I ended up in an E-Mail discussion with the folks in the University of Michigan School of Information mailing list and ended up writing this little essay on Coursera – it sounded pretty good so I decided to keep it. It is just kind of a thought piece.
July 23, 2012
There is way too much hype around Coursera and what it means, portends, and how a meteor will strike the earth and cause all of higher education to have a thin dusting of Iridium, etc etc. We need to factor *all* that out.
Coursera is a way for us to share a tiny tiny fraction of our niftiest on-campus courses and faculty members to an extremely wide audience, nearly all of whom will never get to Ann Arbor, let alone be enrolled in the University of Michigan. Sharing what we know and do with the world for the betterment of the world is what we do and who we are and for me as you well know it is doubly what I do and who I am. Hence my work with Sakai, Moodle, Open.Michigan, the open textbooks I write, appenginelearn.com, pythonlearn.com, and every other venue that I can share with the world the things that I do.
Coursera is a wonderful piece of technology that is tuned to allow me to share my material with 35,000 students around the world and it works amazingly well. Me teaching a Coursera course is my *research* in how we can better use technology to get reasonable education in the hands of underserved people. This is a problem that the world must solve in the next 20 years and working with Coursera is the most exciting thing I have done in my career because I can almost touch that seemingly impossible future with the help of Coursera. And there are a bunch of researchers here at SI and the School of Ed that are with me every step of the way in trying to understand this new form and help improve it and evolve it.
Coursera is six classes at UM – it is not a sea-change. It is a grand experiment and one that in my opinion we are duty-bound to participate in to fulfill our mission and if I were not involved, I would be in grave pain because I would know that the future was being explored and I was not part of it.
Now after all that hyperbole, there are some caveats. It is early days. At this point in time, there is no way to achieve the same rigor (there is that word again) in my Coursera course that I achieve in SI502. Even if I put every single lecture and assignment of SI502 into Coursera – it would not be the same as SI502 because of the lack of rigor. Everything in a Coursera course must be scalable and rigor is hard to scale – especially when folks are learning very emergent skills that are cognitively challenging – it is too easy to just quit and walk away. Coursera works well when students strive to gain the knowledge and they fiercely want the knowledge. But in a class like SI502, a large number of students (at least for the first 5-6 weeks) really might be happier without the knowledge in SI502 and if it were a Coursera course they would quietly drop out or game the system to get some weak but passing grade and get the certificate.
So it turns out that *not* putting too much value on the Coursera certificates is an essential founding notion of what it takes to make a scalable course scale. What students get out of these courses is best correlated to whatever they put in – and there is no good measure for that.
But even with all its limitations, Coursera is far better than anything that came before it in to solve the use case of “teach the world”. Folks will find lots of flaws and those flaws are indeed there – but the best way to fix those flaws is to jump in and life with the flaws and let the solutions come to us as we gain experience.
These are notes we used to guide the two-person panel at the US Moodle Moot August 3, 2012.
Panelists: Dr. Chuck Severance and Phil Hill
Moderator: Brad Schleicher
From the Program:
The future of Moodle is inextricably linked to the future evolution of the LMS. Recent changes in social app adoption, LMS business models, OER licensing, and the ongoing evolution of LMS usage are some of the factors influencing the future. What does Moodle, organizations using Moodle, and teachers need to consider to adapt successfully to this future?
Agenda:
• Quick introduction from Andrew Roderick, putting program in his words as well as short bio description of Chuck and Phil (2 minutes)
• Description of panel, rules (2 minutes)
• Phil introduces Chuck from his perspective (2 minutes?)
• Chuck introduces Phil from his perspective (2 minutes?)
• Brad introduces ground rules, then asks first question (2 minutes)
• Chuck and Phil question each other, PTI style (20 – 30 minutes)
• Audience questions filter in, including questioning of audience (15 – 20 minutes)
Rules:
• Each panelist question will lead to a ~60 second response from the other panelist, following by ~15 second reaction from questioner.
• The panelists will alternate asking the questions.
• Interruptions and challenges are allowed and encouraged.
• No speechmaking through questions.
• The moderator will actively manage the discussion and push the discussion forward.
• The audience can veto the moderator and indicate discussions that should be extended or re-directed.
