All aboard? Reflections on the 7th Sakai conference, Amsterdam

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/pault/allaboardreflectionsonthe/44626. 
However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and approximately the same time.

Oxford made a decision in Autumn 2006 to migrate to the Sakai VLE with the announcement of the Tetra collaboration. Since the completion of the academic year, we've been able to focus more on the task in hand. For myself, I decided the best way to quickly gain a feel for Sakai was to attend a Sakai gathering and conveniently the 7th Sakai Conference was recently held in Amsterdam, the first time the conference had been held outside the United States. I was primarily interested in sessions that addressed system migration, deployment and support, but also keen to hear about pedagogy and usability, leaving it to my colleagues to cover the more technical development aspects. I wanted to know what approaches were adopted to move to Sakai: organisation, resources, timescales, etc.

So was it a case of all aboard...?



Above is the luxury cruise liner, Silver Shadow, which was waiting for passengers to board. It was right next to the Moevenpick Hotel, the conference venue. In fact, it's designed to accommodate a little under 400 guests, about the number of participants at the conference, which rather suggests a dream future venue ... :-)

It's taken two or three weeks for my impressions to settle - I found the three days of the conference quite intense and took copious notes. I can say straightaway, however, that I felt there was generally a good sense of community, with a very constructive outlook across the various constituent communities, ranging from development through to pedagogy and research. Sessions were usually informative and presented well; there was a real sense of purpose and commitment It was consistent with what I've observed on the Tetra developers mailing list: although I'm not been involved in any Java coding myself, I have been seen how the Sakai developers have provided very helpful responses to the various queries raised by Bodington developers seeking to incorporate key functionality in Sakai. Furthermore, when some of these ideas were presented by my colleagues, Adam and Matthew, in their presentation on importing Bodington tool, they were greeted very positively - there is a willingness to learn. So I broadly concur with the encouraging sentiments expressed by Michael Feldsteain in his 'State of the Union' blog post.

There remain many questionmarks as expressed Ian Reid, whose responses were not so rosy: in wrapping it up, he perceived a number of weaknesses and for him fundamental questions remained unanswered. I can at least answer his first point about the product: there are certainly large scale deployments - e.g. at Indiana and Michigan. Further, many of the other points, such as the technical bias, are well known and as far as I can tell they are being actively addressed.

I have quite a number of concerns myself and among my colleagues may be the one who is most reluctant to migrate from our present WebLearn, based on Bodington, perhaps largely because I have spent so much time with it and naturally can get attached. My first query is what kind of system is Sakai? Is it largely an open source replacement for Blackboard or WebCT? At the culmination of the procurement process at Oxford in 2001/2002, we were left with a head-to-head between Blackboard and Bodington. There was a free vote and Bodington won very easily, largely because Bodington offered flexibility: in the use of terminology, in how it allowed areas to be set up, in who could do what in these areas, and in how users could navigate freely around the system. One could use it to augment existing teaching or research arrangements with little effort. WebLearn has subsequently grown organically - from the handful of resources in December 2002 to its present state of about 60,000 resources manually created and managed by thousands of users (staff and students) in the various colleges and departments. At the same time, Bodington also has many weaknesses - it's rather long in the tooth and has often been described as "clunky" - many of the tools are looking very dated and making changes can be very laborious.

Sakai was felt to be the most promising way forward, but as it stands there are serious limitations in its design. The name of Michigan's deployment itself hints at one of these 'CTools,' rather indicating a technical focus: indeed much of the talk at the conference was 'tools' oriented, but during the past year or two, in WebLearn, we've deliberately tried to move away from 'how does tool X work' to 'how to carry out activity Y [using the tools available]' with a recent project looking at activity-based use cases for WebLearn. Also, the course subscription model in Sakai will not be not sufficient (in theory, Oxford's undergraduates are at liberty to attend any lecture at the University); the role-based access control is more coarse-grained (in fact, Bodington doesn't have any fixed roles - they can be defined via group memberships), and the overall organisation of materials lacks hierachy. There are many other smaller issues - e.g. what about those horrible Sakai URLs?

