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.)
[kml_flashembed movie="http://5tein.com/media/video/nixty-edit-content.swf" scale="exactfit" height="300" width="400" /]

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 structured OCW-based courses by interspersing Content and Q&A Discussions:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)
[kml_flashembed movie="http://5tein.com/media/video/nixty-discussions-lesson.swf" scale="exactfit" height="300" width="400" /]

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.

<!–

I undertook this task as Rogue Quest 1 for David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course. The Rogue character class that I’ve adopted focuses on content production with an emphasis on finding and releasing or untrapping “open” content to allow for reuse and remix. I have only theoretical experience with remixing OER, and so it is fitting that I begin at experience level 1.

–>

Reuse/Remix Estimates

As I purview each of seven different OER projects I will give each collection a reuse/remix value rating based on my initial impressions and observations. These estimates may change as I move forward to release, reuse, or remix some of these OER.

My reuse/remix rating is a scale of 1 – 5, where “1″ is extremely difficult or low value, and “5″ is extremely easy or high value, referring to the act of taking CC content and reusing or remixing it on a separate server. To produce these ratings I consider:

• technical openness of media (e.g. Java applet vs Javascript)
• quality of source
• variety of media sources
• semantic/standard structure (e.g. HTML tables vs semantically-correct XHTML; IMS)
• CC license compatibility
• hosted tools and support for remix

I expect to address the why of reuse and remix of OER in another post and catalogue some of the key benefits.

UK Open University’s OpenLearn

Though constructed in Moodle LMS, the UK Open University’s OpenLearn is less like a “walled garden” for OER and more like a playground. It takes advatange of some of Moodle’s learning tools and features and customizability, and content is of immediate to use to anyone else using Moodle.

The project’s LabSpace site is specifically design to encourage educators to “collaborate with others and publish new versions of [UK Open University] learning materials to share with the world.” I was nearly distracted by the ability to “join this unit”–identifying myself as willing to engage in a self-organizing learning community.

I began by checking out Start Writing Fiction. I’ve had the bad fortune of reading some particularly bad fiction this holiday season, and recognized how freeing this OER might benefit all mankind. In each OER the “Versions” block includes “Upload this unit” and “Make a copy for revising”–presumably on the LabSpace web site. Is this custom block’s source code available?

Another useful custom block is “Alternative Formats”, which provides versions of the entier OER including print (HTML), XML, RSS, OU XML, IMS, Common Cartridge, Plain Zip, Moodle Backup. I looked at Print and saw the whole unit in one file. I grabbed the URL (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/file.php/2861/formats/print.htm) so I could test this with Send To Wiki later. I also grabbed an IMS package so I could to try fitting it into other “IMS-compatible” systems, such as the the foppish Bb Vista.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

OLI is like a museum: you can get in and see some fabulous artifacts, but don’t plan on taking any out as a souvenir … without some serious pre-planning.

I recently reviewed OLI’s project on this web site, so let’s cut to the chase:

OLI’s OER content is a mix of non-semantic HTML and media, usually SWFs. The HTML pages are all generated from what looks to be a Java Servlet using Javascript to set cookies and carry the “context”, or unique identifier. This will prevent any normal “spider” software from loading all the pages automatically (they would ignore the passed variables and just re-download the same “page” over and over), inhibiting the download of an entire “course” as a single collection. The passed context appears to be arbitrary; at any rate, it’s not predictive, so if we want to automatically download the content we will have to do so based on spidered links, and will have to rename links and files as we go (Nate Snapp suggested I just use a PERL script in cURL. It seems obvious to me to use the [non-semantic] context IDs as the file name, so page?context=b487c83c80020c69016e6ce63813c727 simply becomes page_b487c83c80020c69016e6ce63813c727.html)

Because there are currently no ways to download an entire package for remix, I intend to ask the OLI warden when the OERs are up for parole, if ever. Of course I’ll phrase it more nicely.

MIT OpenCourseWare

I knew I was not the first to traverse this part of town, so I needed to make sure my target was something of a challenge. Thanks to a list of audio/video-enhanced MIT ocw I was able to find a worthy mark. Linear Algebra contains video lectures and interactive Java applets, presumably already of the lowest usable granularity. Anytime I see the TM Java I want to call it a day. But it will be worth investigating how these applets might be found and extracted for localized reuse, if at all.