• We will use hashtags to encourage audience input and questions.
Initial questions listed below. It is always better to go in depth on a particular aspect of a topic than to try to cover an entire subject in a short time span.
1) What is surprising in the last year in terms for the nature of the market? (both panelists will have 60 seconds to respond to this question from the moderator, with 15 second reflections each)
2) If we came back in five years how will LMS’s be different? UI? Market penetration?
3) What will be the story about open source LMS circa 2000 – 2012 if written in 5 years?
4) Has the LMS market fundamentally changed as you allege? If so, what are the drivers that are causing real changes to a market that has been fairly stagnant or stable for the past decade?
5) Does it matter? Was the LMS movement a short-term phemomenom that has almost run its course? Do teachers really use the LMS in an engaged way or is it just a tool of administrative control?
6) Who stands the most to gain and the most to lose if the LMS market continues migration to a learning platform market? What are the best case and worst case scenarios that you see in regards to LMSs?
7) Has the LMS open source movement lost its purpose? Previously the narrative was Moodle and Sakai, while being high-quality, as also being the source of freedom – freedom from the proprietary LMS market and M&A activity. Blackboard in particular supports the vision of multiple learning platforms. Are Moodle and Sakai still solving problems that education markets need solved?
8) Why do none of the new MOOC entrants (Stanford, Coursera, Udacity, MITx, edX, connectivist MOOCs) use traditional LMS solutions? Does there focus on custom-development signal a change in the value of the LMS as it exists today?
9) Lore developed two versions of its learning platform in less than 12 months and less than $4M. Coursera developed its platform in less than 12 months and less than $4M. what does this rapid pace and low cost of development mean for the future of the LMS?
10) Are we just blowing smoke amongst over-caffeinated pundits? The SUNY Learning Network proposed the rough equivalent of a learning platform based on patching together tools within a Learning Management Operating System in 2005 / 2006. That effort did not lead to changes in the LMS. Why do you / we think the situation is different?
11) Recently Jeff Young of the Chronicle wrote an article analyzing the Coursera contract with the University of Michigan based on a FOIA request. Given the role of being “open”, should these new delivery models such as MOOC be transparent and open in their potential business models and revenue considerations? Did Jeff perform a service to education or was he muck-racking?
12) What about teaching practices? Is the MOOC the ultimate flipped classroom? Or is it yet another type of drill and kill? We will discuss some of the methods we have used to engage learners. Will we change the definition of what is a good or successful teacher? Will teachers be more like talk-show hosts? And, if so, will the reward system be altered for those who are skilled in such environments? What are the options for those teachers who have difficulty teaching more than 25 students.
13) Who will the real winners and losers be if the MOOCs achieve wide dispersion?
14) How will we know when a MOOC is financially successful? What business plans make a massive open online course (MOOC) viable? Coursera and Udacity are already suggesting many different types of business models. Some involve companies sponsor courses, tuition small fees, membership, secure assessment fees, selling courses to community colleges, fees for certificates of completion, loss leader courses, paid advertisements, and pay as you go models.
15) How do all of these changes affect educational institutions? What do they need to do to prepare from and benefit from the future of LMS and learning platforms?
16) What will be the impact to students from all of the ed tech market changes? Will they benefit overall, or are we looking at clever ways for venture capitalists and private equity investors to benefit from a public movement?
Can you provide us with guidelines on when it is ok to use wikipedia as an authoritative source for academic writing? There is an active discussion in the peer review forum with no hope of any agreement.
At the risk of being flamed from 1000 directions – here is my answer and my policy.
For the writing in this class – Wikipedia is perfectly fine. For things that are relatively technical or scientific and broadly understood, WIkipedia is as good a reference as anything else. Wikipedia’s weaknesses are in emerging areas where researchers are trying to define the space and using Wikipedia to try to short-circuit the knowledge building process. Wikipedia is also very very weak when there are some external “stakes” involved as seen in the “Paul Ryan” Wikipedia edits/wars.
So there is not a blanket good/bad here – all references need to be chosen with an eye to their credibility and suitability for purpose. Given the nature of this course I would expect that most Wikipedia references would be perfectly fine. But if perhaps someone is making a contentious point and using a Wikipedia page to support their position – it might be weak.
