“Win, win, win” Are we really there with IMS LTI and LIS?

Posted on by

“Win, win, win” is the mantra from Stephen Vickers (ceLTIc Project, University of Edinburgh) is going to be taking to the Blackboard conference next week. During yesterday’s webinar “IMS LTI and LIS in Action”, Stephen gave an overview of the integrations the ceLTIc project have been able to achieve using basic LTI. And it does seem that we might actually be at a turning point for both basic (and hopefully full LTI) with most of the major VLE vendors now implementing it, and projects such as ceLTIc and EILE (University of Kent), who also presented their work using LTI with Moodle, being able to show real examples of a number of service integrations including blogs, reading lists and streaming servers.

However the biggest battle for uptake and adoption is probably the hardest one – the move from general awareness raising to actually widespread and commonplace use. And, as Stephen pointed out this isn’t just an question of making developers more aware of, but teachers too. So they are the ones asking the question of their VLE teams “do you support LTI” with the knowledge that they can integrate or “mix and match” a lot more “web stuff” into their VLE if the answer is yes. The IT departments should also have the confidence that taking this approach will mean that they can bring more services into their VLE, offer more flexibility to academic staff and not have to worry about a major system upgrade every time they want to add another service.

However these things can take time, and even in the JISC DVLE programme it’s only the ceLTIc project who are actually using LTI. The other projects have noted interest, but as is so often the case, it’s just not quite a priority at the moment, possibly because a number of the projects are dealing with more administrative and non VLE services. Also as the CETIS DLE briefing paper outlined there are a number of potential models for learning environment integration – LTI isn’t the only game in town. On the plus side with more major players now actively involved we might just be on the cusp of seeing some significant advances over the coming year.

The session also included an update from Linda Feng (Oracle) on recent developments with the IMS LIS specification. Again it was encouraging to hear that the working group have been trying to make the spec as usable and flexible as possible. Linda explained how the IMS working group have been developing a set of profiles to allow greater flexibility for implementers and more importantly the profiles will be available, tested and ready before the spec is finalised. Taking this more iterative approach has already allowed the working group to already sort out some element naming gotchas.

Linda also gave a quick walkthrough of a demo of some work Oracle and Blackboard having been doing with SIS data and will be presenting at next week’s BB Conference (an annotated version of the demo is available online). Phil Nicolls (Psydev) then demo’d some bulk data imports from the a cloud service into Moodle.

So all in all a very interesting session with lots of real examples of standards being used in real situations. The recording is available for viewing by following this link.

IMS LTI and LIS in action webinar, 7 July

Posted on by

As part of our on-going support for the current JISC DVLE programme, we’re running a webinar on Thursday 7 July at 2pm.

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.

Understanding, creating and using learning outcomes

Posted on by

How do you write learning outcomes? Do you really ensure that they are meaningful to you, to you students, to your academic board? Do you sometimes cut and paste from other courses? Are they just something that has to be done and are a bit opaque but do they job?

I suspect for most people involved in the development and teaching of courses, it’s a combination of all of the above. So, how can you ensure your learning outcomes are really engaging with all your key stakeholders?

Creating meaningful discussions around developing learning outcomes with employers was the starting point for the CogenT project (funded through the JISC Life Long Learning and Workforce Development Programme). Last week I attended a workshop where the project demonstrated the online toolkit they have developed. Initially designed to help foster meaningful and creative dialogue during co-circular course developments with employers, as the tool has developed and others have started to use it, a range of uses and possibilities have emerged.

As well as fostering creative dialogue and common understanding, the team wanted to develop a way to evidence discussions for QA purposes which showed explicit mappings between the expert employer language and academic/pedagogic language and the eventual learning outcomes used in formal course documentation.

Early versions of the toolkit started with the inclusion of number of relevant (and available) frameworks and vocabularies for level descriptors, from which the team extracted and contextualised key verbs into a list view.

List view of Cogent toolkit

List view of Cogent toolkit

(Ongoing development hopes to include the import of competencies frameworks and the use of XCRI CAP.)

Early feedback found that the list view was a bit off-putting so the developers created a cloud view.

Cloud view of CongeT toolkit

Cloud view of CongeT toolkit

and a Blooms view (based on Blooms Taxonomy).

Blooms View of CogenT toolkit

Blooms View of CogenT toolkit

By choosing verbs, the user is directed to set of recognised learning outcomes and can start to build and customize these for their own specific purpose.

CogenT learning outcomes

CogenT learning outcomes

As the tool uses standard frameworks, early user feedback started to highlight the potential for other uses for it such as: APEL; using it as part of HEAR reporting; using it with adult returners to education to help identify experience and skills; writing new learning outcomes and an almost natural progression to creating learning designs. Another really interesting use of the toolkit has been with learners. A case study at the University of Bedfordshire University has shown that students have found the toolkit very useful in helping them understand the differences and expectations of learning outcomes at different levels for example to paraphrase student feedback after using the tool ” I didn’t realise that evaluation at level 4 was different than evaluation at level 3″.