There are many concerns, but there is reassuringly intense activity to address them and this is leading to mutual enrichment. So, a lot of discussion has flowed on the topic of groups; a new hierarchy service for Sakai might have a name component that will enable nice URLs etc. I also saw some good examples of how requirements are driving the development; how development goes through a proper processes of evaluation and many other encouraging signs, such as the use of the term of Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE), getting away from the systems-oriented language.

So, largely reassured, at this stage my biggest concern is more in terms of timescales and resources regarding a full deployment of Sakai: it's a question of when than if. Looking around, it seems fitting then to note Stanford's announcement on 21 June:

After a year-long pilot, Sakai went into full production at Stanford today, fully replacing our legacy home-grown system. We've taken a long, careful path toward deployment to assure a seamless transition to the new system. It is localized, integrated and well tested, and today we flipped the switch. This is a big achievement for us, fulfilling the commitment we made to ourselves, and to our collaborators at Indiana, Michigan and MIT three years ago when we started this project.

So it can be done, but a long road lies ahead and if we are to achieve this at Oxford for everyone's benefit, we really shall need all aboard!

Using a flexible learning space to teach about a flexible learning space

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:
http://www.educause.edu/node/166732. 
However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and approximately the same time.

[Sorry it is so long since I posted - the Western New Year and Chinese New Year have both passed!]

My job title of 'VLE Administrator' covers a wide range of duties, many of which are quite technical and system-oriented, but it also involves advising staff on developing their areas in the VLE (LMS), the service front line, as it were.  This term I've spent quite a lot of time preparing and delivering courses on how to use WebLearn;  the face to face contact makes quite a pleasant break from coding or answering emails stuck in front of a computer screen.

We are now coming to the end of this term's series of lunchtime courses.  They have usually consisted of a presentation with slides and demonstrations followed by hands-on where people work individually through a number of exercises, familiarising themselves with some aspects of the VLE.  The peak of interaction usually would not go beyond viewing each each other's test area.
 
However, I've recently found myself in one of the so-called flexible learning spaces within the department - a wide room with islands of workstations and a lot of gadgetry.  After a couple of weeks delivering the standard format in this space, I've only just realised that I ought to make more use of such communal spaces.  So this week's course will mark a departure as I shall get people to work in groups, to plan and implement together some structures for online learning.  According to the booking system, registrants are mainly staff, but a couple of postgrads among the number; some work in departments, some in colleges and I guess some belong to both; they cover humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, maths and physical sciences.  And the number of resources they appear to have created in WebLearn range from 0 to dozens. 

This is therefore, I think, an ideal selection :-)  How?  It reflects a typical cross-section of WebLearn's users and I'm hoping that those with more experience will become aware that they are able to help those who are relative novices.  This situation is very natural within WebLearn (Bodington), because it is designed as a flexible space itself that allows as little or as much participation as people need.  You can take any group of people, give one of them the right to create a container and from that point on they can adopt any number of roles to create a mock department or whatever with spaces for teaching, administration, research etc.  Expertise grows tree-like - as the resources expand, all being well so does the amount of delegation and thus the number of people growing the tree.

I've made a list of requirements, suggested some tasks, and wonder how they will manage?  Actually, I'm mainly hoping that participants turn up on the day - the competing demands (and intellectual distractions) on Oxford academics can be quite considerable! 

Open Courseware in a few clicks

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/pault/opencoursewareinafewclick/6446. 
However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and approximately the same time.

As the abstracts for poster sessions could have a maximum of 50 words, I've been posting here to explain in more detail the background behind my forthcoming poster session about WebLearn, the centrally hosted LMS at Oxford University, based on the Bodington software.