For example, if we were fiercely debating the merits of using Wikipedia as a reference source and cited a Wikipedia page to support our position – that would be kind of weak :)
So any argument regarding the appropriateness of a reference needs to focus on the reference itself and not the blanket fact that it comes from Wikipedia.
Before we could leave, I had to run down to Ann Arbor for an hour and then come back and pick Brent up. On the way to Ann Arbor, my right rear tire blew out. In my dress clothes, I quickly hopped out and switched to the spare losing abut 10 minutes. But the spare was low so I carefully drove to a gas station to fill it up. But the little valve stem cover would not come off – so I had to get a pliers to fill the spare up to 60 pounds. Using the spare, I went to Ann Arbor and then back to Lansing where I sat at Belle Tire and replaced two tires where they informed me that my right front bering has a little play. Drat – I just had them replaced a few months back – the new ones must be bad. But I needed to get them replaced under warranty at the place I had them installed – but I did not have time for that – so we will do the trip with a little bearing noise. We will see how that progresses.
With all the confusion, we finally got on the road at 4PM and made it to Chicago at about 7PM. Checked into the hotel and decided to go to the Kingston Mines for some Blues – we arrived about an hour early so we had some food and played video games. We stayed for three hours and watched two bands and then back to the hotel.
Today I have my office hours at 10AM at the Starbucks in Palmer House and then on the road we go. It looks like we are going south down I-57 towards Memphis and Beal Street as our next destination. It looks like this is going to be a music-themed trip rather than a nature themed trip.
Where he suggests that the open educational resource (OER) movement is losing its impetus because of large-scale open-enrollment courses from Coursera and elsewhere are getting all the attention and that OER needs a clear and visible common goal to rally the community. His goal is to have several community colleges produce and promote a degree program by 2014 where every textbook is free/open.
I’ve been thinking about what’s next for OER… With the current set of MOOCs – which aren’t even open – grabbing attention away from the real movement, we need an exciting idea to get behind. Something that can inspire another decade of work across the nation and around the world. (When was the last time you heard about a new OpenCourseWare initiative launching in the US? When was the last time you personally thought of OCW as being really innovative?) We need something that can capture the imagination, something that can inspire both faculty and institutional leaders, something that will bring another 100 US post-secondary schools into the open education movement. Most of all, we need something that will significantly bless the lives of millions of students, providing them access to educational opportunities that can radically transform their lives for good.
Please read David’s entire post before continuing here. I want to make sure you read his post before you read my reaction/rant…
My Comment – Warning – somewhat ranty
Wow. A couple of points of of critique and then a suggestion. (a) It is ironic to hear the world’s pioneer in the idea of adding the dimension of “open/free enrollment” into our collective thinking back in 2007 http://chronicle.com/article/When-Professors-Print-Their/114058/ to make the statement in 2012 that courses providing “open enrollment” are not worthy to use the word “open” in any way to describe themselves. Or put another way – according to you, no one can use the word “open” to describe an activity unless they are using a remix-able CC license. (b) Large-scale open enrollment courses are and will drive the creation of OER/re-mixable course materials. At Michigan, every Coursera instructor works closely with Open.Michigan to make their materials as open and reusable as possible. We do copyright clearance and Open.Michigan actively helps instructors find alternate open resources to use in their courses so that their resulting materials can be as open as practical without compromising the educational outcomes of the course. Each Coursera course has a corresponding Open.Michigan web site where re-mixable materials can be downloaded when practical. At Michigan investment in supporting professor activity in Coursera is increasing investment in Open Michigan’s materials, capabilities, staff and importance to the university. Coursera is causing the creation of new OER materials at Michigan and wonderfully promoting those materials to over 200,000 students right at this very minute. Many of the students in my class *are* teachers curious how to teach my material – I actively encourage them to take and remix my CC-BY slides and make use of my openly available supplementary video materials through references to YouTube and Vimeo on the slides. They can *completely* remix my course if they so choose. Coursera is a content player – it does not decide the copyright of the materials that it plays. My *next* Coursera course will be based on open slides, open videos, and an open textbook.
