Dear CLIENT,

Today, we’ve announced that Elluminate, Wimba, and Blackboard will join forces to bring together the leading technology products for synchronous learning and collaboration – and the minds that created them – in what we hope will be a major step forward to pursue new innovation.

We’ve heard directly from you, our clients, that these products are rapidly growing in importance as formal and informal collaboration – in a variety of settings within and beyond the delivery of online courses – becomes increasingly fundamental to the learning process. But you’ve also told us much more is needed to realize the full potential of these solutions for impacting education.

Our combination is a union of like-minded, education-focused organizations to invest in and pursue this greater potential. Working together to form a new and independent Blackboard Collaborate platform group, we believe we can accelerate innovation in technology for collaboration within and across educational institutions, as well as add great value to the interactions between these systems and asynchronous learning platforms. And we can do so at a rate faster, and to an end much more impactful for educators, than any of our organizations could have achieved alone. The new platform group will operate under the strategic guidance of Ray Henderson, who oversees Blackboard’s overall teaching and learning strategy, and will be led by Elluminate’s Maurice Heiblum, who will assume the role of President, Blackboard Collaborate.

As excited as we are about the longer term promise of working together in this way, we realize that as clients of Elluminate and Wimba you will naturally be concerned about the short-term impacts of this news. Our pledge to you is to make our first focus sustaining the positive experience that both of these communities currently enjoy. Further, we will also sustain the goal of improving collaboration broadly, rather than exclusively for those using Blackboard learning management products. In that regard, we will continue current Elluminate and Wimba integration work for open source products, and it is our strategy to sustain those bridges with other commercial LMS providers as well.

Once we’ve ensured that a smooth transition is underway, we’ll begin the work of shaping a combined vision for Collaborate by working in combination with members of both client communities. In the meantime, we’re actively seeking to learn about specific questions or concerns you may have and hear any early ideas for how we can improve your current experience with our products or better integrate them with whatever learning management technology your institution prefers.

Please feel free to channel your thoughts directly to our executive team at collaborateleadership@blackboard.com. We’ve also established an information resource with anticipated FAQs that we’ll update with your input. We’re very optimistic about the benefit that our collective investment in, and passion for, education collaboration can produce for clients. We’re looking forward to digging in together.

Yours Sincerely,

Michael L. Chasen                     Nashir Samanani
President & CEO                       CEO & Founder
Blackboard Inc.                        Elluminate Inc.  

Carol Vallone                             Ray Henderson
CEO & Chairman of the Board       President
Wimba Inc.                               Blackboard Learn

Blackboard’s cautiously crafted language suggests this is a “strategic partnership” rather than a merger or buy-out. There’s a little additional info to be found on the Blackboard web site, but not much.

UPDATE: The Wimba web site confirms that this is another planned Blackboard acquisition, “for a total of approximately $116 million in cash” (more Bb-polished details here).

Though Bb claims, “we will continue current Elluminate and Wimba integration work for open source products” one has to wonder how much the leading commercial LMS provider will do to support it’s greatest marketshare competitor, the open source Moodle. Note also the careful use of “current”, suggesting that after Elluminate and Wimba are combined into Bb Collaborate, this integration work may cease.

Blackboard now owns WebCT and ANGEL. 2008 higher education CMS usage table adapted from the March 2009 ITC Distance Education Survey

This most recent acquisition is a surprising but not unpredictable indicator of Blackboard’s lust to dominate the higher ed CMS market. In 2006 the US Patent Office awarded Blackboard a broad and hotly contested patent on learning management system features, which Blackboard immediately used to sue its next largest commercial rival, Desire2Learn. And though Blackboard was successful in its legal actions, twice since then the US Patent Office has rejected the original 44 patent claims, first in March of 2008 and again in April of this year.

Blackboard, however, presses on, appealing the rejections, fighting with Desire2Learn in the courts, suing the US Patent Office, and even filing more patents (including one detailing a 3D learning environment, and a set of claims in Canada[!]) on which they can base new lawsuits against D2L.

