Many people have their own opinion of what an e-learning platform should be (I spelled out some of my own broad criteria here), but that’s a debate in and of itself that we tried to dodge here. In doing so, we may have taken a number of things for granted–feel free to disagree in the comments. In the mode of keeping it simple, we reviewed Nixty by looking at the following areas:

1. Sign-Up and User Accounts
2. Creating a Course
3. Designing a Course
4. Participating in a Course
5. Conclusion

Sign-Up and Accounts

Signing up for Nixty is a straight forward process via new accounts or Facebook. We didn’t see an OpenID option. Users can populate a contacts list via invitations through Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Any user can sign up as a learner in any public course, or create a new course and share it with the world.

Within a user’s Settings users can upload a photo or avatar of themselves. Noticeably absent is any field for users’ personal web sites, social network accounts, or Atom/RSS feeds.

Users each have a theme-able “Eportfolio” (see Seth’s at http://nixty.com/eportfolio/Sgur). As opposed to a portfolio that showcases a person’s work, Nixty’s Eportfolio is limited mainly to presenting text information via a resume/CV builder.

Users also have a basic “Blog” (see Jared’s at http://nixty.com/blog/read/jaredstein/). The Nixty Blog allows for rich text editing, but, once submitted, new posts can not be edited. The blogs are publicly visible with no option to make private, either to a single course or to other Nixty members.

Nixty has an internal “Mail” tool which allows messaging of any Nixty user (plain text only). We would have liked to see some sort of integration with external e-mail or social media accounts.

Creating a Course

We began our examination of the features and limitations of Nixty by creating new online courses. In short, creating a new course and adding content is easy. Nixty provides a Wizard, but the interface is simple enough that most users can build courses without it. In most cases Nixty uses AJAX to facilitate page changes without reloading the page.

Courses can be designated as “traditional” or “wiki” versions–the latter allows any Nixty user to edit, add to, or re-order course content. After some confusion, @nixty (via Twitter) let us know that “Tests” and the “Gradebook” features are currently only available in the traditional version.

Course settings allow users to choose a course image icon which appears next to the course in Nixty directories. It also allows the instructor to set learner pass requirements for the course, and even issue a certificate to users upon completion.

The core unit of a Nixty course is the “Lesson” folder. Lesson folders can have learner instructions, can be nested, and can contain a sequence of any number of “Content” materials, “Discussions”, or “Tests”. Content is typically embedded HTML, but can also be a document (e.g. PDF or DOC), a media file, etc. We saw no way to scrape content from a web page–blog, wiki, or other. Also, though labeled “wiki” the wiki version of a course offers few wiki-like features, such as easy creation of new pages, access to wiki mark-up, version histories, etc.

The usability of the Content embedder/editor varied over the two days we used Nixty. Sometimes a simply WYSIWYG editor popped right up; sometimes the editor window was too small to use; sometimes it failed altogether with no error message.

Nixty allows for media uploads, though they recommend use of YouTube for videos. This is surely done for space/bandwidth reasons, but to us it’s the sort of behavior that should be encouraged throughout the system: designers (and users) should host their own materials in the cloud (Flickr, YouTube, Wikibooks, etc), and simple embed that content into the system’s framework.

Reordering Lesson folders was a bit painful. Initial ordering forces the creator to assign a number to each item. However, new items are not automatically queued to the next number, but have to be manually numbered through Manage Course > Lessons > Order Folders.

In our testing the “Syllabus” builder appeared to simply be broken, but there are obvious work-arounds, e.g. syllabus as an external file, or embed it as Content in a Lesson folder.

“Tests” can be used for exams or quizzes, and allow for basic multiple choice, true/false, multiple answer, fill in the blank, ordering and essay questions. Tests showed no option for question categories, pools, or randomization. Remember: Tests are only available in “traditional” version courses.

The “Gradebook” only allows for a Pass/Fail point-value cutoff. A clear limitation for most conventional instructors. Again, the Gradebook is only available in “traditional” version courses.

“Discussions” use the term “thread” but are not actually reply-threaded as we expected.