Looking a little deeper into the course I found several paths to other course media, and was pleased that videos were available as MP4–most of the early MIT OCW media I’ve seen is in RM format.

Though the media and formats in MIT OCW may vary from course to course, the OCW structure of each is reliable and learnable, making traversing the resources as potential remix “maps” feasible.

As far as extracting the OER from the host, this should be no problem: the course provides a zip file which contains all the course except audio and video files. If I recall, this is even in an IMS package of some flavor. The question will be, once the ZIP is free, what will it contain? And how can it be reused?

webcast.berkeley

Webcast.berkeley is UC Berkeley’s multimedia forray into OER. Strangely, at the bottom of the page I saw Copyright 2002-2009, Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved but maybe that’s just for the web page design, which I admit is striking.

Courses are navigated through semester; I chose History 4A – The Ancient Mediterranean World, which contained MP3s of nearly all Isabelle Pafford’s lectures from Fall 2007. I noticed a podcast RSS feed, which I grabbed: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/rss/course-archive.php?seriesid=1906978476 — opening this in a podcast-ready media player, like iTunes, is one rapid method of extracting all the media files for reuse.

There is some video on the site (e.g. ASTRO C10), some of it SWF, some of it streaming RealMedia, which I still haven’t found a suitable codec for on Ubuntu (comment if YOU have). As far as the streaming video goes it is possible, of course, to capture this onto your hard drive with desktop software. However…

I was nagged by the fact that the only licensing info directly on this page was still © All Rights Reserved, so I took a detour and go to the bottom of things. A quarter of a way down the page under Policies we find the actual licensing details:

Beginning in 2007, the default license attached to media recordings for distribution is Creative Commons – non-commercial, attribution, no derivatives (CC2.5 license).

This showed that the Ancient Mediterranean course that I had begun looking at was still ©. Also, the ND was unexpected and puts an entirely different spin on things, eliminating the option of remixing altogether, and thereby reducing my Reuse/Remix rating by a full point. Ben Hubbard of the webcast.berkeley project noted in the comments that the CC license info on all OER published after 2007 is featured prominently at the top of the page, and h.264 video is available via RSS feeds.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere

Stanford School of Engineering‘s CC By license was the first thing I noticed, and offers just a bit more freedom for remix/reuse.

I’d never been to the SEE site before, and I chose from a list of SEE’s more “popular” courses: Oussama Khatib’s Artificial Intelligence | Introduction to Robotics. Scrolling through the first page I found a link to “Download Zipped Course Materials”. The ZIP file did not have an IMS manifest, which is a minor disappointment, but it was a self-contained web site with hyperlinks back to media files served only on the SEE web site.

I took a look at the media files found under Lectures, provided as streaming video as well as the following formats: YouTube, iTunes, Vyew (which actually facilitates compiling and downloading the videos), WMV Torrent, and MP4 Torrent.

Note that many of these videos aren’t actually stored on the SEE web site, and yet they haven’t sacrificed reuse/remix by not making MP4/WMV formats available. Instead they made a brilliant choice: Torrent to facilitate and distribute the server load of these videos. (Based on the speed of delivery of the YouTube version I highly recommend downloading the files, which facilitates localized reuse and remix.)

Open Yale Courses

Reuse/Remix Estimate: 3.5 – Easy. Fair captured content, delivered for reuse, easy to extract as a package, but some remix limitations from license.
License: CC By-NC-SA
Media Types: HTML, XML, MP3, FLV, MOV, PDF, (IMS ZIP)
Though I’d visited Open Yale Courses before I hadn’t deeply investigated the media or packages. My impression was that this project’s results are very much like MIT OCW–a “Polaroid” version of the on-ground class. I checked out a couple of courses before settling on the featured course and favorite author ENGL 220 Milton.

Milton, like the other Open Yale Courses I checked out, is primarily a collection of media files with some PDF notes. Though no feeds are available, all media files are listed under Downloads, making it simple to grab all the MP3s or MOVs at once with a Firefox add-on like FlashGot or Down Them All. The rest of the course is available as a downloadable ZIP files featuring HTML and media structured by an IMS manifest. Hyperlinks to audio files point to the Yale server, but I expect some search and replace can link them to the local copy I just finished downloading.