As ITC noted in its March 2009 survey, ANGEL had gained considerable market share in the US, putting it in the #2 slot against Blackboard+WebCT. What once looked like good news for Angel has become a nightmare for an CMS consumer market in need of diverse and innovative choices, and a looming shadow for other CMS producers, as Blackboard continues to thwart and denigrate healthy competition in the field of e-learning. At this point I’m continuing to put my faith in Moodle, the popular open source CMS, and wondering if US antitrust law contradicts Blackboard’s aggressive behavior.

More than just troublesome for pretty CSS-based pages, quirks mode, triggered on standards-compliant pages, can negatively affect the usability and functionality of the learning experience. For example, we use an inline quizzing Javascript that renders questions and answer choices and feedback based on standards mode CSS. In quirks mode this self-assessment tool is useless.

Blackboard Was Made For Quirks

Basically quirks mode means the browser thinks your web skills are not up to snuff, and the browser therefore renders your CSS in a non-standard fashion. Quirks mode is triggered when a DOCTYPE, e.g.:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

…is missing, or invalid, or unknown, or not where it should be (i.e. the first line of the document).

javascript:alert(document.compatMode) pasted into the Internet Explorer address bar kindly informs us that this browser is rendering this page in quirks mode. Firefox will tell you if you go to Tools > Page Info. Advanced Box Model Test

But even if you’ve been careful to put a valid DOCTYPE into your web pages, once it’s loaded up into Bb Vista and linked to, either from a Folder or a Learning Module, the browser will go into quirks mode. Why does this happen? Simple: Bb Vista inserts XHTML and JavaScript at the beginning of all web pages onload. 140+ lines of it, to be exact. It’s an odious thing to do, but, what do you expect? It’s Blackboard.

It may (or may not) be important to note that this does not happen when viewing a page in the File Manager–only when a page is loaded from a link within the course.

What You Can Do

Not much. And yet this could be a big issue for Internet Explorer users (FireFox renders page in quirks mode [not "Almost Standards Mode" as I'd hoped], yet most standards-compliant XHTML and CSS still render well).

And though most users are still on IE 6 or 7 I had some hope for a way out with Internet Explorer 8. You see, Microsoft promised that “a page explicitly opts into standards mode” when it includes “a metatag in the page that specifies IE=8 or IE=EmulateIE8″. For example:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=IE8" />

In practice, however, this META tag alone does not force IE8 into standards mode in Bb Vista–the misplaced XHTML is apparently too much for IE8 to ignore.

So the most practical solutions I can think of are:

1. Write custom CSS for Blackboard that renders (or re-renders) the page according to the quirks mode box model. This could be done using Internet Explorer conditional comments, for example:

   
   <!--[if IE ]>
     <link href="ie-quirks.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
   <![endif]-->
   
   

   I haven’t yet considered what CSS rules would need to be written to accommodate this, but if it was possible this seem like the most robust and efficient solution.

2. Rewrite the page with Javascript. After Bb has loaded (or begun to load) the page, Javascript triggers a full rewrite of the page, either wiping out or rewriting the Bb XHTML and Javascript in a more appropriate location (e.g. in a targeted, ID’ed element). I’ve asked one of my developers to try this out today, but already fear the additional load time it might put on the Bb-hosted page.

Any other ideas?

If this were only about appearance I wouldn’t be raising a fuss, but this can and does affect the usability of certain e-learning tools, and forces developers to ask, “How will this work in Blackboard?” yet again.

I have been critical about aspects of LMSs in the past. I’ve been critical of Blackboard in particular–primarily because of my complaints about the functionality of the Vista LMS, the “must use standard LMS for everything” attitude of some university CIOs, and Blackboard’s past behavior with respect to patent claims. And while one professor encouraged me to wear my “Supporting Innovation, Not Suing It” t-shirt to class, and while I at some point last night woke up saying, “If we tell you all our ideas, will you patent them and sell them to us later?”, I wanted to open my mind to the potentials of the discussion and not be obtuse as a matter of course.

(The following notes identify ideas by speaker, but please note that the words are only verbatim if I use quotes.)

