered in partnership and with full recognition of in-work and experiential learning.”

Coeducate, has taken an the almost opposite approach to MMU in terms of a top down approach to creating and managing new courses. They have connected their SITS database with their new Moodle installation see this blog post for an overview, but unlike MMU do not have a set of course templates, or the same level of automatic course population. Instead, staff now have more flexibility in terms of creating courses suited to their specific needs, as this post and linked documentation describes. The IDIBL framework has also been developing as template for course creation, however the institution has developed an alternative undergraduate curriculum framework. The team have also produced a report on approaches to developing open courses, which again should provide a useful staff development resources.

Following this more bottom up approach, the team have also instigated an series of innovation support network seminars and produced a set of online resources (housed in Moodle) to support staff as new institution validation process are being introduced. Like so many of the projects being caught up in a sea of other institutional change initiatives that aren’t as tightly coupled as MMU, the project has focused effort on providing support to staff to guide them (and in turn the institution) through changes such as course revalidation. The project has been able to to influence and inform institutional strategy to initiatives such as course revalidation through some light weight data analysis of the VLE in terms of course structure, numbers and types of assessment etc.

Over the past year, the team have also been exploring the Business Model Canvas tool in terms of its suitability for learning design planning and/or conceptual modelling. The flexibility of the tool has been identified as a key strength. The team have found other more specific learning design tools such as the LDSE too prescriptive. This post outlines the approach of integrating this tool within Archi (which is being developed by colleagues at the University of Bolton). The tool is currently being trialled with PGCHE students, and again will hopefully provide another design tool for the University and the rest of the community. The team have been using the tool to support staff in course revalidation process, and are lobbying for its adoption into the formal revalidation process.

The team had hoped to do more work on integrating widgets into Moodle for course authoring. However staff issues and a refocus of project priorites has meant that not as much progress on this has been made as originally intended. However, over the last few months the team have been able to build a customisable 8LEM widget (more information and a link to a beta version is available here). The principles outlined in the 8LEM methodology are also the basis for the work of the Viewpoints project, and by the end of this June, it is hoped that there will be at least two versions of the widget available based on the approaches of the Viewpoints project as well as the “vanilla” version.

Bolton has also been successful in gaining funding for one of the JISC Course Data projects and this project will extend work started in Co-educate. The work done through the CoEducate project has help to articulate some of the key requirements for data reporting and practical uses of data collection, including key indicators for retention and drop out.

As with other projects, the challenge for the team is to ensure that the resources and approaches explored and advocated through the project continue to be embedded within institutional frameworks.

Enable
*Project Prod entry

“As a ‘hub’ initiative, the project aims to enable the University to join together its various change initiatives around curriculum development into a coherent and radical overall change process, which will ensure all stakeholder needs are understood, identify overlooked problems areas, and provide a sustainable solution . . .”

The Enable project started out with the vision of connecting and enhancing institutional processes. As with all the other projects, senior management buy-in was always a critical part of the project and a Senior Management Working Group was set up to ensure this buy-in. Part of the wider institutional story has been the relatively high number of changes at senior executive level which have impacted the project. The team have shared their experiences around managing change and information processes.

In terms of technologies, as well as being part of the Design Programme, the project has engaged with a number of other JISC funed initiatives. The team have been an early champion of EA approaches and have been involved with the JISC FSD EA practice group initiative. They have piloted TOGAF approaches in an Archimate pilot. Their experiences of using Archi in for their work in external examiners pilot are summarised in this blog post and embedded slides. Phil Beavouir, the developer of the Archi tool has also posted a thoughtful response to this post. If you are interested in EA approaches , I would recommend both these posts.

The team have also been experimenting with a number of different ways to automate their code build, acceptance, testing and deployment processes. These tools and techniques are being adopted and used in other areas now too. Again the team have promised to share more via the blog, in the meantime a summary of the technologies they are using are detailed in the project Project prod entry.

The team have been looking at Sharepoint and, another example of cross JISC programme fertilisation, were able to gain some of the benefits realisation funding for the Pineapple project to experiment with its software. An overview presentation is available here. The pilot was successful, but, at this point in time, no institutional decision on an institutional wide document management system has been made, so no further developments are being introduced in respect of this work.

The team feel that the EA approaches have “enabled” them to define with stakeholders the key areas to be addressed in terms of developing effective processes. And, have found that having “just enough backing” for developments has been effective. Particularly in gaining senior management buy-in whilst Executive decisions are not possible. The project has been able to illustrate potential working solutions to recognised problem areas. They have also been sharing their experiences of EA extensively with the rest of the sector, through presentations at various institutions.

PC3
*Project Prod entry

“The Personalised Curriculum Creation through Coaching (PC3) project is developing a framework that places coaching at the heart of the personalised curriculum design. Learners will be able to select provision suitable to their needs, construct an award (or module set), access resources and learning support, and negotiate assessment, with structured support from a personal coach. The PC3 Framework will facilitate this process by developing the necessary processes, documentation, training and technological support, within the context of Leeds Met’s flexible learning regulations and systems.”

Again the PC3 project has been on quite a journey over the past three and and a half years. Changes at senior management level have meant that, whilst not changing the underlying principles of the project of using coaching (as explained in its curriculum model ), the project team have had to adapt some of their anticipated approaches and have experienced delays in decisions around key institutional wide provision of technologies.

A major milestone for the project has been decision to adopt PebblePad as the institutional portfolio system. The team acknowledge that there is still work to be done around the integration of resources in the VLE and in Pepplepad, in terms of the user experience of switching between systems. Perhaps Pepplepad’s planned LTI adoption will help mitigate some of these issues.

The project is now reaping the rewards of their early work in staff development and are now working increasingly to support students, and their use of technology whilst implementing the PC3 coaching methodology. The approach is now embedded into the Sport Business Management Degree programme (see this post for more information) and students are playing an increasingly important role as coaching ambassadors.

Earlier in the project the team had created a number of video based resources around coaching. Now they are supporting students in the creation and sharing of videos as part of their course work and as coaching ambassadors. The team are working with institutional AV staff around developing approaches to creating video resources with students. The project is also planning a conference, where students will be key contributers, and plan to video sessions and make the recordings available as a set of resources.

The team are also seeing increasing use of social media sites such as Facebook for communication and even for running coaching sessions. This has very much been student driven and developments are being monitored with interest.

The team have also been using a number of google products (forms and documents) for sharing of project information and for part of their evaluation by using google forms to collect session feedback.

Where possible, the project are releasing resources as OER. To this end have they have benefited from the experiences of the Streamline project which was funded through the JISC/HEA Academy OER programme. Institutionally there has been a significant development around workflow of OERs with the institutional repository and the JORUM national repository that the project has benefited from. Again another example of cross programme sharing of experience.

So, another set of projects with common aims but very different approaches to organisational change. In many ways, a top down approach as exemplified by MMU may well be the most effective way to gain widespread adoption. However, MMU have benefited from a more stable senior management perspective and have not had to re-articulate their vision to a different set (or sets) of stakeholders during the project lifecycle as some of the other projects have. Engaging staff and students at different levels, as Bolton and Leeds, have done may well be just as effective in terms of seeing real pedagogical change in the longer term. But whatever approach, the importance of modelling and being able to visualise, and develop conversations and engagement has been central.

The event will will include training sessions led by experts, lightning presentations and developer challenges.

Confirmed sessions include:
*Understanding and implementing the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability specification
*Exploring and sharing tool for learning design through a number of design challenges
*Widget store: Sharing widgets and tools to help you design, build and publish your own widgets
*Mashing coursedata xcri -cap feeds
*Node js
*Human Computation related to teaching and learning

All participants will be able to share their own examples, expertise and opinions via lightning sessions, workshops and informal networking opportunities. So, if you have an idea or something you’d like to share, then sign up!

The event (including overnight accommodation) is free to all participants and is being organised by DevCSI and supported by the JISC e-learning, course information, open educational resources programmes and CETIS.

We hope to see many of you in Birmingham in May.