Rice Connexions

This OER project’s site is similar in many ways to the UK Open University’s LabSpace, providing not only packaged content but also resources and tools to facilitate reuse, remixing, and republishing of OER. “Feel free,” the candy store clerk says, “to help yourself. Take some for your friends. Do you want to help me make taffy?”

I first stumbled on Places in Egypt, but became moderately uneasy when I was whisked away to a separate, domained web site called Travelers in the Middle East Archive. This was not quite what I’d expected, but I explored and discovered CC-licensed photos, illustrations, and enhanced images, as well as several e-texts, for instance The Nile : notes for travellers in Egypt in both HTML and XML. Connexions is far deeper than I had fathomed.

Going back to Connexions I next browsed by subjects, into Arts, and found Musical Travels for Children, which used an e-text with images of sheet music and MIDIs(!) within the Connexions standard framework. Musical Travels also presented the text as a PDF and as a ZIP “multimedia” package–very useful for local reuse/remix.

I took a moment to learn about Connexion’s homegrown XML schema, CNXML, a semantic markup language “for education” parsed (probably on the backend) to produce content, similar, I’m hypothesizing, to the way the UK Open University’s OpenLearn project is stored and generated. Connexions provides several tutorials on writing and using CNXML, though it’s not immediately clear how this is useful to the general-use public. (is CNXML usage required for user contributed uploads?)

As I headed back to check a third OER on Connexions, I noticed a hyperlink to the metadata for each resource, which cued me into their unique search system. I used that search system this time, and came across a number of interesting “modules”–short, tutorial- or lecture-like OERs that are typically HTML or PDF with hyperlinks to other subjects on connexions. In some instances I could not immediately determine where one module began and another ended. One can add modules to a “lens”, but it’s not apparent whether or not one can then download a “package” based on lenses.

Intrigued by the Connexions search engine’s options, I next searched based on popularity, and found music OER at the top of the list, though I could not immediately determine how that metadata was stored, or if there was public access to any of it.

Though the media use may vary from OER to OER, and the diverse organizational structures and interfaces may inhibit reuse for novices, the markup and accessibility of the content allow for great potential reuses, and the Connexions system is bolstered by the potential impact of the fostered user input and folksonomies that may result.

Having some experience examining both projects prior to this review, I brought in the following generalized opinions:

• MIT: broad, but shallow -many courses with marginal amount of content and activities
• OLI: deep, but narrow – few courses with significant content and activities constructed for learning

The motivation for these directions seems clear: MIT OCW seeks to reinforce itself by providing semi-useful, translucent access to content from each and every existing course. OLI seeks to define itself as a provider of in-depth, quality, online learning experiences. UNESCO’s OER Wiki describes the two projects as follows:

• OLI “adds instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence”
• MIT’s OCWs “convey the parameters of the course’s subject matter and pedagogy, ideally representing a substantially complete set of all the materials used in the course”

MIT’s French 1

French 1 from MIT OCW is comprised primarily of a syllabus, calendar, readings list, and assignments list based on the textbook Parallèles–a textbook that the syllabus almost fails to mention. the navigation is find and click, but simple enough to learn and use.

The syllabus reflects the fact that this is an existing course that has been “photocopied” for the MIT OCW project–instructions and expectations are restricted to registered students. For instance, it references the MIT Language Learning and Resource Center — a resource unavailable to distance students.

The course site provides PDFs of instructions for in-class activities. Otherwise assignments simply walk learner through textbook activities. Online resources are tacked on to the end almost decontextualized from real learning patterns.

As I opened separate pages for the materials, I wondered, why not combine assignments with readings into calendar as one big course guide? There seems to be no usability rationale for current architecture, except that it fits a single MIT OCW template.

You can download (presumably all) course materials; each index page of PDFs or other content features the CC By-NC-SA license.

OLI’s Elementary French 1 Online

OLI’s French 1 course’s subtitle, “Open and Free: Jan – Jun 09″, immediately reinforces OLI’s assertion that these are full courses to be taught by instructors, or taken by students. The content confirms that this is a complete online learning experience: the structure provides enhanced linear navigation using a combination of tabs and in-page hyperlinks. I found the navigation is somewhat similar to Moodle‘s and I wondered if it may have been based on this LMS originally. Aside from a couple broken links, the content itself seems to be fully-fleshed out learning materials, richly media-enhanced with no textbook needed. The content pages include text, images, and video with inline Flash-based q&a activities for self-learning.