Dr. Wiley began by directing us to consider the history of the LMS, it’s purpose as manifest through functionality and initial usage experiences. A common conclusion was the LMS attempted to replicate what happens in the classroom online: requiring little faculty tech expertise, providing quizzes, assigns, grades, content delivery (paper reduct), discussions [JMS: yes and no. online discussions are both similar and dramatically dissimilar], admin and teaching functions, and integration with campus academic and student information systems.

In response to our growing list, Russ responded, “This is just a collection of things… but there is new capability, and by tying the corporation together we enable new processes. Technology enabled a transformation.”

(JMS: Agreed as a potential. Technology is nothing without appropriate training and inspiration on proper educational application. Through the LMS we quickly accomplished teaching with technology, but not technology-enhanced teaching. But if we ask, how can we leverage technology to make teaching and learning better and easier? We must examine our educational goals, audience, and environment. We must problem-solve, creatively using applications of the available tools.

(Also, there are some ways in which the technology itself has changed the way we teach, albeit slowly:)

1. Quizzes become more reasonable as self-assessments and formative learning activities when done online
2. Discussions become fully participatory, time-liberated dialogs that allow participants to branch and focus on strands that are personally relevant.
3. Digital content is searchable – discussions, texts, etc. This provides different, easier, faster access to materials and ideas that support a participant’s focused interest

We began speaking of the cultural shift associated with (or accompanied by) Web 2.0, and how that may impact education.

Justin makes the good point, if LMs is adaptation of teaching, it also seems this idea of PLE/PLN is just a 2nd generation adaptation of the LMS, i.e., teachers consider, How can I do X, Y, Z — which I did in the LMS easily — without the LMS?

JMS: Some who look at the PLE see it as something constructed by new media, connectivism, not as a substitute for the LMS. Those folks admit they don’t know what a PLE looks like and are uncertain if learning outcomes are similarly measurable. Those most comfortable with the idea of a PLE have some confidence in the organic conditions of it as a learning environment, despite it’s fuzziness.

Granted, some do see the PLE simply as an escape from the LMS, and even though they might be trying to simply recreate what they did in the LMS, they can gain some advantages just by being open: Openness, adaptable, personalized, ownership, persistence, authenticity.

I caught something of Justin saying that the open source (OSS) community is ignoring hard problems… OSS technology fails to provide sophisticated learning features like adaptive release, adaptive testing… The OSS community not taking it on…

(JMS: I accept that specific example as an inadequacy of available open PLE/PLN or Web 2.0 tools. There aren’t currently automatic gatekeeping (pre-programmed or “smart”) tools for PLE/PLN tools and media. Siemens and others might say teachers are naturally the gatekeepers. Users are the gatekeepers (though perhaps this is inadequate). Or maybe we don’t need those gatekeepers at all, that is, we can encourage the fundamentals of information fluency by directing students to assess and re-direct themselves.)

JMS: OS community is not taking on education in general. Why would they? Education is still a niche. Adaptive release is a very education-centered feature. OSS e-learning, like Moodle, include or plan to include it.

David Wiley: “Data. Through the LMS I can capture and use data in a way I never could before.” Also, liberty of users to control consumption of content. E.g. playing course media at 2x speed.

Justin Johansen: Teachers can teach to a style, users can adapt to their preferences (disruptive).

Sara Joy challenges, suggested/asked if LMS can be a “disruptive technology”.

David: At USU an instructor with no budget for “clickers” went to the dollar store and bought $1 laser pointers to accomplish the same thing. Throw up a slide, students with laser pointers indicate choices anonymously on screen. It’s personalized (and probably more fun).

Russ: “Isn’t one of the fundamental issues also location independence?”

Justin: “Definitely, esp. when gas prices were $4/gallon.”

Dr. Wiley whips out slides of 6 changes:

• analog –> digital
• tethered –> mobile
• consume –> create
• generic –> personalized
• isolated –> connected
• closed –> open

Jon Mott: There’s a book about organizations being like spiders, which can regrow a leg, or starfish, which have legs that, if severed, can grow into a new starfish. Are we like spiders or starfish? Best organizations are hybrids. Starfish-like activities. eBay features of a spider.