Nixty has neither an import nor export option for courses or materials, making migration to or from laborious.

Despite Nixty’s apparent draw for opencourseware and open educational resource projects, Nixty provides no licensing feature for content. We expected to be able to list license properties for individual items similar to Flickr, educommons, or the Moodle OpenShare mod.

We can’t discuss the course creation/development process without mentioning the navigation on the web site. Navigation is inconsistent at best, and often laborious or confusing. The following video illustrates one example that’s sure frustrate instructors in number of clicks alone:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)

Once finished, a creator can make a course public–this lists the course in the Nixty directory and allows other users to sign up for the course.

Designing a Course

We’ve looked at the nuts and bolts of Nixty in order to experience the possibilities, though actually designing a course is a different matter. Design of a successful informal or open course depends a lot on the limitations and affordances of a given system, the creativity of the designer, and the needs of the learners–an element apparently overlooked by Nixty (and most other LMS). We examined design considerations by looking at adapting my own online course, and examining a few of the spotlighted courses in Nixty.

The course I built in Nixty is based on my existing fully online 3-credit course, which aims to lay the groundwork for new web developers by introducing the basics of XHTML and CSS. The course design is a fairly traditional: primarily linear experience that connects heavily project-based instructional lessons with weekly discussions, journals, and learning quizzes.

(As with any conversion or migration, I had the bitter-sweet realization that my course had flaws scars that I was not quite ready to make public. This does, however, encourage me to make improvements under possible public scrutiny.)

In my course Because there is no built-in assignment tool designers have to rely on Discussions and Tests for activities. I did insert assignments into his Nixty course, and conforming to the nature of the informal, open educational experience I listed them as self-assessment only. And though I did provide a basic scoring criteria list, a better self-assessment feature would allow instructors to create rubrics, and users to score and track their work. Assignment-type activities would also be bolstered by a simple URL submission field, or even linking to artifacts in a learner’s Eportfolio (though the Eportfolio does not support objects/artifacts).

Use of essay-type questions in Tests could accommodate non-standard activities and assessments, but I think for such an option to thrive in an informal experience peer users would need to be able to access other learners’ quiz results for feedback and scoring. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Alternatively, a Discussion could be used for project submission and peer feedback. Because file upload is not an option, learners would have to refer to files hosted elsewhere. This limitation may in fact encourage better practices in learners, as each would have to have their own space(s) on the web for publishing educational and professional artifacts (e.g. a blog, Flickr, Slideshare, etc). Unfortunately, the designer’s Discussion thread creation prompt does not provide anything more than a plain text editor, limiting the richness of instructions for the learners.

In my Nixty course, as in most courses, the structure is fairly limited and contained by the Lesson folders, which contain only linearly-sequenced Content, Discussions, etc. The following short video shows how OCW_Maven (aka Sarina Canelake of MIT) structured OCW-based courses by interspersing Content and Q&A Discussions:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)

In our opinion a truly disruptive educational platform should encourage alternative structures, including recursive sequencing, e.g. learning branches or paths. That Nixty provides a “wiki” option for the course suggests a highly organic possibility, yet as mentioned several key wiki features are absent, especially dynamic, on-the-fly creation of new pages from links.

Participating in a Course

The idea behind a formally informal course experience is that a critical mass of users congregate around a learning hub in order to provide peer-to-peer or expert-to-peer feedback, direction, or mentoring. This requires a large number of users active on the site. It also requires a method of connecting users with the site’s activities when they are away from the course. Often this is done via e-mail, but the simple–yet surprisingly rare–method is with Atom or RSS feeds, for either content updates or discussion threads. Nixty provides neither feature, which may be the single largest weakness threatening the success of a project that apparently aims to be an open, informal learning hub.

Tests aside, “completion” of a Lesson, Discussion, or piece of content is based primarily on the user clicking “Mark this item complete”. This is fine for monitoring simple progress through a sequence of activities, but provides no real feedback to users on more substantive levels of progress. We suggested previously that a self-assessment rubric and tracking feature would be ideal for projects and assignments. Further, a reflective journaling field could be employed to help users track their thoughts as they progress through the materials.