The Creating and Education App Store for the UK session at the CETIS conference, was the first opportunity for the team to share, firstly the vision of a shared codebase to underpin a range of existing and potential widget stores. And secondly, to share initial prototypes of UIs, and get feedback on the work to date and potential future development ideas from delegates.

Fridolin Wild (OU) gave a useful overview presentation “the university in a box” which highlighted the work of the OU in various widget related projects and initiatives which have built on the notion of the personalised learning environment.

Scott Wilson, (University of Bolton/CETIS) then set the wider context of widget developments, from W3C o the JISC DVLE programme, which is neatly encapsulated in the diagram below.

W3C Widgets and Widget Store Projects

One of the key parts of the work is to provide extended community building features such as ratings, comments, use cases etc. As well as providing additional support for users of the store(s), Scott also outlined plans to share this “paradata” via the JLeRN Learning Registry node (which was discussed as part of a parallel conference session).

Over the 3 hour session there was much discussion around three key areas:

1. Institutional use of such a store: e.g. how would you use such a store? Have a local installation or use a hosted services? Implement connectors using IMS LTI for example.

2. Tracking and Recommendation services: what would be captured? how would it be shared? How could useful analytics be captured and used?

3. Widget Authoring: led by the Widgat team a useful discussion centred around their widget authoring tool.

For the conference plenary a two slide summary was produced, and look out for more details on the store over the coming months on this blog.

Mark Stubbs (W2C project) started the session giving an overview of what they now call their Core+ DVLE model, aka their “mega mash-up”.

W2C Megamashup diagram

With their VLE (Moodle) at the centre the team have developed a number of web services from a range of institutional systems. This is now allowing students to access a number of services such as timetabling, PC availability, reading lists etc from mobile devices. Taking this web service approach has allowed the team to use the “develop once, deploy often” approach. Consistent tagging (based on existing commonly used tags such as course IDs etc) has also been key for integration. Mark also took us through some very interesting stats around usage of the services, and the students use of mobile devices.

Hugh Davies, Dave Millard and Yvonne Howard the took us through developments from the SLEP project. There are a number of similarities to be drawn to the mega mash-up approach of W2C. However a key difference being that Southampton don’t have a VLE at the centre, instead Sharepoint is at the centre of their developments, with new UIs being developed for students to access information. Using Sharepoint hasn’t been without it’s challenges, as the team did highlight, it hasn’t been as flexible as they first thought, however they are using the project to try and introduce more agile and user centred development processes into the mainstream of institutional provision of services.

Being Southampton the team have also be investigating ways to increase the use of open data, and so have been spending time working with internal groups such as the Data Access Group, to try implement and develop policy around the use and sharing of data.

The actual apps/services which each project has/is developing are pretty unique to each institution, however the over-arching principles and techniques could be applied to many institutions and shows that it is possible to create more distributed learning environments through the greater integration of existing systems allowing access from multiple devices. To find out more, a recording of this highly informative session is available online.

More information about the DVLE programme, including links to previous online sessions is available on the CETIS wiki.

Starting at 12 o’clock and lasting approximately an hour this session will give delegates an insight into the underlying technical approaches the projects have taken to providing mobile services which integrate with existing institutional systems, and also their ongoing requirements and student engagement processes. To get an overview and some background to the programme, this post gives a summary of project activity based on the last set of interim project reports.

As ever the event is free to attend, and you can register your interest by using the form below.

The session will demonstrate a number of portfolio centric integrations and widgets being developed as part of the current JISC DVLE Programme from the DOULS, DEVLOP and ceLTIc projects. Below is a short summary of each of the presentations.

DOULS
Portfolio redevelopment at the Open University has focussed on incorporating some of the enhanced functionality available within Google, e.g., a document repository, facilities for sharing, collaboration and reflection. The DOULS project (Distributed Open University Learning Systems) has been tasked with delivering integration between the Moodle learning environment and Google. The presentation by the Open University will focus on these integrations and what it means for the student experience.

DEVELOP
Part of the University of Reading’s DEVELOP Project has been to look at e-portfolio provision and use, and to develop three widgets to assist staff and students in the creation and maintenance of e-portfolios. The University uses Blackboard as its VLE and widgets have been designed using HTML/JavaScript to interact, in pilot studies, with Blackboard’s very basic e-portfolio tool. One widget, now fully developed for Blackboard, enables students to build a portfolio with all the pages as specified by their tutors/lecturers. This widget also guides the user through the various steps needed to share and maintain their portfolio. A feedback widget is at this moment being developed to allow tutors to provide feedback on specific parts of the students’ portfolios while an export widget is planned to allow students to download their portfolio in a standards-compliant form.

ceLTIc
Stephen Vickers from the ceLTIc project will demonstrate how the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification can offer a simple and effective mechanism for integrating learning tools with a VLE. The session will also illustrate how LTI can enable learners from Moodle and Learn 9 to collaborate together in a shared space within an external tool such as WebPA or Elgg.

Information on registration and how to access the webinar can be found at the conference website, and remember to follow @jiscel11 and the #jiscel11 hashtag on twitter for updates.

A recording of the session is available by following this link.

Ian Dolphin’s opening keynote gave a really useful overview of the history of Sakai, their vision of ‘plugability’ and ease of integration of tools and services. The community continues to grow with over 330 known adopters, 71 foundation members, and 20+ commercial affiliates. (As an aside one of the more intriguing aspects of cultural diversity was the presentation from St Petersburg State University talking about their use of Sakai and how they are now working with private Islamic schools across Russia in developing their curriculum delivery).

My main interest in the conference was to try and find out more about developments with their Open Academic Environment (OAE) which I know involves integration of widgets and explore potential links particularly around the JISC DVLE programme. I also wanted to get some more clarity around the differences/links/integrations between the OAE and the original CLE (Collaboration and Learning Environment).

The OAE works seems to be developing apace, and it was heartening to see (and hear about) their development process which is very much user led. The project is creating and using what they call “design lenses” to guide developments. Each lens corresponds to a particular aspect of teaching and learning. The over-arching lens is conceived as a mindmap (see screen shot below) and there is a high level of alignment with work of the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery Programmes and the challenges, processes and technologies structure of the Design Studio.

Sakai Learning Capabilities Design Lenses

The demos I saw from the project group and in particular from the team at NYU, it would appear that the OAE is a usable and flexible environment. There is also an online demo by Lucy Appert, NYU available here. Some highlights of the system were the use of widgets; tagging of content, increased levels of openness from private to shared to public; more integration with the usual suspects of external sites; integrated licencing and more.

In terms of widgets we have had some interactions over the past couple of years with developers from the University of Cambridge through our early widget working group meeting. Although not taking the W3C/Apache wookie route, they were able to do some basic interoperability and repackaging to make them run in a wookie server so it might be worth the team looking at the growing number of widgets available from that community and re- purposing them.

The OAE group are working towards creating templates and again, I can see lots of links to the Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes, and also to the wider context of learning design and the range of stakeholders who came to the Design Bash later in the week in Oxford. We have a wealth of case-studies and resources around staff and student engagement at a range of levels across the curriculum design process which I’m sure could be of mutual benefit. The work Robyn Hill (University of Wyoming) has been doing around templates also highlighted commonalities around the issues of shared understandings of terminology, context specific use etc, etc, which again all came up during Design Bash.

The CLE is also developing with the latest version due for release in Spring 2012. Chuck Severance gave an update on developments, which have also taken a very user centric design process. Unsurprisingly given Chuck’s involvement in both communities, one of the major updates to the CLE will be the integration of the new IMS CC specification (which will incorporate basic LTI). Chuck sees this as being a (or perhaps the) “game changer” for Sakai. Despite appreciating the benefits of LTI, I’m somewhat skeptical about that in the UK context. However, if there is a rush of LTI producers and consumers of the coming 18 months then it could indeed give Sakai an edge over other systems.

The OAE and CLE were talked about as being complementary, but the community is obviously in a hybrid phase at the moment until there is a complete integration. So for people thinking about adoption, they will probably need to have clear timeline of integration and release of features to their community. The OAE looks very pretty and I can see it appealing to academics – however you will need quite a bit of dedicated technical support to use it. NYU are still just piloting its use in selected courses/schools.