Like the MIT course, OLI’s French 1 included a number of external online learning resources, however these came in context at the beginning of the course, and thus I was more inclined to click on several to investigate how they might enhance what was to come.

There does not seem to be a way to easily download all course materials at once, though they are clearly marked CC By-NC-SA on each page. This brought me to a question re. the Flash files: if I download the SWFs and crack them, essentially converting them to FLAs, is that acceptable use under the applied CC By-NC-SA license? Presumably yes, as the source code is inseparable from the finished product.

MIT’s Logic 1

MIT OCW’s Logic 1 course utilizes a web site architecture that is very similar to French 1, ensuring that user learnability of the web system is high. In addition to the basics of syllabus, calendar, and readings this course provides PDFs of lecture notes, which provide surprisingly good, text-book like information and examples. Indeed, I read through several of these and got at least the “feel” for the course.

OLI’s Logic and Proofs

As a user trained to recognize shifts in my scent of information, the first thing I noticed in Logic and Proofs is that this course site’s navigation system was inconsistent with the French 1 navigation system. This is not to say that the alternative navigation is illogical, only that the change hurts my head.

This course features introductory movies that orient the learners to the subject, with a media-enhanced transcript for alternate learning styles. A note on my personal preference: for a subject like this, I prefer text with images over video.

The main content of the course is primarily text, but notably enhanced with relevant learning comprehension and self-assessment questions that open in new window (they didn’t in French) with a separate look. Because of this, Logic seems to be quilted together from 2 different systems.

I have to say that symbolic logic has always captivated me, and while the MIT OCW Logic course intrigued me, the completeness and linearity of the content in the OLI course kept me interested and engaged. As I was indulging in one activity I thought, “I should be getting college credit for this!” Upon investigating this impulse I found that not only does OLI provide instructions for instructors and learners, it provides a means by which students can use the OLI web site to receive credit through their home institution. Talk about mashing up your education. Brilliant!

MIT’s Paradox and Infinity

Similar structure to previous MIT OCW courses–enough so that I see a very predictable pattern here. Readings refer to a standard textbook and (usually “closed”–few available online) articles, as well as problem sets — PDF available for self-challenge (however, notably absent is any electronically mediated method of receiving feedback–automated, community-based, or otherwise).

Interestingly, the course site provides hyperlinks to (discounted) purchase via Amazon.com; does MIT get a cut as a way to offset production costs?

OLI’s Physics With the Andes Workbench

OLI Physics features similar navigation and structure to Logic 1, which is unfortunate as I believe OLI’s French 1 had the most modern and intuitive nav system so far. This OLI course is highly activity-based; lesson information (primarily text, but some video) is immediately taken up into “Learn by Doing” activities use Andes tutor software, available for download and installation on Windows (I couldn’t get it running on Ubuntu through WINE).

Again, I found elements of other OLI courses: complete content, linear construction, self-learning activities and assessments. I am not overstating my impression when for a fleeting moment I thought about quitting my job and returning to student life; I am envious of this and future generation of students who can make their own schedules with flexibility provided by the Internet, and I regret to admit I probably got away with a lot simply by exchanging seat time for credit. If personal responsibility is adhered to, the accountability and outcomes of online learning may be higher, and achieved more efficiently.

Aircraft Systems Engineering

MIT OCW’s Aircraft Systems Engineering course site follows the structural pattern of the other MIT OCW courses (syllabus, calendar, readings, etc), with one notable enhancement: video of class lectures. Listed under lecture notes, the video components make this the most compelling MIT OCW course reviewed so far. Fairly rough Real Media video of in-class guest lectures by experts in the field are provided with PDFs of lecture slides, and MP3s. On Ubuntu I couldn’t locate the RM codec I needed to view the video, but did give the audio files a listen, and these were high enough quality to download and bring on bus rides or road trips. Combined with the slides this makes an interesting, remixable OER.