Discussion responses can be voted “up” or “down”, but we thought that a better user feedback feature would provide additional, aggregable feedback to users in cases where the Discussion is used for sharing of work and solicitation of critiques. Users replying to a thread can use a GUI editor to compose their responses, but can not attach files. Again, this is not necessary with a PLE/PLN-informed perspective on digital identities and self-publishing, but many instructors–and learners–will look for this.

A plus for anyone planning to try Nixty is the fact that their representatives are very active on the support forums as well as on Twitter, and are more than willing to engage the community, answer questions, and offer advice.

Conclusion

As a simple e-learning platform Nixty is fairly satisfying. It’s willingness to provide a home for discussing and organizing content is laudable, and its aim to provide an alternative, open platform for informal learning is something we’ve been talking about for years.

The version of Nixty reviewed here is somewhat promising for informal learning scenarios, and the lightweight nature of the LMS can, at times, feel like a breath of fresh air over heavier LMS. The shifted paradigm of the system and its inherent limitations may encourage designers and educators to think about informal and independent learning in alternate ways.

However, broken or absent features make it difficult to recommend as a serious e-learning platform or an LMS. Indeed, existing Web 2.0 systems–either independently or in tandem–offer better core functionality (e.g. WordPress, MediaWiki), and we can think of other specifically educational platforms that would probably serve as well or better. For instance, the commercial LMS provider Instructure offers free individual course accounts to instructors as well as a public course option for informal open courses. Instructure Canvas is a more mature and feature-rich LMS platform that should not be ignored by open educators and educational theorists. And, of course, open source-minded folks would can just host their own instance Moodle or Sakai. (It’s somewhat surprising that Nixty didn’t build itself on either of these platforms, which are also full-featured and more mature.)

The fact that Nixty is new forces something of a catch-22: many self-directed learners and open educators won’t want to invest the time in using it until a critical mass of users can support those experiences; yet not critical mass is possible without users committing the system.

Despite its weaknesses Nixty is an interesting project, and we’ll be watching as its development progresses in the coming months and years. At this stage at least, Nixty is missing too many features, exhibits too many bugs, and offers little new affordances for us to encourage its adoption at this stage for anything except experimental open educational experiences.

• Assess or track student learning so as to provide formative or summative feedback (e.g. gradebooks, learner analytics, quizzes)
• Share and sequence learning materials–both locally-produced and external content (e.g. wiki pages, documents, multimedia, web pages)
• Facilitate learning communities, both their formation and persistence (e.g. learner identity profiles, discussions, chat rooms, blog aggregation)
• Communicate with learners in order to explore topics, negotiate meaning, and provide feedback, whether those interactions are expert-to-learner, peer-to-peer, content-to-learner, self-reflective (e.g. e-mail, discussion, scoring rubrics, voice/video messaging)
• Aggregate or publish learners’ academic work, either within a “walled-garden” or to the public (e.g. portfolios, blogs, wikis, document sharing)

As I reviewed the video I noticed I had made a handful of mis-statements that I should correct here:

• Martin Dougiamas is from Australia, not New Zealand.
• The book I reference at the beginning as inspiring me to rethink Moodle was Jason Cole’s “Using Moodle”
• Our Banner system talks to Moodle via a Luminus Message Broker plug-in, not LDAP (we use LDAP for WordPress MU)
• When I talk about adaptive quizzing, I meant to refer to educational research on web-based/hypermedia learning from the last decade or so.
• Though the Workshop tool has been dropped from Moodle 2.0, its functionality will not be replaced in the Assignment tool–instead a new Workshop tool is in development for 2.0

To be clear, we don’t really know what a model PLN looks like, or how it works, or if it’s efficient; we may not even know what the difference between a PLE and a PLN is. It may be that the one thing we can say definitively is we don’t know what a PLN looks like, for any two are unlikely to be the same. It may be that we want a PLN to resist being reified. When I think of a PLN/PLE I try to keep it open-ended; I conjecture that it is shaped by habits formed in the accomplishment of daily tasks, is connected to resources for discovery of new information, and is fostered by social relationships that may be authentic and trusting or merely incidental, built by one-to-one/one-to-many communications. Many of the facets of a PLN–but especially the social aspects–are increasingly open to the world.