The last bit I need to talk about is 'open courseware.' This can have many conotations, but here it refers simply to course content has been made freely available to the public and does not require guest access or visitor login. Many academics were keen that their materials - especially in teaching - could be indexed by search engines, to help promote their courses. On the other hand some were concerned that Google would sneak into areas they thought were private, so we had to be sure of all exposed URLs and circulate that as a list beforehand.

Before April 2006, as with most VLEs you needed to press a 'log in' button to gain access to anything, which was felt unnecessary for those resources that were meant to be openly viewable. So the barrier was removed. Now if academics want to enable access for Google and friends, the general procedure - which applies to most resources in the LMS - is as follows:

1. Log in.
2. Go to the resource you wish to make public
3. Click on the link 'View Access' at the bottom of the page.
4. In the following page go to the pull-down menu 'Allow..' and select 'Public' to 'look at' this page.
5. Click on the [Add] button to enact.

Here's an illustrative screenshot (minus mouse pointer):



This is taken from my bookmarks area in MyWebLearn.  At the moment, it's private as only the system admin and myself can see it, but if I were to click the [Add] button, anyone would then be able to see it. 

With the fine-grained accesss, you can choose any selection of resources public, so you could have samples from one of more of the following, in any combination: from just one or two handouts or a lecture through a module, course or even a degree. Each time you grant public access, that resource becomes open, so if you make every course resource open you have open courseware. Just allowing access to content is not providing the same educational experience as an Oxford student, but there is actually scope for more than reading since many of the tools allow for visitor interaction - so you can have public surveys, open discussions with prospective students and so on. If privacy is needed, administrators (we call them 'Floor Managers') can create and manage additional user accounts.

For those interested in some stats, before opening up Google had indexed only about 100 pages (most of these URLs coming about via links from other sites). On removing this restriction opening up access, the number of pages grew steadily to over 10,000 pages and the Web access logs show a huge variety of searches landing up on the site. I monitored Google's crawling in some posts on its gradual exploration (with 2^nd and 3^rd posts - the latter wondering about internal/external searches).

Bodington 2.8 released - now with Apache license

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/pault/bodington_2_8_released_now_with_apache_license/6280. 
However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and approximately the same time.

On Monday 2^nd October, there was a new release (version 2.8.0) of the Bodington VLE software, now under the Open Source Initiative (OSI) certified Apache 2 license. New features include support for the MySQL database, display of RSS and Atom newsfeeds, with various ways of rendering them and a Peer Marker Tool, whilst other tools have been improved/brought up to date, such as the support to import and export of IMS Content Packages. Further details are available from the official release announcement.

If you want to get up and running quickly, go to the file releases are available from SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodington/
and select the bodington-quickstart_war, which is a preconfigured version of Bodington consisting of an archived package that you can upload into a Web application server like Tomcat.  The language is technical, but actually there are only a few steps involved, so it only takes a few minutes. It's designed to get you up and running with Bodington with the least possible effort. Instructions are provided in the download.   If you want the very latest builds for Bodington you can obtain them from CruiseControl running on one of our development servers (also available for WebLearn).

To make it even easier to sample a Bodington-based VLE, I'll be bringing to Educause some bootable WebLearn Live CDs based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution, which you can just put into your IBM-compatible PC and boot up. I'll give some out at the poster session on Wednesday evening.  Hope you enjoy the free VLE :-)

However, perhaps of most significance is that Bodington now comes with an Apache 2 License. In practice, there's hardly any change at all in how the software is developed and the conditions attached to it. However, it's actually a very important change and I'd advise any educational establishment(s) wishing to share their software freely to make sure if at all possible that from the outset they have an OSI approved license. Otherwise, you may have to subsequently jump through hoops to transfer to one at a later date or else pay lawyers to establish the case for this being a new OSI approved license on your behalf following the approval process.