Prior to embarking on this particular task I had generalized these two OCW projects as being about shallow breadth (MIT OCW) or narrow depth (OLI). My reviews supported this earlier generalization if the primary quality objective is prêt-à-porter OER. With respect to learner value I considered an additional analogy: these 3 MIT OCW are like Polaroid snapshots of authentic MIT courses, scanned in and uploaded to bear the MIT brand; these 3 Carnegie Mellon OLI are more akin to planned, staged, shot, enhanced, and sequenced for online learning, and specifically created to define the OLI project (not the other way around).

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.

My review will be a little different from John and Ben Krutsch’s review, as I almost immediately set about wiping the Xandros Linux operating system (OS) and installed Ubuntu Linux, which I am using on several other computers.

Specs of EeePC 900

Review

The ASUS EeePC 900 is a compact, fairly light, surprisingly powerful notebook that will suit the needs of nearly any mobile dekstop computing user, providing they have good manual dexterity and eyesight.

Strengths:

• Small width and depth
• Good resolution for the size (1024 x 600)
• Sufficient USB ports (3) & SD card slot
• VGA video out
• Fairly lightweight
• Fast boot up (< 1min) and application starts
• No moving hard drive to farm
• Bright screen in normal, indoor lighting

Weaknesses:

• Average height
• Small screen requires good vision (disclaimer: my colleague John Krutsch has a visual impairment but did not complain about the readability of the screen size)
• Keyboard is a little awkward and uncomfortable for my hands
• Not as lightweight as I’d expected
• Limited storage space (I’ve set aside the 16gb 2nd memory for my storage space.
• Achromatic chassis may be boring to some
• No Bluetooth or WAN

It’s fair to say I have high expectations for laptops/notebooks. I’ve owned half-a-dozen different brands of laptops (Panasonic, Dell, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Lenovo, Texas Instruments/Acer), and so far my favorites have been Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Dell, in that order. In fact, I now own two Lenovos which I use 90% of the time—a Thinkpad T60 for my “desktop replacement” with a docking station, and a Thinkpad x60s as my writing notebook.

Because the EeePC was predicted to replace my Thinkpad x60s in my workflow I reviewed the EeePC in comparison. It’s important to keep in mind that the EeePC costs three times less than the Thinkpad x60s, and ASUS certainly didn’t intend for it to be a competitor of these higher-end laptops. I run Ubuntu 8.4 on my Thinkpad, and for the basic word processing and Web/Internet apps I used there is very little noticeable advantage to the Thinkpad in terms of speed, which is a strong mark for the EeePC.

The battery life of my charged EeePC was labeled at approximately 6 hours, though I will update this information tonight after I let it run down.

Obviously the Thinkpad has a larger screen and a full-size keyboard, and so it wins there hands down—by comparison, typing on the EeePC was painful, though the more I type with it the easier it becomes.. What really startled me upon comparison was how insignificant the weight difference was between the EeePC 900 and the Thinkpad x60s—the Thinkpad was a mere 6 oz heavier—not enough to really notice.

So while the EeePC is a compact tool of considerable computing power at an unbeatable price, it’s small size can be weighed as a disadvantage in terms of screen and keyboard usability. For my purposes, it’s not significantly lighter or more convenient than my Thinkpad x60s, and so to facilitate my writing work I will probably stick with the latter. I expect the EeePC to be very convenient, however, to keep in my office as a highly portable, on-demand notebook for toting around campus to meetings and appointments.

Applications for E-Learning

The most prominent application for learning with EeePCs comes from their low pricetag. At ~$400 USD I could imagine these being standard equipment for jr. high or high school students. If my son’s school had an established plan for integrating use of notebook computers into the daily curriculum, I would have no problem shelling out the money for one of these. Presuming that these could be used for at least 2 years, probably 3-4 if any memory expansions become available, the bang-for-the-buck potential is high.

The Xandros and the Ubuntu distributions come with Firefox for the Web, OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, and Ubuntu comes with GIMP for image editing–this open source suite alone provides users with significant opportunities to learn and create right out of the box.

Collaboration or other connected learning opportunities are less apparent, but I think it’s worth considering further, even to the point that ed tech bloggers come up with a “best practices” list of ways to support engaged learning through these and other laptops (something the OLPC focuses on with Sugar).