As I mentioned earlier, Sakai doesn’t have a huge uptake in the UK but I was able to get more of an overview of the UK scene during the “Towards a common European Sakai Fishing Policy” session presented by Adam Marshall (Oxford University) and Patrick Lynch (University of Hull). Now Oxford isn’t your typical HEI however Sakai does seem to work for them. Their transition from their previous system (Boddington – hands up if you remember that one!) seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. Customization is crucial to Oxford and Sakai has afforded them the level of flexibility they require. Hull on the other hand is more representative of a typical HEI and both Adam and Patrick are keen to expand the UK user base to include more “normal” institutions. Currently the users in the UK and Ireland are Newcastle, Lancaster, Daresbury, Hull, Oxford, Cambridge, Bath and Limmerick, with Newcastle and Bath using it more as a research environment than a teaching and learning one. A UKissN (UK and Ireland Support Network) has been formed, more information is available from their blog and over the coming months they hope to produce more case studies etc of implementation to encourage interest.

One phrase that did keep cropping up in various conversations over the course of the conference was “you don’t fired for choosing moodle”. I’m not sure that is the main reason for the increased migration stats we’ve seen in the UK over the past couple of years, however there is an underlying truth in there. By the same token I can’t see anyone getting fired for having another look at Sakai. So I would encourage you to go the the UKissN site, explore what’s happening and start asking questions.

Obviously I haven’t been able to cover everything in the conference in this post, but as ever, I was tweeting away during the conference, and I’ve collated my tweets including lots of links here to give another view of the conference.

The aim of the programme is to:

” . . .promote the development of coherent, inclusive and holistic institutional strategies and organisational approaches for developing digital literacies for all staff and students in UK further and higher education.”

with projects:

” . . .working across the following stakeholder groupings in their plans for developing digital literacies: students, academic staff, research staff, librarians and learning resources and support staff, administrators and managers and institutional support staff . . .”

The programme has developed from previous user centred work funded by the JISC Elearning programme starting back in 2008 with the Learners’ experiences of e-learning programme, the 2009 Learning Literacies for a Digital Age Study, the 2010 Supporting learners in a Digital Age study and the series of Digital Literacy workshops being run this year.

To help get to know a bit more about each other, the projects gave three minute elevator pitches (which included a very entertaining poem from Pat Parslow of the Digitally Ready project, University of Reading.) Although all have different approaches, as highlighted by Helen Beetham (part of the programme synthesis team) there are a number of commonalities across the projects including:

*common access and opportunity
*impacts of technology on core practice 
*new demands on the sector

Helen also highlighted that at a programme level JISC wants to be able to move forward practice and thinking around digital literacies, build on what we know and not repeat what has gone before. From the short presentations given by the projects, I think there will be a lot rich information coming from all of the projects over the next two years.

As part of CETIS input, I will be providing programme level support around the technologies being used in the programme and collating information into our PROD database. Although the projects are very user-centric, I am particularly interested in surfacing issues around what are the preferred technologies for the different stake holder groups, how are they being provisioned at an institutional level? And, at more holistic level, what does it mean to be a truly digitally literate institution? In parallel with staff/student skills developments what are the technical infrastructure developments that need to be enabled? What are the key messages and workflows that need to truly embedded and understood by everyone in an institution?

I can already see links with the approaches being taken by the DVLE programme in-terms of light weight widgets/apps and mobile integrations with VLEs and other admin processes; and the DIAL project at the University of the Arts as part of its elevator pitch also highlighted links to its OER work. I’ll be writing this up initially as a series of blog posts.

Building on the model developed through the Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes, the Design Studio will also be used as an open collation and sharing space for project outputs. The programme is also going to work with a number of related professional bodies an related membership organisations to help share and promote common sector wide experience and best practice.

The aim of the day was to help the team “define the design specification for the WIDGaT toolkit, in particular the Design Decision Maker and Authoring Tool interface.” The team are planning to build a tool specifically aimed at non-techies – ” The WiDGaT toolkit (Design Decision Maker, Authoring Toolkit) aims to enable staff or students without technical expertise to easily design, develop and share widgets that support personalised learning. It enables the creation of widgets that address particularly (but not exclusively) the needs and preferences of disabled students.”

Splitting into small groups, the morning session was designed to get us thinking not about the authoring tool, but rather on designing widgets. Using the paper based design process the team had used during their previous WIDE project (see my previous post on this), each group had to create a design specification for a widget. The picture gives an idea of how the group I was in used the Design templates and flip chart to record our ideas.

widgat design template

The afternoon was then spent thinking about what kind of tool would allow people without any development experience build our, or indeed any other, widget. So we were thinking around a set of questions including:
*What would be the best way to replicate the f2f, paper supported, decision making process we had gone through?
*What kinds of interface, components and services would need to be available?
*Would templates be viable/useful?
*How would you save/share/publish outputs?

The group I was in spent quite a bit of time discussing the need to include some of the information made explicit in the Design template sheets e.g. detailed “personna” and “scenario” (basically the who, why and how of widget use). Although fully appreciating the need for them, we did wonder if they are better done offline, and if too much pre-authoring form filling might be off putting and actually slightly counter productive? We were also concerned with scope creep and very aware that the team are working to a tight timescale for development. So again we spent quite a bit of time discussing how to create an environment that gave enough options to be useful/useable, extensible to allow new functionality to be easily integrated and also, most importantly, was feasible to build.

During the feedback session it was clear that everyone in the room was broadly thinking in a similar way – particularly around the pragmatics of building a working system within the project timescale. The use of templates was also popular, as that provides a way to show users what is possible and also define an initial set of components/services.

I found the day to be very stimulating and very well structured, so thanks to all the team for their efforts in planning. As with any well designed design process, our input doesn’t stop after one day. The team are now pulling together all the ideas, reflecting on the themes emerging from the day and are going to produce a draft specification which we will be asked to feedback on before producing their final specification. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the toolkit develops and enjoying being part of a collaborative, user centred design process.

When we first ran a design bash, 4 years ago as part of the JISC Design for Learning Programme we outlined three areas of activity /interoperability that we wanted to explore:
*System interoperability – looking at how the import and export of designs between systems can be facilitated;
*Sharing of designs – ascertaining the most effective way to export and share designs between systems;
*Describing designs – discovering the most useful representations of designs or patterns and whether they can be translated into runnable versions.

And to be fair I think these are still the valid and summarise the main areas we still need more exploration and sharing – particularly the translation into runnable versions aspect.

Over the past three years, there has been lots of progress in terms of the wider context of learning design in course and curriculum design contexts (i.e. through the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes) and also in terms of how best to support practitioners engage, develop and reflect on their practice. The evolution of the pedagogic planning tools from the Design for Learning programme into the current LDSE project being a key exemplar. We’ve also seen progress each year as a directly result of discussions at previous Design bashes e.g. embedding of LAMS sequences into Cloudworks (see my summary post from last year’s event for more details).

The work of the Curriculum Design projects in looking at the bigger picture in terms of the processes involved in formal curriculum design and approval processes, is making progress in bridging the gaps between formal course descriptions and representations/manifestations in such areas as course handbooks and marketing information, and what actually happens in the at the point of delivery to students. There is a growing set of tools emerging to help provide a number of representations of the curriculum. We also have a more thorough understanding of the wider business processes involved in curriculum approval as exemplified by this diagram from the PiP team, University of Strathclyde.

PiP Business Process workflow model

Given the multiple contexts we’re dealing with, how can we make the most of the day? Well I’d like to try and move away from the complexity of the PiP diagram concentrate a bit more on the “runtime” issue ie transforming and import representations/designs into systems which then can be used by students. It still takes a lot to beat the integration of design and runtime in LAMS imho. So, I’d like to see some exploration around potential workflows around the systems represented and how far inputs and outputs from each can actually go.

Based on some of the systems I know will be represented at the event, the diagram below makes a start at trying to illustrates some workflows we could potentially explore. N.B. This is a very simplified diagram and is meant as a starting point for discussion – it is not a complete picture.