The base of Bodington may be instructive here. Bodington was released by Leeds University as open source software in 2001. I remember hearing how Jon Maber and Andrew Booth took the Apache software license and made a few tweaks to ensure that it would satisfy the University's directorate. I don't know what differences they made, but when an open source expert came to examine the license, they said that he didn't recognise it, though strangely it appeared to him more like a BSD license. Although the code was freely available, any legal department of an organisation could not be sure that was indeed legally open source software and the simplest thing to do is to turn to the OSI list and see if it belongs to that list. If not.  So we decided to make a change in the license, requiring consent of all copyright holders involved, which included signatures of those involved in contributing code, so a lengthy process.

From Personalized Learning to Open Courseware: VLEs and Access Rights

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/pault/frompersonalizedlearningt/4844. 
However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and approximately the same time.


I have a little poster session coming up at Educause with the rather loong title of 'From Personalized Learning to Open Courseware: Learning Management Systems Can Be Flexible', reflecting many elements that I'd like to convey. I hope to elaborate in the following posts.

The watchword is flexibility, as this is what really matters at Oxford. In 2001/2 a working group with broad representation from academics, IT staff, and administrators undertook a lengthy procurement process for an LMS (we tend to call them VLEs in the UK) - a list of documents is available from the LTG Web site. We evaluated about 30 systems against both a features checklist and a more probing set of requirements encapsulated in two mock courses. It was the latter that proved most illuminating because for all their features, bells and whistles, the commercial offerings were unable to fit our needs: ranging from simple things like terminology to more fundamental issues with the data model. They also seemed designed for substantial investment of resources so that if you used just one tool, your 'course' would contain lots of empty space, whereas we wanted a very gentle transition for academics, who could start tentatively by simply uploading a lecture handout without need the help of an IT officer. And with the commercial systems there were the licensing fees to consider.

The only system that allowed our ways of working Bodington, which had the considerable benefit of being open source (now under the Apache 2.0 license) - free of license fees and free to develop further according to our needs. I recall how Prof. Andrew Booth and Jon Maber came down from Leeds and gave an informal presentation, quickly establishing rapport as they related their experiences at various levels in their HEI that met with ready nods of understanding. When it eventually came to choosing between Blackboard and Bodington, Bodington gained close to 100% of the votes. A pilot service was launched soon after, became production in May 2004 and has grown steadily since.

The system developments are driven mainly by user requests, but some developments are done a bit independently as we try to be forward-thinking. This year there have been two key developments and the poster session is to illustrate, but to describe them properly I need first to try to explain a little about the access control system because it underpins both.

Access Control Management

When you enter WebLearn at the root, you are presented with a Web site that presents its pages in a hierarchical structure using a physical metaphor, with the top level initially with a list of Buildings and underneath Floors, Suites of Rooms and so on, the labels providing a number of conveniences beyond having merely folders and files. If you log in, there's little difference, except that as you explore the site you will find that what you can see and do has changed. It's a completely different paradigm from the flat structure typical in many other VLEs - you don't have a 'my courses' view as such.

There's no explicit concept of role (as in admin, course designer, instructor, marker, student, etc.) - rather the key concepts are groups of users and access rights (see, view, post, record, mark, etc.) Each resource in the system may have a set of groups and access rights assigned. Thus the notion of roles becomes implicit based upon who can do what and where; as one can belong to any number of groups, each assigned multiple rights per resource, everyone has effectively their own set of authorisations, i.e. their own roles.

Such granularity makes it easy to set up varying levels of participation, ranging from simple involvement such as moderating a discussion board, through to administering an area containing dozens of courses. It also readily supports change and can accommodate all of the following scenarios:

• A Continuing Education student in creative writing requires access to course material in the Faculty of English
• A graduate student needs access as a student to study materials, yet may also need to serve as a tutor for undergraduates
• A member of teaching staff with certain rights as a lecturer may require further rights as a course co-ordinator.
• A student studying Philosophy is advised by her tutor that she should consult some materials on Logic provided by the Computer Science department
• Students from two colleges set up a shared project workspace and then find that they need to share with students from another college plus their college tutor.