17. Use electronic flash cards (p 184). (Coincidentally, @KenWoodward and I are working on providing an extremely reusable flash cards app for both desktop Web browsers and handheld devices.)
18. Drag-and-drop activities for self-assessment within a lesson (p 194).
19. Use pre- and post-assessments to demonstrate the value of the e-learning (p 205).
20. Provide flowchart(s) to illustrate processes (p 216). (I’ve found these are easy to create in most spreadsheet programs.)
21. As part of prototyping and design, write a learner scenario to describe possible interactions with e-learning (p 221).
22. Tap into learners’ “emotional brain” with personalized learning models (Concrete experience; Reflective observation; Abstract hypothesis; Active testing) (p 226). (This model is similar to Stevick’s Observe – Span – Do, which I’ve found to be effective in language learning.)
23. Use content templates to rapidly turn out lesson pages with a consistent look and feel (p 228; p 232).
24. Use concept maps and causal loops for navigation as an alternative to linear navigation for complex concepts (p 240). (I do recall some early studies of hypertextual learning suggested that non-linear navigation is risky at best.)
25. Embed hyperlinks to glossary entries within the lesson content (p 249).
26. Provide a printable summary of lesson content as a study aid (p 265).
27. Develop a virtual campus to help wholly distance learners orient themselves and feel connected (p 287).
28. Use visuals to show relationships between course concepts (p 291).
29. Slow down or speed up motion to demonstrate complex physical skills (p 301).
30. Create an interactive, multidimensional timeline for subjects such as history that weave events in places and times (p 308).
31. Use still and interactive graphics for complex or obscure physical concepts (e.g. atoms, cells, galaxies, tidal pools) (p 312; 315; 318; 321; 324).

These 31 ideas are the choicest out of Shank’s 95+ picks. Note that I’ve written 95+; Shank explains at the end that there are more than 95 ideas in this book, despite the title. She suggests that the element of surprise can help learning along, yet at the same time she notes that she herself wouldn’t have noticed, and the book doesn’t even number the ideas so that you could know there were more than 95. Really, who’s going to be keeping count in their head?

Length and those minor complaints aside, I recommend this book to instructional designers or technology-minded teachers, if only to see the screen-shots illustrating the most useful and innovative ideas.

I might correct myself on that last point to include “common sense” ideas that are of significant value; yet even so, I think I could edit Shank’s book down to simply 31 useful and noteworthy ideas for technology-enhanced teaching. My version would include just the following.

1. Provide a detailed, weekly study schedule (p 16).
2. Embed performance tips to direct study and discipline toward learner success (p 20).
3. Anonymous weekly surveys to collect formative feedback (p 31).
4. Have contingency plans in place for learning in the case of technology failure (p 39).
5. Explain discussion message protocols to keep students focused and comfortable in forums (p 78).
6. Let learners evaluate their own contributions to the course through online quizzes or surveys (p 82).
7. Use tables as graphical organizers to illustrate relationships between information or concepts (p 94).
8. Ask students to enter their answer and compare it to an expert’s response (p 101).
9. You mouse rollovers to show ancillary info, allowing students to learn more about topics or passages (p 105), or use collapsible layers for text or illustrations (p 244).
10. Share bookmarks to web sites online (p 112). (Surprisingly, del.icio.us or other online tools were not mentioned.)
11. Show an expert’s view of a question or issue surrounding a topic (p 118).
12. Use a table, or Word’s track changes for easy peer editing (p 132).
13. Moderate student chat rooms (p 142). (They recommend a “knowledgeable assistant”, but I say that’s the teacher’s job!)
14. Use word games, such as 5 summative words that start with the same vowel to reinforce concepts (p 161). (I like acrostics, such as are found in the Nintendo DS game, Brain Age 2.)
15. In synchronous lectures, let learners determine the order in which topics are presented (Gordon MacKenzie-style) (p 163).
16. Use games and puzzles to review (e.g. crosswords, fill-in-the-blank (p 180). (I recommend our GameGarten, aka The Play Station hosted by John Krutsch.)

I’ll stop at number 16 to give you the information in two manageable chunks. Chunking is one idea that I think is pretty useful in e-learning, though it is overlooked in The Online Learning Book. I’ll post the last 15 strong ideas on this blog tomorrow.