Design Bash Workflows

So, for example, starting from some initial face to face activities such as the workshops being so successfully developed by the Viewpoints project or the Accreditation! game from the SRC project at MMU, or the various OULDI activities, what would be the next step? Could you then transform the mostly paper based information into a set of learning outcomes using the Co-genT tool? Could the file produced there then be imported into a learning design tool such as LAMS or LDSE or Compendium LD? And/ or could the file be imported to the MUSKET tool and transformed into XCRI CAP – which could then be used for marketing purposes? Can the finished design then be imported into a or a course database and/or a runtime environment such as a VLE or LAMS?

Or alternatively, working from the starting point of a course database, e.g. SRC where they have developed has a set template for all courses; would using the learning outcomes generating properties of the Co-genT tool enable staff to populate that database with “better” learning outcomes which are meaningful to the institution, teacher and student? (See this post for more information on the Co-genT toolkit).

Or another option, what is the scope for integrating some of these tools/workflows with other “hybrid” runtime environments such as Pebblepad?

These are just a few suggestions, and hopefully we will be able to start exploring some of them in more detail on the day. In the meantime if you have any thoughts/suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

To give a bit more context the original call for funding for the institutional projects specifically asked for bids that would:

” . . .review their virtual learning environment and related systems to establish to what extent they meet the current and projected needs of the wide range of users in the institution and beyond, and implement technical work to widen the range of functionality the VLE can provide in an interoperable way.”

Which would lead to a set of deliverables including:

“• Enhancing the flexibility of VLEs to meet new and developing user requirements and to permit future expansion and changes.
• Demonstration of a range of architecture models for composing institutionally delivered learning environments.
• Guidance on, and models for, expanding VLE functionality and delivering it in different ways to meet institutional needs.
• An increased number of high-quality sharable widgets and applications made available to common web platforms in UK institutions, and an easier process of deploying them.”

So what progress is being made?

ceLTIc, University of Edinburgh
Progress continues with deployment of LTI connectors across a range of platforms including BB, Pepplepad, Elgg. You can get more of a feel for what the project has achieved so far from their recent presentation at our IMS LTI and LIS in Action Webinar. The project are now entering their evaluation phase which aims to “explore the impact of the implementation of LTI connectors with a VLE and four applications: Elgg, WebPA, PebblePad and Learning Objects in a number of higher education institutions from the perspective of:
tutor; developer; e-learning support; administrator.” More information about the evaluation methodology can be found on the project blog.

DEVELOP, University of Reading
The DEVELOP (Developing and Enhancing Virtual Learning Environments and E-Learning Options) team at Reading have primarily been exploring the extension of their BlackBoard VLE to allow greater pedagogic flexibility and their portfolio provision so that it can be used for teaching and assessment purposes. Scoping documents for their widget development (Tagging and recommender, portfolio, ASSET Video, content) are available from the project blog. At the moment, the widgets are all at various stages of development and user testing. The user evaluation and testing are part of the rapid prototyping approach the team are using (you can read more about the technical evaluation part of this process in this post. These evaluations will form the basis for a set of case studies around the effectiveness of each of the widgets. The case studies will be based on the templates created at Reading as part of another project JISC funded project, OULDI, which is part of the Curriculum Design Programme. The team have also been working closely with their key internal technical stakeholders to ensure sustainability of developments. The University of Bedfordshire is also testing the video widget.

DOULS, OU
The DOULS (Distributed Open University Learning Systems) team have continued with key user engagement processes to scope, define and specify the set of Google gadgets they are going to develop: Assessment Helper; Forum Recommender; Forums; OU Buddy; Study Planner. Draft gadget functionality specs for each one is available the project blog. The team have also documented their process and have produced a number of useful guidelines relating to usability and accessibility in terms of testing gadgets and overall management of accessibility within a VLE. These are openly available from the blog. The team are continuing to learn the “ins and outs” of working with the Google Apps for Education API for widescale adoption. Again the team are sharing some of their “visions” for potential Google App/Moodle integration and thoughts around potential uses/extensions for the Google start page on the blog. There will be more code releases in September, when they will also start their evaluation. Their interim report is also available for download from the blog.

SLEP, University of Southampton
The SLEP (Southampton Learning Environment Prototype) project is part of a wider institutional wide initiative at Southampton to restructure both its research and teaching and learning environments. As you’d expect from Southampton, open and linked data are central to their approach and the team have used a “co-design” process “made up of a large- scale student survey, smaller focus groups and one-on-one interviews) has revealed a preference for a small number of key services in our initial launch (including email and timetabling).” This process has also surfaced the importance of groups and communities, and the team’s prototype interface design highlights these and makes “ them the lens through which students and staff access all of the data and services of the institution”. The project is now coming out of “stealth” mode with their first round of apps being released in September accompanied by a large scale (c. 1,000 students) user evaluation of their new user interface. More detail on their overall approach and the co-design methodology is outlined in this paper presented at the PLE conference earlier this summer.

W2C, MMU
The W2C team continue to make good progress with what they often refer as their “megamash up”. The team have made steady progress developing web services including: PC Availability; Fee Status (RSS); WebCT Areas & Announcements (RSS); Library Reading Lists (RSS) & Podcasts (RSS); Integrating Talis Aspire and Equella. Providing this information in a mobile friendly way has had a dramatic impact on the number of hits these services are now getting. The team have been closely monitoring the usage of these services and shared how they collect the data and some of their insights in this post. The team have also been involved in a study of student use of mobile devices with a number of other institutions. Preliminary findings from the on the MMU part of the study are available in this post .

The team have prioritised the development of web services for mobile devices and have been working with oMbiel’s campusM mobile phone product. This has allowed them to rapidly deploy their web-services and create a user feedback loop. The team have also undertaken work in developing open source widgets for their Moodle installation which I’ll refer to later in this post. The W2C project, again is part of a wider institutional change process around provision of teaching and learning and the team have been very pro-active in sharing their “core- plus” model with the rest of the programme and the wider community.

Reflections
The CETIS Distributed Learning Environments briefing paper was a key starting point for the programme, and particularly for the institutional strand, JISC wanted to find out the key institutional infrastructure issues are surrounding more flexible creation distribution of apps/gadgets/widgets and how data can be shared and re-used effectively.

Again going back to the funding call: “ The following technical approaches are of particular interest:
• Widget platforms external to the VLE displaying content from a range of sources including the VLE.
• Plug-ins to the VLE or other institutional web platform demonstrating the use of open educational standards such as IMS LTI (learning tools interoperability).
• The VLE providing some of its data and functionality as widgets/and or plug-ins to be consumed in other environments.
• Enabling access to particular research equipment in VLEs via widgets.
• Identity and access management approaches, such as OAuth.
• Approaches which illustrate innovative creation, use and consumption of data sets (including linked data ) sets across multiple platforms.”

Security has been and continues to be a key concern for projects (as highlighted in this post from Mark Stubbs after the programme start up meeting last September). Accessibility is also a concern, and it’s probably fair to say that the DOULS and others at the OU have had to spend more time than they probably first envisaged ensuring that their Google apps provision met required accessibility guidelines.

However there have been some quick wins for example W2C have been able to accelerate their mobile app deployment using an external partner which freed up the team’s time to work on developing web-services. We are also beginning to get a far greater understanding of student mobile device ownership and indeed from all the user engagement across the projects a greater understanding of the key data/services which staff and students actually want and use regularly.

In terms of standards/ specifications we have a stalwart supporter of the IMS LTI approach from Stephen Vickers at the ceLTIC project who clearly thinks the IMS way is a win, win, win scenario. There is still some resistance to implementing LTI in other projects – partly due to their unfinished status. Reading are keeping a watching brief on developments and are concentrating on developing widgets they know will work in their VLE. Whereas Southampton prefer to work with more conventional, non education specific web service approaches. However the recent announcement from IMS that they are now merging the development of full and basic LTI into one specification may start to convince more potential adopters. Once again the security question raises its head. Whilst there seems to be more convergence across the IMS, Open Social and Wookie development communities around the use of services such as OAuth, and the development of data handling process which sh/could start to allay common concerns around security of sensitive data such as assessment information etc. However, there is still probably a need for quite a dramatic culture shift within institutional provision and access before OAuth is widely adopted across the sector.