It's one of the trickiest things to digest - even technical developers who have had a chance to work with Bodington, examine its source code have often not fully grasped the richness of the granularity! It's not that hard, just different, I think. You can gain further idea in an overview of access rights.

I think it's also worth considering whether the nature of roles also has resource implications - I think that once you start fixing labels on people it can reduce flexibility and with the lack of fluidity you can't share workloads so easily, things can't work organically. The more designated roles, the more complicated it can become.

If anyone is interested to trying things out, I'd be happy to help - there are (of course :-) various ways of doing this.  I shall probably create some WebLearn test accounts for Educause.

Building community in learning environments – what about teachers?

Note: This article was originally posted in the Connect section on the Educause Web site, at:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/pault/building_community_in_learning_environments_what_about_teachers/4843. 
However, this address has since become inaccessible, so the post has been reproduced here as an archive with the same date and approximately the same time.


Having extolled the virtues of sharing, my blog has been void of any further contributions. I'm sorry about that and aim to post a few entries in the coming week, especially as I prepare for the Educause conference in Dallas. At the very least I should elaborate soon on my abstract for my poster session on Wednesday evening.

In the UK there's been a lot of discussion and debate around the notion of personal(ised) learning environments (PLEs for short), with further funding available from the JISC in their latest call (04/06 Capital Programme) - see e.g. e-learning strand Call III. All this has raised fundamental questions about the nature of learning as individuals and within communities, let alone what this means in terms of software systems. It can be a heady and contentious mix and in all of this I wonder what about the role of teaching, guidance and so on? Is it being devalued?  So here I'm going to reflect on my brief experience with an online venture where personal spaces and community were closely connected, with occasional pauses to refer to learning environments. However, in this case I'm thinking especially about involvement among academics (faculty).

About 10 years ago (Autumn '96), I received an email out of the blue responding to my personal Web pages on Buddhism. The message invited me to "take the site to another level" and join a new online venture. Was I interested? Even then before spam was suffocating Inboxes, I was somewhat wary, but out of curiosity I sent a reply. Soon after I received another message, this time from someone else, who expanded a little on what his 'associate' had expressed before. I was informed, "This is going to be the biggest thing to hit the 'Net!'"

For one with English sensibilities, a touch of understatement is considered slightly more appealing. However, when some elements about the venture explained to me, it seemed to me a good proposition. The basic premise was that hitherto to find a quality-controlled and edited guide to resources on the 'Net there was little choice beyond the impersonal Yahoo-style directories. This venture was to change that by creating a kind of directory service with real people serving as expert guides to the resources.

I eventually joined as one of the first 'Guides' for what was then called The Mining Company, later About.com. My task was basically to maintain and develop an area in their site on Buddhism, publishing an original article at least weekly and growing an edited links directory. The article could be a news item or topic of interest, so not dissimilar to a blog entry. Further, there was a requirement to foster community, mainly through synchronous discussions. How personal could this area be? How much did it have to conform to corporate demands? There was considerable freedom - you could write on the topic of your choice; the input from others came largely on the style of presentation, writing with the audience in mind, with the aim of establishing rapport. I enjoyed the work and I think most others did too, and that is one of key factors of its success.

The connection between the individual and community was built on personal interest and enthusiasm on a topic close to one's heart and there's ample evidence that it worked well. It wasn't just the model that was well designed, the whole infrastructure that supported the Guides was excellent – regarding the technical setup, content creation was straightforward using ready-made templates and any processes (e.g. file transfer) were well documented. However, there was another layer of support readily available behind the scenes within the organization, which had a feeling of a synergetic whole – whether it was to do with administration or the mentoring received when building your area. I found the mentoring particularly attentive and encouraging.

However, I had a very basic problem - access to the 'Net. A convoluted story, but it ended up with some forlorn investigations into mobile wireless access, which would prove prohibitively expensive. I also had to write up a doctoral thesis, sooner rather than later, so with considerable reluctance I gave up the work, before even the official launch! My articles are still available, just in my personal space, starting with the First Noble Truth .