David, there are 2-3 blog posts per day that mis-understand Coursera and see it as some kind of “enemy”. Life is to short to correct all the mis-understandings. But I figure I should comment to you since in my mind what we are doing in Coursera traces its seminal founding moment back to you back in December 2007. For me, Coursera is an amazingly effective execution of your idea from 2007. I personally loved the idea in 2007 and Coursera is my chance to honor your ideas and innovation. At over a million students we have come a long way from the 50 students in your course back 2007. So while I may not change your mind – I had to at least try. Enough of me defending Coursera – on to the larger mistake in your blog post…
A CC degree with only OER textbooks is not a particularly worthy or interesting grand challenge. There are lots of open textbooks – some may or may not be suitable. It would be pretty easy to do an all-OER CC degree – if folks tried to accomplish what you suggest in the timeframe you suggest – it would end up harming the OER movement in my opinion because it is easily done by compromising the educational outcomes of the degree or tailoring the degree to whatever textbooks are available. Accomplishing what you propose at the expense of educational outcomes would reinforce the mistaken notion that OER materials are somehow lower quality. Individual OER materials are *not* lower quality – we just don’t have high-quality OER materials in all subject areas.
The grand challenge that you *should* take on is to take this code – http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ and then take this code – http://cnx.org/ and fork them both and create a desktop authoring environment that allows authoring, import, export, and publishing to a wide variety of formats of augmented media-enhanced textbooks. In short make an open source / open standards version of iBooks Author – Oh yeah and fix the lame iBooks Author UI while you are at it. You need to fork SIGIL because they think EPUB is virtual paper and should never move beyond that. You need to fork cnx because they think that server-based authoring is sufficient – yuck! Actually the cnx format is likely a good start as the internal representation of the the desktop authoring environment – keep that and remain compatible with the CNX online authoring environment. Oh yeah – and Flat World Knowledge (and cousins) is also not a solution to the grand challenge because in search of a sustainable business model they are building a 99.4% open model and it turns out that the 0.6% matters. So there is your grand challenge. Empower authors. Remove the barriers to producing and remixing open content. If someone dropped a bunch-o-money in my lap – I would grab four grad students and do it – but it seems people want to fund me to advance the cause of open source and interoperable LMS’s these days rather than address the rate-limiting factors of the OER community – so this grand challenge falls to you or someone else.
My son Brent turned 21 this year so we decided that it was time to take a classic American summer road trip. Of course the tradition is to ride motorcycles all around the mid-west visiting places like the largest ball of twine. But since Brent is mildly handicapped (Cerebral Palsy) we need to do it in a car. I have adapted the “Dr. Chuck Mobile” – a 2001 Buick LeSabre (215,300 miles) with a left foot accelerator so he can share in the driving.
Here is a short video I made in 2005 just after Brent had recovered from a hip-augmentation surgery and we purchased a Polaris 90cc ATV so we could go out riding.
More recently he has been in several heavy punk/metal bands as the lead singer. I also made this terminally cute and a bit long video to play in the background at Brent’s high school graduation party.
On The Road Again…
So the idea of the road trip is to take two weeks and have absolutely no agenda. The road trip will start early on Tuesday August 14 where we will drive to Chicago and stay at the Palmer house, do an office hour for my Coursera course at the Palmer house, go to listen to some Blues, and then the next morning get up and drive out of Chicago and decide where to go next on the spur of the moment. We will program the destination into the GPS and off we will go pointed at the horizon.
It will be a classic vagabond road trip – we will sleep in Walmart parking lots, sleep in rest areas, take showers in truck stops, eat junk food or at diners and generally smell and look pretty bad – growing beards and wearing hats when our hair looks a mess. Brent calls it our “hobo trip”. Every few days we will spend a night in a hotel to clean up and get re-civilized and then back on the road we will go. Like any good road trip we will not stay at any destination for very long – anywhere from 4 hours to 24-hours and then back on the road we will go. A key element of a road trip is to be on the road – not stopped at one location or another. It is about wandering and being on the move looking for adventure.
We are consciously not doing any planning in terms of agenda and don’t even know when we will exactly come back other than when school starts at Lansing Community College. We will generally likely not go east to explore but we may go as far north as Calgary Canada, as far South as New Orleans, or as far west as Roswell New Mexico and Area 51. We just don’t know.