JMS: Some in education want that severed starfish leg to turn into a bird. But education’s history doesn’t show that we’re evolutionary–there’s no dramatic mutation between generations that changes the species. Education is certainly not, historically, subject to revolution either! It’s adaptation at best. It’s incremental change.

Aaron Johnson: Web 2.0 can be transformative in, for instance, using a blog publishes homework online, for the world to see–maximal exposure.

Dr. Wiley points out that several class blog posts have been picked up by Stephen Downes, which impacts the community, impacts the class, impacts the writer.

Justin: In the old system publishing homework was your mom putting your assignment on the fridge with a magnet.

Aaron: It’s also transformative in a way that democratizes access. But how are things changing in how people behave and interact? Do I get more out of that?

(JMS: We’ve seen that young people’s sense of privacy may be changing, and also that online exposure can bite us in the rear.)

Justin: I haven’t had a transformative e-learning experience in the classroom discussion forum. It’s usually, “do this boring thing for class or else”.

JMS: I have. (That’s what put me in e-learning over a decade ago, and I have them with some regularity now)

Jon: I learn something everyday on Twitter. I follow about 150 people, all of the ed tech related. My network has expanded, and for the better.

JMS: And learn to filter junk out, hopefully!

Russ: Yes, adding people, one by one… “adding diversity, accumulating collected knowledge… but at some point you reach a threshold.”

JMS: At first there’s a lot of noise, but you learn to filter that out, or cut it out. I follow around 60 people, but that changes from week to week. I’ll follow a lot of people who I will later un-follow, not because I don’t like them, but because their use of Twitter may not contribute to or match my own personal way of valuing Twitter. (JMS: I’ve talked too much. Time to listen more.)

Aaron: A lot of us still use the web for adaptations of normal life. Despite my tech-savvy nature, I hear about Web 2.0 stuff and I think do I really need that? Is the real transformation in the things that we do, or in helping people understand what they can do now, with this ability to use technoloy?

Jon: Novelty of technology is not enough. You have to be evaluative. How is using this going to help me? I user twitter not to be social, but to be professional.

JMS: The beauty of these tools is the personalization. The beauty of the PLE is the personalization.

Jon: I’ve used delicious for my own purposes, but have finally found a use for it in collaborative environment.

Justin: (To his group) Why aren’t we using delicious on our OER project?

(JMS: Note to self, we might put our group’s open ed project links list on a wiki instead of a Google Spreadsheet. Then reach out to community and get additional links for free.)

We somehow manage to move the conversation back to the future of the LMS.

JMS: I see the future of the LMS being not a replication of these open, existing tools, but a way to structure, organize, and adaptively control or smart-sequence these. As Justin pointed it, adaptive releasing, setting and resetting paths, etc.

Justin: Would we, by using the LMS as a place to integrate Web 2.0, personalized tools, push folks away from using those tools?

(JMS: Is Justin talking about the creepy treehouse-ness? I don’t get a chance to ask…)

Russ: “Is it not a false choice to give proprietary vs open source? … Is it not a distinction without a difference?”

(JMS: There are potential advantages in both that we should not lightly dismiss, e.g. proprietary may have quality advances, resource advantages, corporate attention, collaborative integration and first-choice with publishers; openness may have adaptability, customization, lower cost, ownership. [To me the subscription model is so painful, I personally want the ability to keep and maintain code perpetually, for example, stay at WebCT CE 4.1 for a decade if we wished.])

Russ: For a while technology was pulling the practice, but now (as we talk about web 2.0 tools) but now it seems we’ve flipped that.

Wiley: “Forget open code source for a minute. Forget APIs. Look at YouTube, Flickr, GoogleMaps. They all have a common language: RSS. APIs are great if you like that. But these tools are bleeding syndication, and they don’t punish you for mashing it up.”

John Hilton: Free access vs. open source vs. paid license.

Jon: “Once upon a time there was a Blackboard.com where you could create your own course for free.”

Russ: “It’s back.”

So we are talking about interoperability of the learning object (LTI)?