The way the system gelled, across personal and technical spheres was altogether impressive and I often wonder what those of use involved in online learning systems, particularly in HEIs, might learn from this. On a structural note, the Mining Company's site was quite regimented, largely static content, with only a handful of templates, though considerable scope to use HTML as you wished. What a visitor is likely to notice about the site is:

• there's someone who is looking after the pages personally
• it's informative
• it is kept up to date
• on sending a query, you receive a prompt and helpful response

About.com contains a lot of instructional material and I'm thinking about it almost as a virtual academy with hundreds of academics who are very engaged online. That's not a huge number, yet About.com has been in the top 10 in terms of Web traffic – don’t think it was the biggest thing to hit the ‘Net, but it wasn’t far off! It shows that there is a natural thirst for knowledge that can be served remarkably well through a special synergy.

If I now glance over to WebLearn, the institutional Virtual Learning Environment that I currently administer, what observations can I make? It's quite busy with thousands of staff and students accessing it more than occasionally, with probably more staff contributors than About.com Guides. We have discussion lists, discussion boards, user groups, lots of interactive tools and various other ingredients. There's a lot of help documentation and a widely publicised email address for help, to which colleagues and I try to provide a prompt and helpful response.

After all that, the environment is often described as "useful" in terms of access to information, but I've not seen much online community. A lot of the content is to do with adminstration, is provided in large batches, updated infrequently with little indication of what's fresh or topical. Academics are as passionate as anyone about their own subjects, but compared with About.com Guides, they are generally less enthusiastic and nowhere near as engaged online. Perhaps it's not surprising given that an Oxford education is largely face-to-face, epitomised by the tutorial system, where networking is done inside the walls of colleges and departments. Yet it's is evident among students that there's scope for online engagement to mediate physical communities - an entry in Facebook is apparently sine qua non.

There are actually well-known limitations of Oxford's face-to-face networking because academic connections seem to be quite often the outcome of serendipity more than anything else. The limitations are perhaps more obvious when considering that increasing amount of research is interdisciplinary in nature. In fact, even the most recalcitrant professors are using the Web and email frequently, so I think we're missing the right means or environment of online communication; there ought to be better means of fostering the expert teaching community. Perhaps it is just a matter of resources? Perhaps academics are under too much strain, so can't embrace anything beyond what they're doing now? Or maybe I'm just naive - I once tried to encourage an exchange of ideas between two dons who both had an interest in software for teaching logic. The response was frigid!

The work on PLEs, at least as I've encountered it as sponsored by the JISC, is focused on students, but that's only part of the picture – or just one side of the equation when considering 'learning and teaching'. The relative lack of engagement among academics indicates to me that a greater emphasis is needed on teaching, tutoring, mentoring and guidance and through that more academics may become fuller contributors online.
So does that mean we need to look at the Personal Teaching Environment (PTE) or the Personal Instructional Environment (PIE) or the Personal Guidance Environment (PGE)? But then what about the Personal Research Environment (PRE) and the Personal Administration Environment (PAE)? As someone who favours a holistic approach, there seems to be a serious risk of fragmentation that I don't find very appealing, even though each probably have distinctive characteristics.  The problems become manifest when you try to build systems - there's a temptation to build distinct systems for each.   It’s already problematic to distinguish between a VLE and VRE - and if there are significant differences do you go and build completely separate systems for each?    It's early days, though I gather that some patterns have been established in the JISC-funded Building a VRE for the Humanities.

There are actually numerous alternative online educational environments that lend themselves more to personalisation and community that may support the teaching side more. Pete Robinson, one of my colleagues in the Learning Technologies Group occasionally asks me have I taken a look at Elgg. I've always replied that I’ve only glanced at it, having never been able to allocate time to explore, but feeling I really ought to make time. Yet where might I find the time to consider even some of the issues this raises within an institutional context...?