Unsurprisingly it was the learning design aspect that piqued my interest, and as the workshop progressed and we saw more examples of the toolkit in use, I could see it becoming another part of the the curriculum design tools and workflow jigsaw.

A number of the Design projects have revised curriculum documents now e.g. PALET and SRC, which clearly define the type of information needed to be inputted. The design workshops the Viewpoints project is running are proving to be very successful in getting people started on the course (re)design process (and like Co-genT use key verbs as discussion prompts).

So, for example I can see potential for course design teams after for taking part in a Viewpoints workshop then using the Co-genT tool to progress those outputs to specific learning outcomes (validated by the frameworks in the toolkit and/or ones they wanted to add) and then completing institutional documentation. I could also see toolkit being used in conjunction with a pedagogic planning tool such as Phoebe and the LDSE.

The Design projects could also play a useful role in helping to populate the toolkit with any competency or other recognised frameworks they are using. There could also be potential for using the toolkit as part of the development of XCRI to include more teaching and learning related information, by helping to identify common education fields through surfacing commonly used and recognised level descriptors and competencies and the potential development of identifiers for them.

Although JISC funding is now at an end, the team are continuing to refine and develop the tool and are looking for feedback. You can find out more from the project website. Paul Bailey has also written an excellent summary of the workshop.

Initial thoughts on “Follower networks, and “list intelligence” list contexts” for @jisccetis

Posted on by

As many of you will probably know, Tony Hirst, has been doing some really interesting work recently around data visualisation. Last week he blogged about some work he had been doing visualising his twitter network, and at the end of his post offered to “spend 20 minutes or so” creating visualisations for others – for a donation to charity. Co-incidentally we had an internal CETIS communications meeting last week where we were talking about our reach/networks etc so I decided to take up Tony’s offer

Hi Tony
happy to make a donation to ovacome if you would do a map for me -well actually for CETIS, Would like to see if we can make sense of (any) links between our corporate “jisccetis” twitter account and our individual ones.
Sheila

and the results are here. Tho’ I suspect it probably took more than 20 minutes :-)

I haven’t spent a great deal of time yet analysing the graphs in detail, but there are a couple of thoughts that Tony’s post triggered that I feel merit a bit more contexualisation.

Firstly, yes the @jisccetis has a relatively low number of followers (currently 193) and doesn’t follow anyone. This is partly due to the way we manage (or perhaps mis-mangage) the account. As most of the staff in CETIS have personal twitter accounts, we haven’t really been using the corporate one much. However recently we have been making more of an effort to use it, and now have set up automated tweets from the RSS feeds for our news and events which are augmented with other notable items e.g. the joint UKOLN/CETIS survey on use institutional use of mobile web services.

We haven’t really put an awful lot of time or effort into a corporate twitter strategy – other than reckoning we should have a “corporate” account and use it:-) We didn’t take a decision about not following anyone, that just sort of happened. We (the small group of us who are ‘the keepers’ of the @jisccetis login details) don’t really look at the actual account page much now as most of the output is automated. Actually I feel that this approach works well for this type of account. As it isn’t ‘owned’ by one person it doesn’t (and won’t) build the kinds of relationships more personal accounts have. Not following people doesn’t seen to stop people following the account – and if you don’t follow @jisccetis, then quick plug, please do – we don’t spam and send out pretty useful info for edutechie types.

Tony’s work on the lists for the account is interesting too. TBH I hadn’t really had a close look at what lists the account was on – and thanks to all eight of you for listing the account. As so many CETIS staff are on twitter, people may wonder why we don’t have our own CETIS list. Well there is a bit of historical background there too. When lists came out at first, some members of staff did create such a list, however there were other staff members who didn’t want to be listed in that way, so we never really took the list idea any further forward in a corporate sense. As anyone who uses twitter knows, there is a fine line between personal and work use ( personally I tend to it for more for the later now) and our twitter accounts are personal accounts. Like most of our use of web 2.0 communication tools, we take a very light touch approach – no one has to tweet and we have, and wouldn’t want to have, editorial control. We rely on common sense and judgement; which for the most part works remarkably well. We use the same policy for blogging too.

The visualisations are really fascinating and my colleagues and I will be taking a much closer look at them over the coming weeks. I’m sure they will be key for us in our continuing development and (mis)management of the@jisccetis twitter account. One thing I now would love to do is hire Tony for a week or so to get him to do the same for all our individual accounts and cross reference them all. However I think that given “the current climate” we may have to do that ourselves, but there is certainly plenty of food for thought to be going on with.