Wiley: “But LTI is so complex. RSS is sooo easy. Some clever folks, like Tony Hirst, will use Pipes or APIs. There’s technical accessibility, then there’s an expertise-less accessibility.

Jon: Having APIs and web services is critical. Maybe we need more than single sign-on.

Russ: “To Dave’s point about the data, if you want to use the data you have to have that captured in an environment.”

(JMS: Data can be made accessible through APIs, no?)

Jon: Livetext does program assessment and portfolios. You can build and expose your portfolio. Creators can easily export.

Dave: Yes, let’s just get data out of the end. Because even with standards everyone speaks their own dialect.

Aaron: Searchable.

John: By Google?

Aaron: Internally? Or… What do we mean by LMS for open ed?

Wiley: “Simplest example–and OCW is 1.0 simple–I built my course in Bb. How do I publish as OER? I probably need 30hrs to do it.” (JMS: Push-button public publishing?) Content publishing, content importing.

Justin: A lot of our Bb courses are full of PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, maybe HTML…

Aaron: What does Bb add in terms of content ability? It sounds like you’re talking about the same thing, replicating a course structure. Or how do you get the content out without having it trapped in the LMS’s structure?

JMS: You could do it both ways:

JMS: You have a “repository”, though I dislike that word. It’s a plain web server, or a wiki, or WP, or even an LMS repository. It contains the content–PDFs, PPTs, DOCs, HTML. You can share those straight off of the repository as disagreggated pieces. OR you can link to them directly from your individual LMS course structure. This eliminates course-to-course redundancy. OR you can link to them directly from your opencourseware platform. AND/OR your LMS has a way to select which pieces of the individual course to “open”, and then publishes an open version of your course with some parts hidden.

Wiley mentions OpenShare mod.

JMS: OpenShare does part of this for Moodle: lets you incrementally tag license metadata for resources and activities, and then mark those resources and activities as open or closed. Public can view those open items; registered students can view all the items.

An hour after trying to work around various bugs in the awful 1.9 Moodle gradebook I found myself in need of this formula again, and the only place I could find it was in my own post on the old WebCT forums. I’m posting it here for my future reference only, but maybe it will be useful to other Bb Vista or Moodle users:

Drop the Lowest Score of a Series

For this example we need to know the labels (Bb/WebCT) or ids (Moodle) of the columns to be included. Here I use A1, A2, A3.

In this example we want to drop the lowest assignment score for our total, first in Blackboard Visa and then in Moodle:

This calculates the sum total of of the 3 assignments then subtracts the minimum score of the same series.

Drop the Lowest Two Scores of a Series

In this example we want to drop the lowest 2 assignment scores from our total. I’m using 5 assignments to illustrate this in practice.This can get pretty hairy, but once you’ve studied this example it should make sense:

This calculates the sum total of of the 5 assignments then subtracts the lowest possible combination of two scores found in the same series.

The aforementioned example will work for dropping lowest 3 and more using the same principles, but obviously it gets exponentially longer.

One passage in particular percolated my sense of irony. In addressing the idea that institutions may have more flexibility to innovate with open source solutions, Michael Chasen…

…argued that there are benefits to the corporate model of software publishing, too. “I have 300 people on my development team working full time on our products and services,” he said. “I don’t know if there are 300 full-time people currently working on Sakai. Maybe there are. I have a multimillion-dollar hardware-testing lab just to test scalability.”

“At a minimum,” he said, “we are at least just as innovative as open source.”

At least as innovative as open source! With millions in expenditures on hardware and developers Bb is proud of the fact that they are at least as innovative as open source, which runs on the power of volunteers and sheer passion? Chasen’s statement can be read both ways, confirming what I’ve believed for the past two years: that free, oss platforms such as Moodle etc. are now on par with Bb and the other Big Boys, and thus a monumentally better deal for educational institutions. Instead of investing money in licensing, invest that money in people, and shape the direction of the LMS in ways that are best-suited to your institution’s needs.