We will have Twitter and WiFi as we go and I will tweet and blog as we progress. I will ask the Twitterverse for help on things like “Where is a good blues bar in St. Louis?” (if we decide to go there). I have no idea if Brent will do any kind of public blog – he is not on Twitter (sheesh – kids these days).
I may have some office hours for my Coursera course in weird locations like Mount Rushmore or Omaha Nebraska. But I won’t know in advance even where I am going so folks will only find out at the last minute.
I would be glad to get some suggestions and help for how to survive such a road trip. How do I know where there are rest stops? Is there a book of all the truck stops that have showers? There must be a book or even better an app that tells you cool road-trip like places to visit that can use location services on my iPhone. I have this feeling that showers will be the most difficult thing to manage when we become hobos living on the road. Any general advice will be greatly appreciated as this is our first experimental road trip.
This is the Dr. Chuck Insider’s Guide to Ann Arbor for the upcoming IMS Meeting – August 6-9, 2012. I am really looking forward to you all coming to Ann Arbor. With a meeting in North Quad (where I have my office and teach) and hotels with a 1 block radius and plenty of great eating and fun within a short distance – it should be a meeting to remember. North Quad has a few nicknames to help in asking for directions: NQ and Quadworts are the most prevalent nicknames for the building.
Thanks to Matt Jones and Anthony Whyte for their help with this guide and thanks to Heidi S for all her help in setting up the meeting logistics.
For hotel and other details for the IMS meeting see the IMS web page.
We of course start with the most important thing of all – Karaoke. There are two box Karaoke within walking distance:
Blue Karaoke (Box)
404 W. Liberty St.
Friends Karaoke (Box)
621 Church St
This is a 10 minute walk diagonally across campus to the south east corner of campus.
Good Time Charley’s
1140 S University Ave
There’s club-style Karaoke from 10PM-2AM on Tuesday night.
WiFi and Coffee
University buildings have free WiFi with the SSID of MGuest – you might need a VPN for some ports but it should be super-fast, support tons of simultaneous connections (students are gone for the summer), and be reliable. Go ahead and run Apple’s Software Update during the meeting and watch the download speed.
The Starbucks at 222 South State (1/2 block south) has free Wifi. Search for “Espresso Royale Cafe” (a.k.a. ERC) if you want a less “franchised feel” for your coffee shop and free WiFi. Panera’s is at 777 North University is a block south.
Zingerman’s
Zingerman’s Deli
422 Detroit Street
Zingermann’s needs its own category. This may be the best deli in the world. There may be great deli’s in New York City – but Zingermanns is also very nice to you and the staff are always willing to talk to you or give you a sample. They make all their own bread. Insider trick – When they ask you if you want an old pickle or new pickle – say “both”. It is a four block walk (northwest) from NQ. It is near a terrific shopping center called Kerrytown. This is an event on Wednesday evening http://www.zingermansdeli.com/2012/06/pop-in-little-italy-in-kerrytown/
Bars
Ashley’s
338 South State Street
The best beer selection in Ann Arbor. Two blocks south of NQ. Ashley’s does Trivia on Mondays and it is pretty intense.
Arbor Brewing Company (a.k.a. ABC)
114 East Washington Street
Sidewalk dining if you get there early enough. Three blocks west of NQ.
Blue Tractor (Microbrewery)
207 East Washington Street
Grizzly Peak (Microbrewery)
120 W. Washington
Jolly Pumpkin (Microbrewery)
311 South Main Street
Dominick’s
812 Monroe Street
Dominik’s requires a nice walk to the south side of campus. But there is nothing like it on a warm summer’s evening.
Hole-In-The-Wall Restaurants
Jamaican Jerk Pit
314 S. Thayer
This is 1/2 block south of NQ. I would forgive you if you ate every meal here. When you leave – you might fly back just to eat here. My fav is the pork entree – go ahead and get spicy. I eat there so often I have a “Frequent Jerk” card. You can take it when you go so I get to 10 punches and free food more quickly.