The programme has also afforded the opportunity for projects to explore the W3C Apache Wookie (Incubating) approach to the building and deployment of widgets. Our widget bash provided hand on opportunities for developers to get started building (and repurposing their own apps) wookie widgets. Despite the (relative) ease of building widgets, there has been some articulation surrounding concerns around the institutional deployment of a wookie widget server see this post from the W2C project. There continues to be an appetite for a stable sandbox/test server that projects could experiment with. This has been discussed before through our widget working group (pre-cursor to the DVLE programme) and it is something we at CETIS do recognise. Unfortunately we aren’t in a position to guarantee stability of any such service, and so we have being advocating a community based solution (perhaps augmented with a bit of funding from JISC). This is bound to be something we return to at the end of the programme once the projects have completed their reviews of their approaches and we can get a more informed view from across the programme.

There is also the question of where widgets/apps/gadgets should be accessed from after the projects finish. Should the code be available only via project websites? Do we need think about developing education app store (again this brings up similar issues as the wookie test server). One potential interim measure we are starting to investigate is the use of the JISC Design Studio which is primarily being used to share outputs from the Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes, but there are plans to use it to share other programme outputs too.

In the final stage of the funding cycle, the projects will be reflecting more on their infrastructure and how they relate to the models outlined in the CETIS DLE briefing paper. Both DEVELOP and W2C are seeing alignment with Model 2 “plug-ins to existing VLEs”.

screen shot of DLE Model 2

W2C have begun to articulate their model in a some more detail in this post.

Over the coming months as evaluations begin in earnest, it will be interesting to see any convergences of approaches/models start to appear, and to explore what kind of affordances the projects distributed learning environments have to offer over traditional approaches.

More information about the projects and the programme support activities can be found on the CETIS wiki. There is also a public netvibes page with feeds from all the project blogs.

The timeline below also gives another view of programme activity through aggregated tweets using the programme hashtag #jiscdvle and with an RSS feed from the related Learning Platforms topic page on the CETIS website.

http://emea92334157.adobeconnect.com/r9lacqlg5ub/

The session will feature demonstrations of a number of “real world” system integrations using the IMS LTI and basic LTI and LIS specifications. These will be provided by the Stephen Vickers from the University of Edinburgh and the CeLTIc project; Steve Coppin, from the University of Essex and the EILE project and Phil Nichols from Psydev.

The webinar will run for approximately 1.5 hours, and is free to attend. More information, including a link to registration is available from the CETIS website.

Tweet

As I’m not a programmer I’m also always on the look out for easy (and preferably free) ways to make widgets. A couple of years ago I thought I had found the answer with Sproutbuilder, but hey-ho as is the way of things they changed their terms of service. As I really didn’t do that much with it, it didn’t seem worthwhile to pay for the service. So, over the past couple of years I’ve been really keen to see some kind of WYSIWYG widget builder funded. We didn’t quite get there within the scope of the DVLE programme, however I’m delighted to report that the latest round of JISC LTIG grants includes the Widg@t project from the University of Teesside.

Building on the work of the ARC team’s excellent WIDE project (one of the DVLE programme’s rapid development projects), Widg@t aims to:

“explore, design, develop and evaluate a WIDGaT toolkit that will support the design, development and sharing of widgets by those directly involved in the teaching and support of disabled students

By engaging pedagogical and technical experts with our intended end users the objective is to produce a WIDGaT authoring tool that enables teachers or students to develop and share bespoke widgets.”

I’m a really looking forward to seeing the developments and final output from this project and hopefully having fun building some widgets again. This time with an open source, W3C standards compliant tool:-) As I’ve commented before, it’s also great to see a continuum of development from across JISC funding and to see pedagogic and technical developments truly working hand in hand.

The team are also looking for community involvement, so if you want to get involved please do contact them, details are on the project website.

Tweet

And judging from other comments from the other delegates, having two days to work on developing “stuff” is one of the best ways to get actually move past the “oh, that’s interesting, I might have a play with that one day” stage to actually getting something up and running.

The widget bash was the latest in our series of “bash” events, which began many years ago with code bashes (back in the early days of IMS CP) and have evolved to cover learning design with our design bashes. This event was an opportunity to share, explore and extend practice around the use of widgets/apps/gadgets and to allow delegates to work with the Apache Wookie (Incubating) widget server which deploys widgets built to the W3C widget specification.

We started with a number of short presentations starting with presentations from most of the projects in the current JISC funded DVLE programme. Starting with the rapid innovation projects, Jen Fuller and Alex Walker gave an overview of their Examview plugin, then Stephen Green from the WIDE project, University of Teeside explained the user centred design approach they took to developing widgets. (More information on all of the rapid innovation projects is available here). We then moved to the institutionally focused projects staring with Mark Stubbs from the W2C project who took us through their “mega-mash up” plans. The DOULS project was next with Jason Platts sharing their mainly google based approached. Stephen Vickers from the ceLTIc project then outlined the work they have been doing around tools integration using the IMS LTI specification. We also had a remote presentation around LTI implementation from the EILE project. Rounding up the DVLE presentations, Karsten Lundqvist from the Develop project shared the work they have been doing primarily around building an embed video BB building block. Mark Johnson (University of Bolton) then shared some very exciting developments coming from the iTEC project where smartboard vendors have implemented wookie and have widget functionality embedded in their toolset allow teachers to literally drag and drop collaborative activities onto their smartboards at any point during a lesson. Our final presentation came from Alexander Mikroyannidis on the ROLE project which is exploring the use of widgets and developing a widget store.

After lunch we moved from “presentation” to doing “mode”. Ross Gardler took everyone through a basic widget building tutorial, despite dodgy wifi connections and issues of downloading the correct version on Ant, most people seemed to be able to complete the basic “hello world” tutorial. We then split into two groups, with Ross continuing the tutorials and moving creating geo- location widgets and Scott Wilson working with some of the more experienced widget builders in what almost become a trouble shooting surgery. However his demo of repackaging a pac-mac game as W3C widget did prove very popular.

The sun shone again on day two and with delegates more familiar with wookie and how to build widgets, and potential applications for their own contexts, the serious bashing began.

One of the great things about working with open source projects such as Apache Wookie (Incubating), is the community sharing of code and problem solving We had a couple of really nice examples of this in action, starting with the MMU drop in pc-location widget. The team had managed to work out some IE issues that the wookie team were struggling with (see their blog post), and inspired by the geo-location templates Ross showed on day 1, managed to develop their widget to include geo-location data. Now if users access the service from a geo-location aware device it will return a list of free computers nearest to their real-time location. The team were able to successfully test this on ipad, galaxy tab, iphone and android phone. For non-location aware devices the service returns an alphabetical list. You can try it out here.

Sam Rowley and colleagues from Staffordshire university decided to work on some DOM and jQuery and issues. Whilst downloading the wookie software they noticed a couple of bugs, so they fixed them and submitted a patch to the Wookie community.

Other interesting developments emerged from discussions around ways of getting data out of VLEs. The team from Strathclyde realised that by using the properties settings in wookie they could pass a lot of information fairly easily from Moodle to a widget. On day two they converted a Moodle reading list block to a wookie widget with an enhanced interface allowing users to specify parameters (such as course code etc). The team have promised to tidy up the code and submit to both the wookie and moodle communitys. Inspired by this Stephen Vickers is going to have a look at developing a powerlink for webCT/BB with similar functionality.

On a more pedagogical focus some of the members of the Coeducate project worked on developing a widget version of the the 8LEM inspired Hybrid Learning Model from the University of Ulster. By the end of the second day they were well on the way to developing a drag and drop sequencer and were also exploring multiuser collaboration opportunities through the google wave api functionality which wookie has adopted.