Widg@t widget building tool

Posted on by

I really like widgets or apps or whatever you want to call those little discrete things you can pop into a web-page, VLE, blog, access on your phone etc. Over the last few years at CETIS we’ve been supporting developments in this area through various activities such as the widget working group, the current JISC DVLE programme and our widget bash earlier this year.

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.

Transforming curriculum delivery through technology: New JISC guide and radio show launched

Posted on by

A new JISC guide ” Transforming curriculum delivery through technology: Stories of challenge, benefit and change” has been launched today.

“a mini-guide to the outcomes of the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology programme, summarises the headline benefits of technology in curriculum delivery made evident by the work of the 15 projects in the programme The outcomes of these projects provide a rich insight into the ways in which institutions and individual curriculum areas can make use of technology to respond more robustly to the demands of a changing world.”

You can access PDF and text only versions of the guide, or order a print copy by following this link

The latest installment of the JISC on Air series, Efficiences, enhancements and transformation: how technology can deliver includes interviews with two projects involved in the programme, (Making the New Diploma a Success and eBioLabs) discussing the impact achieved in two very different contexts and disciplines.

If the mini-guide whets your appetite for more information about the programme, the Programme Synthesis report provides more in-depth analysis of the lessons learned, and further information and access to project outputs is available from Design Studio.

SEMHE ’11 – Call for papers

Posted on by

The 3rd SemHE workshop (Semantic Web Applications in Higher Education) will take place this September and will be co-located with EC-TEL’11 this September in Palermo.

The workshop organisers are hoping that it will attract people working on semantic web applications in HE and those who have been developing linked data infrastructures for the HE sector. The workshop will address the following themes:

– Semantic Web applications for Learning and Teaching Support in Higher Education.
– Use of linked data in repositories inside or across institutions.
– Collaborative learning and critical thinking enabled by semantic Web applications.
– Interoperability among Universities based on Semantic Web standards.
– Ontologies and reasoning to support pedagogical models.
– Transition from soft semantics and lightweight knowledge modelling to machine processable, hard semantics.
– University workflows using semantic Web applications and standards.

The deadline for submissions is 8 July and full information is available at the workshop website.

Approaching The Learning Stack case study

Posted on by

Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen a number of presentations by various colleagues from the Univeristat Oberta de Catalunya about the development of their learning technology provision. And last September I was privileged to join with other international colleagues for their OpenEd Tech summit.

Eva de Lera (Senior Strategist at UOC) has just sent me a copy of a case study they have produced for Gartner (Case Study: Approaching the Learning Stack: The Third Generation LMS at Univeristat Oberta de Catalunya). The report gives an overview of how and why UOC have moved from a traditional monolithic VLE to their current “learning stack”, which is based on a SOA approach. NB you do have to register to access the report.

The key findings and recommendations are salient and resonate with many of the findings that are starting to come through for example the JISC Curriculum Design programme and many (if not all) of the JISC programmes which we at CETIS support. The findings and recommendations focus on the need for development of community collaboration which UOC has fostered. Both in terms of the internal staff/student community and in terms of the community driven nature of open source sofware development. Taking this approach has ensured that their infrastructure is flexible enough to incorporate new services whilst still maintaining tried and trusted ones and allowed them the flexibility to implement a range of relevant standards and web 2 technologies. The report also highlights the need to accept failure when supporting innovation – and importantly the need to document and share any failures. It is often too easy to forget that many (if not most of) the best innovation comes from the lessons learned from the experience of failure.

If we want to build flexible, effective systems (both in terms of user experience and cost) then we need to ensure that we have foster an culture which supports open innovation. I certainly feel that that is one thing which JISC has enabled the UK HE and FE sectors to do, and long may it continue.

From challenge to change: how technology can transform curriculum delivery

Posted on by

A recording of the online presentation “From challenge to change: how technology can transform curriculum delivery” by Lisa Gray (JISC Progamme Manager), Marianne Sheppard (Researcher/Analyst, JISC infoNet and project co-ordinator for the Support and Synthesis project) and myself is now available online.

Session Synopsis:
During 2008–2010, the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology Programme investigated the potential of technology to support more flexible and creative models of curriculum delivery in colleges and universities. The 15 projects within the programme sought to address a wide range of challenges such as: improving motivation, achievement and retention; managing large cohorts; supporting remote and distance learners; engaging learners with feedback; responsiveness to changing stakeholder needs; delivering resource efficiencies which enhance the quality of the learning experience. Through the various project investigations, the programme has learned how and where technology can not only add value but can transform the way in which the curriculum is delivered in different contexts.

This session summarized the key messages and findings emerging from the work of the projects and demonstrated some of the outputs from the projects available from the Design Studio.

For more detailed information I can thoroughly recommend the programme synthesis report by Lou McGill which provides detailed information on programme theme, key lessons learnt and project outputs.