Ray’s Red Hots
629 East University Avenue
This is a 10 minute walk diagonally across campus to the south east corner of campus. The cheese fries are the stuff of legend – don’t get chili – just cheese – trust me. If they wrote a fifth Lord of the Rings book – these cheese fries would be featured in the book for sure – they are that epic.
Blimpy Burger
551 South Division Street
This is a seven block walk from NQ – but the burgers are legendary. And they insist that you make your selections in the right order: (1) fried side items, (2) how many patties and what bun (3) additional items on the burger. Just watch the people ahead of you in line and you should be OK. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Listen to what they ask you and answer their question instead of blurting out your whole order. If you make a mistake they won’t punch you – they will just correct you. It is a mark of being a “honorary native Ann Arborite” when you can order at Blimpy Burger without being corrected. And yes you can open the pop and drink it while you are in line.
Tijo’s (Mexican)
401 East Liberty Street
About 2 blocks from NQ. We like the wet burrito. It is no longer technically a hole-in-the-wall – but before it was moved downtown, it was a hole-in-the wall – so it is still given the honorary hole-in-the-wall designation. They have an item called “Mount Nacheesmo” that is not on the menu and was featured in Man v. Food. If you eat one by yourself you get a picture on the wall.
Pizza
Pizza House
618 Church Street
Cottage Inn
512 E William St
Fancy Food
Main Street is the place for fancy food. Just Google Street View up and down. Legal Seafood, a fondue restaurant, fancy german food, fancy italian, too many to list. Here are a few you might miss and want to check out.
The Earle Restaurant
121 West Washington Street
Underground – dark, fancy and classy – nice place for dinner with some red wine.
Gandy Dancer
401 Depot Street
This is in an old train station and about 6 blocks north of NQ (not on Main Street). It is fine dining and where we take people being interviewed for lunch or dinner.
Blue Nile – Ethiopian Restaurant
221 East Washington Street
A unique Ann Arbor experience. Closed Mondays.
Interesting Collegey Things to Do
Pinball Pete’s
1214 South University Avenue
There are very few remaining places full of pinball machines. Pete’s is a throwback and in a basement. I prefer the one in East Lansing as it is darker and dingier – but the Ann Arbor Pete’s is a short diagonal walk through campus to the South U area.
IEEE Interview: Teaching the World – Daphne Koller and Coursera
In my August installment of my IEEE Computer magazine Computing Conversations column, I interview Daphne Koller, Stanford Computer Science professor and Coursera cofounder. The other cofounder of Coursera is Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor. This interview was filmed May 25, 2012 during a visit to Coursera headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
I think that it is particularly interesting that the Coursera, Udacity, and edX efforts all were created by people with Computer Science/Engineering backgrounds and in particular people with interests in Artificial Intelligence.
The trend toward opening up college courses while they are being taught started back in 2007 with David Wiley. Others like George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, and others increased the sizes of these open courses and explored different pedagogical approaches to the courses.
But in the Fall of 2011, three Stanford courses were opened to the world and they effectively took the idea of large-scale open courses and pushed it up to 11. With all three courses seeing an enrollment of over 100,000 students, it opened up the possibility of a whole new level of scale in terms of the number of students enrolled.
Once this new frontier was identified, people are moving quickly to explore the possibilities of large-scale open courses (some call these MOOCs). Coursera, Udacity, and edX were formed to move these amazing experiments more towards the mainstream by making technology available to more instructors, universities and students. Even though these efforts are still only a few months old – they are capturing a lot of mind share and they are quite successful already.
Who knows where these efforts will take us in 3-5 years?
Note: I am excited to be teaching a course in Coursera as part of the University of Michigan participation called Internet History, Technology, and Security that starts Monday July 23, 2012 (i.e. next Monday).
Dr. Severance teaches the online course “Internet History, Technology, and Security” using the Coursera teaching platform. His course starts July 23, 2012 and is free to all who want to register. The course has over 25,000 enrolled students. In this keynote, we will look at at the current trends in teaching and learning technology as well as look at technology and pedagogy behind the course, and behind Coursera in general. We will meet the Coursera founders as well as take a live behind-the-scenes look into the course as it is being taught including successes and challenges to date. Attendees are welcome to sign up and participate in the course prior to the keynote to make the discussion about the course even more interactive.