Overall there seemed to be a really sense of accomplishment from delegates who managed to do a huge amount despite having to fight with very temperamental wifi connections. Having two experts on hand proved really useful to delegates as they were able to ask the “stupid” and more often than not, not so stupid questions. Having the event run over two days also seemed to be very popular as it allowed delegates to actually move from the thinking about doing something to actually doing it. It also highlighted the positive side of contributing to an open-source community and hopeful the Apache Wookie community will continue to see the benefit of increased users from the UK education sector. We also hope to run another similar event later in the year, so if you have any ideas or would like to contribute please let me know.

For another view of the event, I’ve also created a storify version of selected tweets from the event.

Tweet

The three projects are quite diverse both in scale, approach and outputs. As I’ve written about before, the WIDE project from Teesside University took a very user centred approach. The team have created a range of widgets including a ruler to help with reading on-screen which the user can control size, colour and transparency. Teesside took the W3C approach to development using the Wookie widget server. Although Elaine Pearson (Project Director) did highlight that they did decided to make some of their widgets desktop based due to the accessibility features they need to utilise. Code for their widgets is available from the project website and Jorum.

Examview, from Glasgow City College looked at “integrating key student systems with the VLE”. Focusing on linking their VLE (moodle) with their exam records system the team have created an interface which gives students access to accurate and consistent information about their grades. Now when students log into the VLE, they can click on an ExamView link on their home page and they are taken to a personalized page which displays all their current results. So far, feedback from students has been very positive and is encouraging staff to input results regularly into the records system.

The team considered a number of approaches to their technical development, and the most effective way to get results from their record system into the VLE. Initially they developed a direct back-end query to the Unit E (their exam record system) Oracle database. They have also developed a MySQL database query which other institutions could utilise to create a scheduled export of data. All the code (with extensive comments) is available for download from the project website. The team have also released code into the Moodle community it has already been picked up and is being used by the University of Bejaia in Algeria.

Finally the Framework for Rich Interactive Quizzes for Mathematical Sciences project at Glasgow University, developed a very specific application to “extend the functionality of the quiz facility of a VLE by providing a framework for widgets displaying interactive graphics.” Current systems tend only to display static graphics and/or have limited interactive features. The team have developed in javascript to give them the level of functionality and integration they require with their VLE. However they do plan to make a wookie version of the widget available and add IMS simple outcomes functionality for recording scores.

Copies of the presentations (which include more details on technical choices etc) from the session are available from the CETIS website. For an insight into what is happening in the year long Strand B projects, this recent blog post from w2c project at MMU gives an comprehensive overview of the systems and possible integration routes they are exploring.

The three projects are:
* Rich Interactive Questions for Quizzes, University of Glasgow
* Exam View, Glasgow Metropolitan College
* WIDE (Widgets for Inclusive Distributed Environments), Teeside University

The meeting will start at 2pm and last approximately two hours. As ever there is no charge for attending. Registration and log-in details are available here.

WIDE is part of the current JISC funded DVLE programme. It is one of three six month rapid development projects. “WIDE is a joint project between the Accessibility Research Centre at Teesside University, JISC TechDis and Portland College that aims to make online learning more accessible and inclusive for disabled students/learners. Our objective is to develop open educational resources that will improve or support the learning experience and can be shared and adapted by the community.”

The project has been developing widgets through a series of user engagement workshops. The workshops have adapted the learning design templates created the the RLO CETL a couple of years ago as part of their Sharing the Load project which was part of the JISC funded Design for Learning Programme. They’ve also created a widget storyboard template building from the original learning design templates.. Having been involved in the support of that programme as well as the DVLE programme, it is heartening to see re-use and progression of project outputs.

The WIDE project website has more information on the workshops as well as links to the widgets that have been built so far (28 and counting!), a tutorial “creating a calendar widget”, APIs, and lots of other great stuff. It’s well worth spending half an hour browsing resources – who knows you maybe inspired for some re-use too.

PROD is also growing into a substantial record of the technological approaches from a growing number of JISC programmes, almost a collective memory if you like. Over the past few months my colleague David Sherlock has been developing some easier ways to get information out of PROD and provide some visualisations of the data we are recording, you can read more in his blog. So, in relation to the DVLE programme here are a couple of snapshot views of the data we’ve been recording.

Firstly a wordle of the standards and technologies. Quite interesting surface overview, but doesn’t give much detailed information.

DVLE standards and technologies wordle

A mindmap showing each project entry, you can click through to moved down from project name to standards/technologies and then comments. I think this provides a useful, digestible summary of the programme. We’d like to develop this more to include links to project home pages, date stamps for comments etc.

And yes, we will be creating a wookie mindmap widget but it was just quicker to use this existing google one for proof of concept.

A manyeyes view of the numbers of each standard/technology. This allows us to show the numbers of projects using each standard/technology. I think this could be increasingly useful to use across programmes to allow us to start building richer pictures of emerging trends.

We will be developing more of these visualisations over the coming months so watch this space and you can of course view the complete entries directly in PROD.</p

Yesterday all eight of the funded projects made their way (well, actually the level of rain made it feel a bit like swimming) to Bolton for their first meet-up. The programme is divided into two strands, with the first comprising of three projects of six months duration, finishing in December this year. Glasgow Metropolitan College and Glasgow University and concentrating development of a specific widget/VLE plug-in each. Teesside University is taking a more user centric approach by running a number of workshops and then developing widgets from ideas that emerge from them. The other strand is made up of the remaining five projects (MMU, University of Reading, the Open University, University of Edinburgh and Southampton University). These projects are funded for a year, and are investigating the larger issues of integrating more flexible and interoperable approaches to institutional learning environments. More information about the projects is available from the JISC website.

The main technologies in use across the programme are W3C widgets (mainly through using Apache Wookie incubating), Open Social and IMS LTI and Basic LTI and their new Basic Outcomes. To help bring everyone up to speed on each of these a large part of the morning was given our to presentations on each. Ross Gardler (OSS Watch) did the honours for Open Social, Scott Wilson (CETIS) for Wookie and Wilbert Kraan (CETIS) for IMS. Copies of the presentations will be available via the CETIS programme support page over the next day or so. These set the scene for a round of breakout discussions. Mark Stubbs has already blogged about some of the specific security/ authentication/wookie issues the W2C project is grabbling with.

I sat in on the Open Social group where the security issue also came up. Ross argued quite strongly that the technical issues around security have to a large extend been solved outside the education sector and we just need to trust the technology. However, the group did agree that there were cultural issues with education (particularly HE) around knowledge and understanding of identity and authentication which needed to be broken down. We also discussed the possibilities of using open social in a portfolio context. The University of Reading are looking to extend the functionality and interoperability of their in-house developed portfolio tool. The group discussing the IMS options spent quite a bit of time musing over the time/cost implications of developing full LTI integrations over using Basic LTI and the limitations of both – from the wider when will the spec be finalised issue to smaller I can build it but how long will it last, and in the long run does that actually matter?

In the afternoon we had more discussion particularly around wookie implementation. One concern around wookie for a number of projects was its sustainability. As with any (relatively) new technology, sustainability of external systems is a key concern for anyone looking to deploy it in a significant context. However, as Ross pointed out more than once, the fact that wookie in now in part of the Apache foundation, the chances of sustainability are greatly increased. The University of Bolton are also committed to its development and again as with anything, the more use it gets the stronger it becomes.

Along side the more technical discussion there was a concurrent discussion around user-engagement. As explained earlier the Teesside project is very much focussed on gathering real user needs and has designed face to face work shops (adapting templates creating by the RLO CETL and the Sharing the Load project). We discussed many approaches to “paper design” including having print outs of various mobile devices to remind people of the actually size of the finished app/widget. The group all agreed that scope creep, nicely illustrated by Scott Wilson from some recent workshop experience where they found delegates trying to design a whole VLE instead of a specific “thing”, was something that teams needed to be mindful of.