I think we know what a LMS looks like: it is typically a monolithic, institutionally-controlled system that provides user accounts and digital space for the tasks of teaching and learning. A LMS is likely to allow file storage and redistribution, private and public communication, user tracking and logging, assignment management, timed/semi-secure assessment, and so on. Even more so than a traditional classroom, a LMS course environment is nearly always closed to the world.

Jon hit most of the primary strengths and weaknesses of each already, but I wanted to add or expand the list a little, but really just take this chance to brain dump and play both sides of a still relevant issue:

LMS Strengths

1. One-stop shopping. Not only do instructors build everything in one place, students can reach all aspects of the course in a single silo (except in the case of ePacks). Related: tools look and act similarly.
2. Bred by educators. Features are based on feedback and requests from a community of educators (theoretically).
3. Attention of ed tech market. Not only to CIOs attend to education-centric software products, third-party companies (textbook publishers to advanced communication tools such as Wimba) build content and products to work with the LMS.
4. Many models of academic use are available as examples or objects of criticism, especially in fully online courses.
5. Potentially greater latitude in using third-party materials under Fair Use or TEACH act. At any rate, many vague, fuzzy, or even illegal uses of third-party material by faculty are masked by closed system.
6. A closed environment–the metaphorical “walled garden”–may encourage students to freely express themselves.

LMS Weaknesses

1. LMS companies seem prone to buy-out, and thus may “pull the rug” out from adoptive institutions.
2. Adoption often requires licensing, which may inhibit switching, or may impel adoption of new versions.
3. Quality of third-party products and integration is often poor, inhibiting access and blemishing the experience.
4. Improvements, features, and fixes are historically are slow.
5. Design may encourage outdated, limiting, or less effective teaching practices.
6. With the exception of Moodle and Sakai, most LMS are closed source (in spite of Blackboard’s claims to be “open”).

PLE Strengths

1. Tools are based on “real world” needs, uses, and practices, and are more likely to be “authentic”.
2. Tools are likely to be coded or scripted according to broadly adopted standards.
3. Stability may be based on community adoption and support as well as financial viability.
4. Students may engage with communities of practice—real experts operating in their profession.
5. 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Unable to rely upon corporate contracts or other adoption criteria, Web 2.0 tools rely on continued user support and expanded adoption.

PLE Weaknesses

1. Few models or case studies to use as examples or objects of criticism.
2. Tools often require terms of service agreements peculiar to the product company.
3. Likely not designed specifically for education.
4. For interoperability or data harvesting data must be both open and standardized.
5. Related to institutional control of data, data may be impermanent.
6. Some individuals may disdain open publishing or prefer to maintain privacy.

As our semester crawled into the second week and I began to enter scores and feedback for the students’ first assignment–a blog post–I noticed a couple unusual features:

1. When a student submits an URL for an assignment, Instructure grabs a screenshot of the rendered URL in addition to providing a hyperlink. This ensures that students actually have completed what they claim to have completed at the time of submission.
2. Students and instructors can each reply to an assignment’s score and feedback seamlessly within the system. For instance, after I submitted scores for this first assignment, one student explained in the assignment feedback why I failed to notice that she had in fact completed the assignment. I confirmed this, changed her score, and replied back, much like I would in private e-mail, but without any of the hassle of opening a message, choosing an addressee, etc.

Not only is this feedback discussion feature both seamless and the default, I can also use a built-in rubric, attach individual files (though Instructure has an even better way to upload assignment feedback en masse) and even record audio feedback inline (uses a Flash-based plug-in [still buggy for me on Win 7 in FF3]).

This is a great way to negotiate feedback and scoring with students. This also provides an opportunity for learners to engage in the assessment process. And since the features on this particular tool are easy and even intuitive to use, there is no excuse for accurate, timely corrective feedback that is understood by both instructor and learner.