Date: August 10, 2012 – Wilmington, NC
Speaker: Dr. Charles Severance
Charles is a Clinical Associate Professor and teaches in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Charles is a founding faculty member of the Informatics Concentration undergraduate degree program at the University of Michigan. He also works for Blackboard as Sakai Chief Strategist. He also works with the IMS Global Learning Consortium promoting and developing standards for teaching and learning technology. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project.
It has been four months since I started working as a consultant for Blackboard in the role of Chief Sakai Strategist. With the annual Sakai Conference a month ago in Atlanta and Blackboard DevCon and BbWorld this past week in New Orleans, it seemed like a good time to give an update on things.
Cross-Platform Learning Object Repository – xpLor
Now that xpLor has been announced, I can further clarify why I joined Blackboard back in March. Back then I knew what you all now know. Blackboard (through MoodleRooms) is building a cross-platform Learning Object Repository that is planned to be deeply integrated into Learn, ANGEL, Moodle, Joule, and Sakai. For years, in my role as IMS LTI evangelist, I have been hoping and encouraging anyone to build a real LOR that made proper use of IMS Common Cartridge and IMS Learning Tools Interoperability.
It turns out that for the past two years, Dave Mills (founder of ANGEL Learning) has been quietly working on just such a product in his (then) role as the Chief Technology Officer at MoodleRooms. Dave had quietly re-assembled a number of the brilliant ex-ANGEL development team (Kellan, Mike, Scriby, etc) back together at MoodleRooms and when Blackboard acquired MoodleRooms everyone has stayed, and we are having a great time working together. I love it because I get to go to Indianapolis every few weeks and work with that team. It is just a 4-hour drive from my home so it is easy to get to Indy. When technical folks are having fun working together on fun stuff – it bodes really well for the future of any company.
The xpLor system uses real cloud technologies like Node.js, MongoDb, and elastic search. These are fun technologies to work with for a guy who has been deep in in the trenches of Java, multiple SQL variants, and Spring for the past 10 years.
As a quick history aside, many know me as “Dr. LTI” – but what is less well-known is that the original Common Cartridge evangelist before Jeff Kahn was none other than David Mills himself. Back in 2005-2006, Dave Mills was at ANGEL and used his leadership position to spearhead both the technical designs of IMS CC as well as make sure that it was rapidly implemented in ANGEL as the first implementation in a major LMS. Dave/ANGEL shipped IMS Common Cartridge import and export *before* the standard was complete. Here is a video from the Learning Impact in 2006:
Another history tidbit is that Ray Henderson is one of the initial inspirations for IMS Common Cartridge when he was at Pearson (before ANGEL and before Blackboard). Ray was at the (then secret) meeting in early 2005 where the words “Common Cartridge” were first uttered and Ray Henderson was the person who formally proposed the idea of a Common Cartridge specification in Summer 2005 at the Alt-I-Lab conference in Sheffield England. What is cool about all of this is that all of us have been working together for the past 8 years *regardless* of what company we have worked for. Our personal passion for standards and interoperability stays us with through any job change. And now we are all together at Blackboard. End of history aside – you get the picture that this has been brewing for a while.
The xpLor system is the exact system that I would have designed if I had the time to do it. It uses IMS CC and IMS LTI as its foundational architectural construct and everything is built around the fact that the LOR will interoperate and supplement LMS systems. It is the first LOR that will not try to replace LMS systems, but instead augment all LMS systems regardless of the vendor of those LMS systems through the use of standards to make the integration. In a sense it makes LMS-specific Learning Object Repositories pretty much obsolete. Dave Mills built the ANGEL Learning Object Repository (which is a fine product – but not cross platform) so he knows first hand (a) the right features to put into a LOR, (b) the features *not* to put into a LOR, and (c) the limitations of a single-vendor LOR in the marketplace.
If you saw Michael Chasen’s keynote at BbWorld – you saw a 10 minute demonstration of xpLor connected to Learn and then a single screen with a few clicks showing xpLor integrated into ANGEL, Joule, and Sakai.