Chasen poo-poo’s the evidence that institutions are leaving Bb for Moodle, yet his self-assured statement on the matter reveals a flaw in his logic: “There’s not more people leaving now than there were yesterday.” If I have 10 people on Bb on Monday and 1 person leaves, I have 9 on Tuesday. If 1 person then leaves (same count of attrition), that’s down to 8 I have on Wednesday. There may not be an increase in the number of people leaving now than there were yesterday, but the conversion rate is still being whittled away. To exacerbate this fact, I don’t see herds of institutions stampeding towards adopting Bb for the first time (Q4 2009 call reports new higher ed customer increase at about 5%).

Blackboard insists that it’s patent claims will not be asserted against open source software LMS development, but if they really are as shark-like as the Chronicle suggests, what other plans might Chasen et al have to deal with the growing “threat” of Moodle and other oss platforms to their marketshare? The recent Bb partnership with Sakai to develop an open source integration tool may provide some insight. Michael Feldstein highlighted this excerpt from the August 6, 2008 Bb earnings conference call wherein Chasen reported,

our learning system will be able to load other course management system courses through our interface. …a lot of campuses have standardized on the Blackboard system… but there maybe an individual teacher or a very small department that is using either a home-grown system or maybe an open-source solution…

It sounds to me as if a developing Bb strategy is to partner with or leverage open source projects to produce integration or transmogrification tools in order to sweep dissident teachers and courses into Bb.

Thinking about Bb’s modus operandi, the patent debacle, and of course the cost of licenses has already conjured some new, bitter slogans to post on John Krutsch’s >Blackboard Customer-ized Mug Maker. It looks like a great place to vent for disgruntled Bb users; let’s just hope he doesn’t receive his own cease and desist notification.

Blackboard filed the lawsuit on July 26, 2006 against competitor Desire2Learn based on intellectual property claims related to it’s Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138. Blackboard has argued that it had invested 100 million dollars in the development of the educational products protected under the patent. (NoEduPatents.com has made an explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims.)

Backlash to the Blackboard patent by the open source and educational communities has been strong since news of the lawsuit first broke, and will likely continue through communities such as boycottblackboard.org. I personally did not expect Blackboard’s claims would be upheld when re-examined by the patent office, let alone that the lawsuit would be validated by the jury.

Because the patent claims are broad and impact so many common e-learning features, Blackboard’s legal victory is bound to be discouraging and troublesome to other commercial learning management system providers such as Angel Learning, eCollege, and Agilix. Blackboard has previously declared that it would not assert it’s U.S. patents against open source software development, e.g. Moodle and Sakai.

Does this apparent magnanimity bolster my favor for Blackboard? Certainly not; the position is superficial at best, and Blackboard knows it. Anyway, it’s beside the point: though I personally lean towards open source software for educational technology, I am a capitalist, and free market competition and consumer-driven innovation of services and products is important to me. Blackboard’s overblown patent claims are an affront to innovation and competition, taking advantage of systemic failures in U.S. Patent regulations.

And though some will dismiss this news based on the argument that even conceptually the LMS has inherent flaws (failure to keep up with current technologies, inauthentic, lack of learner ownership, creepy-tree-house, etc), I believe the LMS is still a valuable toolset for many. The LMS has has propelled e-learning into a new frontier by standardizing the basic communication and delivery features for an educational audience. The LMS’s ability to provide teachers an easy-to-use set of online educational tools in a one-stop-shopping experience is and will remain considerable for the next 5 years at least. (The unfortunate reality is that alternative networked education “systems” such as personal learning environments are still being thought out and developed–at the very least alternatives are probably not ready for widespread adoption and implementation by faculty members.)

Regardless of whether you’re pro-LMS or anti-LMS in general, I think the larger debate about software patents particularly when applied to education is an issue we in ed tech all have a stake in. At the ITC conference last week I picked up a witty t-shirt given to me by The rSmart Group that signifies the position of many:

Sources

• Desire2Learn’s Patent Lawsuit Blog
• Blackboard’s Patent Info Page
• Blackboard’s U.S. patent #6,988,138
• NoEduPatents’s Explanation of Blackboard’s 44 patent claims
• Groklaw: Reexamination of Blackboard Patent
• Wikipedia: Software Patent Debate
• BoycottBlackboard.org

Not only do I disagree with the instructor’s desired objectives in using this survey (she essentially hopes to prove that the reason students are failing her online course is because they are under-prepared or have wrong assumptions about online education–of course it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the course has nearly no media-enhanced learning, no student-student contact, and very little student-instructor interaction), I disagree with the questions that I wrote.