W2C is taking a different approach towards user engagement. They are using an external company to build their first official iphone app (due out sometime next week), followed later in the year by blackberry, android and widget versions. The team are going to use this initial app with students and staff to get feedback and inform future developments. The cost of external development they feel is offset by time savings for the team and gives them something tangible to test with. There also seemed to be a general consensus that actually seeing “the app for that” was incredibly powerful in terms of user engagement – particularly for VCs

There is a great deal of synergy between the projects and I hope that yesterday provided an opportunity to forge stronger relationships across the programme and beyond. It looks like there will be a number of apps/widgets to share with the community by the end of the year.

CETIS is providing support to the programme and we will be organising a number of open meetings over the next year for other to engage with the projects. So watch the space for more updates and information and if you are involved with similar work, please let us know.

Concurrently it also seems that every HE institution in the country is either about to start, in the middle of, or has just completed a review of its learning environment provision. So despite many calls of its death, it does seem that the VLE is going to be around (in some shape or form) for a while yet.

Last week in Birmingham we held an event to launch our DLE briefing paper. The event also coincided with the Distributed Virtual Learning Environments call announcement from JISC. During the day we had presentations demoing a number of the models featured in the briefing paper as well as an overview from Peter Hartley of the ALT LER (learning environment review) SIG. Heather Williamson from JISC was also able to give an overview of the DVLE call.

Over all there was a lot of interest from participants in exploring further ways to easily extend functionality of learning environments for users (staff and students) – particularly the development of widgets. Over the next year we are planning to run a number of events where we can bring developers and users together, so watch this space, and if you have any suggestions please let me know.

Presentations from the day are now available on the CETIS wiki. You can also view the twitter stream from the day.

During the sessions we explored 5 models for creating a distributed learning environment. :
1 – system in the cloud, many outlets
2 – plug-in to VLEs
3 – many widgets from the web into one widget container
4 – many providers and many clients
5 – both a provider and a client
Unusually for a CETIS conference, the models were based on technologies and implementations that are available now. (A PDF containing diagrams for each of the systems is available for download here)

Warwick Bailey (Icodeon) started the presentations by giving a range of demo of the Icodeon Common Cartridge platform. Warwick showed us examples the plug-ins to existing VLEs model. Using content stored as IMS Common Cartridges and utilising IMS LTI and web services, Warwick illustrated a number of options for deploying content. By creating a unique url for each resource in the cartridge, it is possible to embed specific sections of content onto a range of platforms. So, although the content maybe stored in a VLE users can choose where they want to display the content – a blog, wiki, web-page, facebook, ebooks etc. Hence the headless VLE quote. Examples can been seen on the Icodeon blog. Although Warwick showed an example of an assessment resource (created using IMS QTI of course) they are still working on a way to feed user responses back to the main system. However he clearly showed how you can extend a learning environment through the use of plug-ins and how by identifying individual content resources you can allow for maximum flexibility in terms of deployment.

Chuck Severance then gave us an overview IMS Basic LTI and his vision for it (model 2). Describing Basic LTI as his “escape route” from existing LMSs. LTI allows an LMS to launch an external tool and securely provide user identity, course information, and role information to that tool. It uses a HTTP POST through the browser, secured by the OAuth security. This tied in nicely with Warwick’s earlier demo of exactly that. Chuck explained his visions of how LTI could provide the plumbing to allow new tools to be integrated into existing environments. As well as the Icodeon player, there is progress being made with a number of systems including Moodle, Sakai and Desire2Learn. Also highlighted was the Blackboard building block and powerlink from by Stephen Vickers (Edinburgh University).

Chuck hopes that by providing vendors with an easy to implement spec, we will be able to get to the stage where there are many more tools available for teachers and learning to allow them to be real innovative when creating their teaching and learning experiences.

Tony Toole then presented an alternative approach to building a learning (and/or teaching) environment using readily (and generally free or low cost) available web 2 tools (model 3). Tony has been exploring using tools such as Wetpaint, Ning, PBworks in creating aggregation sites with embed functionality. For example Tony showed us an art history course page he has been building with with Oxford University, that pulls in resources such as videos from museums, photos from flickr streams etc. Tony has also be investigating the use of conference tools such as Flash meeting. One of the strengths of this approach is that it takes a relatively short time to pull together resources (maybe a couple of hours). Of course a key draw back is that these tools aren’t integrated with existing institutional systems and more work on authorization integration is needed. However the ability to quickly show teachers and learners the potential for creating alternative ways to aggregate content in a single space is clearly evident, and imho, very appealing.

Our last presentation of day one came from Stuart Sim who showed us the plugjam system he has been developing (another version of model 1). Using a combination of open educational standards such as IMS LTI and CC, and open APIs, plugjam allows faculties to provide access to information in a variety of platforms. The key driver for developing this platform is to help ‘free’ data trapped in various places within an institution and make it available at the most useful point of delivery for staff and students.

So, after an overnight break involving uncooked roast potatoes (you probably had to be at the conference dinner to appreciate that:-) we stared the second half of our session with a presentation from Scott Wilson (CETIS and University of Bolton) on the development of the Wookie widget server and it’s integration into the Bolton Moodle installation (another version of model 1). More information about Wookie and its Apache Incubator status is available here. In contrast to a number of the approaches demoed in the previous session, Scott emphasised that they had chosen not to go down the LTI road as it wasn’t a generic enough specification. By choosing the W3C widget approach, they were able to build a service which provides much greater flexibility to build widgets which can be deployed in multiple platforms and utilise other developments such as the Bondi security framework .

Pat Parslow, University of Reading, then followed with a demo of Google Wave (model 4) and showed some of the experimental work he has been doing incorporating various bots and using it as a collaborative writing tool. Pat also shared some of his thoughts about how it could potentially be used to submit assignments through the use of private waves. However although there is potential he did emphasise that we need much more practice to effectively judge the affordances of using it in an educational setting. Although the freedom it gives is attractive in one sense, in an educational setting that freedom could be its undoing.

We then split into groups to discuss each merits of each of the models and do a ‘lite’ swot analysis of each of them. And the result? Well as ever no one model came out on top. Each one had various strengths and weaknesses and a model 6 taking the best bits of each one was proposed by one group. Interestingly, tho’ probably unsurprising, authentication was the most common risk. This did rise to an interesting discussion in my group about the fact that maybe we worry too much about authentication where and why we need it – but that’s a whole other blog post.

Another weakness was the lack of ability to sequence content to learners in spaces like blogs and wikis. Mind you, as a lot of content is fairly linear anyway that might not be too much of a problem for some:-) The view of students was also raised. Although we “in the know” in the learning technology community are chomping at the bit to destroy the last vestiges of the VLE as we know it, we have to remember that lots of students actually like them, don’t have iphones, don’t use RSS, don’t want to have their facebook space invaded by lecturers and value the fact that they can go to one place and find all the stuff related to their course.

We didn’t quite get round to model 5 but the new versions of Sakai and Blackboard seem to be heading in that direction. However, maybe for the rest of us, the next step will be to try being headless for a while.

Presentations and models from the session are available here.

Scott Wilson (CETIS) will be there to talk about the Apache Wookie (Incubating) widget engine and progress on the W3C’s Widgets specifications, and to help anyone looking at integrating Wookie with other applications. Wilbert Kraan (CETIS) will also be demonstrating integration of Wookie with Google Wave.

The event will be fairly informal with lots of opportunities to share code and experiences; there will also be the opportunity to demo work in progress. If you have any suggestions for a short presentation please let me know.

The event is free to attend, and more information including a link to register is available on the CETIS wiki

The purpose of the workshop was to clarify the concept of widgets in the ICOPER context, particularly how to link widgets to competencies. One of the main drivers of the project is to build best practice around the use of digital technologies, so it was useful for the project partners to have an opportunity to discuss just what their expectations/understandings of widgets are before deciding on a collective way forward.

The morning was taken up by a number of presentations giving an overview of some developments in this area and some potential areas for development. Scott started the day and emphasized the need for interoperability for widgets so that they can be deployed across multiple platforms and aren’t subject to vendor lock-in. This is one of the reasons the CETIS working group has initially focused on infrastructure issues as previously reported. The work he has been doing for the Ten Competence project has been focussing on utilizing widget technology to add extra capability (for both teachers and learners) quickly without having to modify an institutional VLE.