Of course anyone who has written survey questions with a mind to gain accurate and insightful information on the participants knows what a challenge the task is from the get-go; I don’t kid myself that it’s no easy endeavor, but I also think there has to be a better way.

Among my primary objectives in writing the questions were the following ideas:

• Keep the survey short, so that students would actually do it.
• Have some redundancy to check for accuracy and inhibit prejudicial responses.
• Avoid asking questions that dare students to label themselves “dumb”.
• Avoid questions that tempted students into labeling themselves “smart”.

But the primary objective was essentially this: after reading a good number of “student readiness” surveys online I wanted to avoid asking questions that gauged a student’s willingness to partake in a lonesome independent study course. “Independent study” is not equivalent to modern “distance education” in the Stein dictionary (in fact, even “distance education” is not equivalent to “distance education” in the Stein dictionary, but that’s another story). And so though several of my questions are based on the questions asked in other “distance education” surveys, I purposefully steered away from presumptive questions like:

Feeling that I am part of a class is:
a. Not particularly necessary to me.
b. Somewhat important to me.
c. Very important to me.

As if being “part of a class” is somehow mutually exclusive from distance learning! And it’s not that I’m opposed to independent study types of courses; in fact, I myself greatly enjoy and grow in isolation, but I recognize that’s not necessarily the norm.

Then there are questions that perpetuate instructors’ presumptions that they can get back to distance students at their leisure:

My comfort level with waiting a few days to receive instructor feedback is..
Low   Moderate   High

While it may be an unfortunate reality in distance education programs that instructors do often delay responding to students (I recommend a 24 hour turn around at the latest), we certainly don’t want to encourage that behavior, nor do we want to discourage student expectations of their instructors.

Finally, I also have disagreements with the term “student readiness” in general, as that tends to automatically place the blame for student failure at the feet of the students. Jared Spool, a Web usability expert whom I greatly admired, once inspired me to make the following provocative paraphrase, There are no user errors, only
design errors. And while I recognize that this statement is not universally true, it does challenge the designer (in this case, the instructor or the instructor’s instructional designer) to reconsider blaming the user (aka student) for failing to complete the task.

My Questions

Even though I have a pretty good insight into what I think is wrong with so many “student readiness” surveys, I still had a hard time making my fundamentally different. But I’ll share them here anyway, with the hopes that some brainy folks can offer better suggestions to achieve the same general objective: determine if our students are adequately prepared–both mentally and technically–for an online course experience.

(Note: these questions are randomized in the final survey to mask redundancy.)

Options: Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
1. I often get things done ahead of time.
2. I can work independently and meet deadlines without being reminded.
3. I learn best through live classroom discussions.
4. I am comfortable engaging in class discussions on the Web.
5. If given clear instructions, I am confident that I can complete the assignment independently.
6. I often need to have instructions for an assignment clarified or explained more than once.
7. As a reader, I sometimes need help to understand the text.
8. When I need help understanding the subject, I am comfortable e-mailing an instructor to ask for clarification.
9. When I don’t understand something I’ve read, I ask the instructor to explain it as soon as possible.
10. I am very competent using e-mail and Web sites.
11. I am a skilled writer.
12. I don’t always comprehend what I read.
13. I expect to spend less time on an Distance Education course than a regular on-campus course.
14. I often put things off until the last minute
15. I expect a Distance Education course to be easier than a regular on-campus course.

If you hate these questions, give me something better.

And if you like them, you can download them here (This survey is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.):

• DE Readiness Survey (survey).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Survey version
• DE Readiness Survey (quiz).zip Blackboard Vista IMS Quiz version (scored for a “perfect” student)
• DE Readiness Survey.txt Moodle GIFT format (scored for a “perfect” student)