As the day progressed it become increasingly clear that interoperability is key for the successful development and use of widgets in an educational context. A number of presentations illustrated use of page aggregators such as netvibes. In one way these are great ways to quickly and easily start building personal spaces (or personal learning environments – but I use that term with caution). However the business model of any of these services could change overnight and how would that affect use – particularly in an educational context? Would you pay for your netvibes page? More importantly how/where would you recreate that page – could you export your “widgets” elsewhere? I’ve already been burnt by this kind of changing business model my love affair with the Sprout Builder widget application came to an abrupt end when they monetized their business model. I really liked their widget building wizard, but for my needs, it just isn’t really viable to pay their monthly subscription. Maybe one thing the ICOPER community could look at would be building a free, open-source widget editor.

One of the key things about widgets that seems to have a general agreement, is that they are small applications that generally do one thing, but do that one thing very well. I was slightly concerned when discussions came around to developing an e-portfolio widget. However I think what was actually being proposed was exploring how/if widget technology could provide different views into a portfolio, which actually might be useful. You may only want to show/share a small part of your portfolio any one set of users. I was more taken with the work being done by the OUNL with open content where they are developing widgets to aid reflective learning. They described there work as developing “learning dashboards” where information such as how long you had spent on a course compared with the average user study time is available. This information is easily available in most VLEs but very rarely shared with students – only a tutor should be able to monitor student progress But this is exactly the kind of information that can help to build relationships and ownership between a learner and content. Obviously this kind of relationship can be even more critical to developing successful learning strategies when using open content without any direct supervision.

Overall I found the day very thought provoking. I was glad to see that a consensus did seem to be emerging that widgets are not some kind of new answer to the age old problem of how we can provide more effective learning opportunities/environments but that they can help with teaching and learning if used appropriately; and if we can all work towards greater interoperability of the basic technology. In this way we can start to provide ways for teachers and learners to access a pic’n’mix of additional, discrete functionality to whichever learning environment they are using be that VLE, webpage, mobile phone etc.

Some broad overarching objectives were identified after the conference, primarily to investigate an infrastructure whereby a collaborative widget server is available to anyone in the H/FE sector – including developing widget server plug-ins for all major web platforms and making widgets easily discoverable and embeddable. Followed by determining models of widget use in teaching practice and support development, sharing, embedding of teaching and learning specific widgets. Whilst these are pretty much in-tact some short terms aims were decided upon, and these were prioritized by the participants.

In terms of infrastructure, two main approaches to widget development and deployment were discussed. These came from the TenCompetence team at University of Bolton and the CARET team, University of Cambridge. The Bolton team have developed their own widget server (called wookie) and have been developing a number of collaborative, shared state widgets (such as chat, voting etc) using (and extending) the W3C widget specification. These can be deployed in a number of systems including Moodle and elgg (see previous blog and David’s post re creating widgets for wookie).

The team from Cambridge on the other hand have taken the shindig/opensocial/ approach and are starting to embed “gadgets” into their new (under development) SAKAI environment. So a short term goal is going to to try and get an instance of wookie server running along side shindig and vice versa and report back on any issues. Over lunch a couple of “lite” interoperability tests showed that widgets built by each team could run in both systems. It was also agreed that some kind of overview briefing paper on widgets (whys, what’s where etc) would be a valuable community output.

Once these initial tasks have been completed we can then look at some of the other issues that arose during the date such as a common widget engine interface, deployment and security of widgets, as well as accessibility, how to write widgets and of course actually using widgets in teaching and learning.

The next meeting is provisionally scheduled for 23rd March in Edinburgh (to tie in with the JISC conference the next day). More information will be available soon and if you are interested please let us know and come along to the meeting.

Wilbert started the session with an overview of his experiences of building an assessment widget using google docs and sprout builder and integrating it into moodle. The gory details are available from his blog.

One of the many appealing traits of widgets is that they are relatively simple to create and integrate into websites (particularly using wysiswyg builders such as sproutbuilder). However integrating widgets into closed systems such as VLEs can be problematic and generally would require a level of admin rights which most teachers (and learners) are unlikely to have.

This is one area that the TenCompetence project team at the University of Bolton has been investigating. Scott Wilson demoed the Wookie widget server they have built. By adding the wookie plug-in to moodle it is possible to seemlesly integrate widgets to the learning environment. Scott explained how they have been using the W3C widget guidelines to build widgets and also to convert widgets/gadgets from the Apple apps collection to put into wookie and therefore into moodle. This potentially gives teachers (and students) a whole range of additional tools/activities in addition to the standard features that most VLEs come with. A USP of the Bolton project is that they are the first to build collaborative widgets (chat, forums etc) using the W3C guidelines.

Scott made a very salient point when he reminded us that VLEs are very good at allowing us to group people. Most web2.0 tools don’t provide the same ability to group/distinguish between groups of people – there are few distinctions between “friends” if you like. So by creating and/or converting widgets and integrating them with VLEs we can potentially extend functionality at relatively low cost (no system upgrade needed – just add the plug-in) whilst retaining the key elements that VLEs are actually good at e.g. grouping, tracking etc. This is where the learning design element comes into play.

Dai Griffiths, University of Bolton, outlined how the IMS LD specification can provide a way to orchestrate widgets with a set of rules and roles. He showed examples of UoLs (units of learning) which use the chat widget in the wookie server. This is one of the most exciting developments for IMS LD (imho) as it is starting to show how the authoring process can become much easier for the average teacher. You just choose what widget you want to use, decided which students can use it, and when, add other content – widgets -whatever and you have your runnable learning design. I know it’s not quite that simple, but I do think this goes along way to address some of the “lack of easy to use tools” barriers that the learning design community have been facing.

There was a lot of discussion about students creating widgets. Tony Toole told us of one of his projects where they are trying to get students to build widgets. At the moment they don’t seem that keen as they (probably quite rightly) see it as secondary to their “real” learning tasks. However they do like and make use of more informational type widgets which utilise RSS feeds to push out content such as reading lists, course announcements etc. Ross McLarnon from Youthwire showed us the desktop widget application they have just started to roll out to over 130 Universities. Interestingly the university news widget is the most popular so far.

As ever it is practically impossible to summarize the discussions from the session, but some other key issues that arose were authorization. There was a discussion around the emerging oAuth specification which is based on a ticketing system so users don’t have to give username/password details to 3rd parties. It was also agreed that some kind of national educational widget server based on the wookie system would be useful. As well as storing relevant, safe, widgets it could have information/examples of widgets being used in practice and relevant system plug-ins etc.

As a follow on from this session we would like form a working group to explore all these issues in more detail and provide feedback to JISC for potential funding opportunities. If you would like to be involved please let me know either by leaving a comment or by sending me an email (s.macneill@strath.ac.uk)

More details of the session can be found on the wiki.

In about half an hour I had build a widget which displays the outputs for the JISC Design for Learning programme (just taking a feed from the programme delicious site), published it onto the Design for Learning wiki and in my netvibes page. I’ve now just created a widget for my last SIG meeting with audio/video files embedded and a location map which I put into facebook and the CETIS wiki.

Now I’m not claiming that these examples are anything unique, or particularly well designed. However, what I really like about this particular tool is the simplicity of it and the way it integrates services that I use such as rss feeds, maps, polldaddy polls, video, audio etc. Publishing is really straightforward with links to all the main sites such as facebook, beebo, netvibes, pagesflakes, igoogle, blogger . . . the list goes on. You can also make changes on the fly and when you republish it automatically updates all copies.

Tools like this really do put publishing (across multiple platforms/sites) and remixing content into the hands of us non-developers. There are many possibilities for education too, from simple things like creating a widget of a reading list/resources from a delicious feed to a simple countdown for assignments. (OK, that might be a bit scary, but heck a ticking clock works for most of us!). Simple tools like this combined with the widgets that the TenCompetence project are building (and showed at a recent meeting) are really starting to push the boundaries, and show the potential of how we can mix and match content and services to help enhance the teaching and learning experience.