If you came to the in-depth session hosted by Brent Mundy and David Mills later, you saw the longer demo done in ANGEL. For those of you well-versed in demo-ology, you would immediately assume that it meant that the ANGEL, Moodle, Joule, and Sakai integrations were fake or hand-constructed. That is absolutely not the case. Before BbWorld we had full and deep implementations of the xpLor integration API in all five platforms (Learn, Sakai, Moodle, Joule, and ANGEL) – the 10 minute demo could have been done with *every one* of those five LMS systems and it would have been as smooth as the Learn demo. I will be showing the Sakai implementation to folks at IMS, Michigan, Columbia, NYU, Rutgers, and others as quick as I can. I am not going to make a screen recording because it is not a final product and I still have a few things I need to tweak in Sakai and in the integration API before the product is finished – so I want don’t want things locked down too early. In terms of full disclosure, none of the integration code is in the core codebases of Sakai, ANGEL, Learn, Moodle, or Joule – as we need to do a little more work before we start the process of putting the code into those core code-bases.
But I repeat that what you saw of the demonstration of xpLor and Sakai, Moodle, Joule, ANGEL, and Learn was real, rich, working code that was working solidly and continues to work as we evolve the code bases towards Beta.
Oh yes and grades are already flowing back to the LMS through LTI 1.1 – the way I did it in Lessons is that I just made it auto-create GradeBook columns when grades started to flow. I made the instructor UI as simple as possible – I did the nomal things and made it as simple as possible. by the way – grades flow back to all of the LMS’s that are integrated with xpLor though LTI 1.1.
I could not be more excited than I am about xpLor and in a way I have spent more time since March working with xpLor than I have with Sakai because I wanted to make sure Sakai was an equal part of the xpLor roll-out this week. Now that BbWorld is done, I can get back to Sakai.
Sakai Presence on the BbWorld 2012 Trade Show Floor
I have been part of my first ever “Sakai” booth! I had a booth. I did demonstrations of xpLor and Sakai at the booth. I used the little badge scanner. I had a special Blackboard Open Source Services t-Shirt. I felt all grown up! We had a combined open source booth with Sakai, MoodleRooms, and NetSpot. It was so cool and in particular because I am getting to be really good friends with all the MoodleRooms folks and got to meet all the NetSpot folks. Phil, Lou, Martin, and Tom from MoodleRooms are the best mentors I could ever have. In a way, if you think about it, what I will hope to build would be something like “SakaiRooms” where we host Sakai in Blackboard’s hosting facilities around the world. I have no idea how long it will take to roll out such a service or if/when I will start working on it, but I will say that my focus in my role at Blackboard is to invest Blackboard resources in Sakai 2.9 and beyond to improve the overall quality of Sakai as my top priority.
But while I work on and invest Blackboard resources in Sakai 2.9, I am getting so much help and mentoring from all the folks at MoodleRooms. MoodleRooms has done a really nice job of how they deploy Moodle as a cloud service. It takes some pretty dang clever tricks to make a shared multi-tenant app server work. I don’t think that I will be able to pull off multi-tenant app servers for hosted Sakai, but I am learning all the tips and tricks that make MoodleRooms scalable and manageable and I can use many of the same techniques in my design of a hosted Sakai service that will greatly streamline management and deployment. Luckily since Learn is a Java application with similar limitations to Sakai, Blackboard’s hosting facilities are well-prepared to handle Java applications. By the time MoodleRooms is integrated, the hosting folks will have a really broadened skill set and bringing Sakai into the shared centers should be pretty smooth.
What is freakishly cool is the camaraderie between the folks working on Learn, ANGEL, Sakai, Moodle, Joule, and Engage (formerly edline). You would think that there would be some kind of edge or competition with six LMS systems in the same company. But that is not the case since there is only limited market overlap for the products. It might be a little confusing for sales people – but it absolutely *not* confusing for technical people – we all are having so much fun seeing different parts of the market. For me in Sakai, we had such a hard time penetrating the K12 market. If I work closely with the Engage folks – I can get features that I think are important into 20,000 K-12 customers through a simple upgrade. I cannot tell you how exciting this is for me as someone who wants to build technology that changes how we teach and learn.
Plans for Sakai CLE and OAE
The integration that I built for the Sakai CLE is basically an integration into Sakai 2.9’s Lessons (the software formerly known as LessonBuilder). Lessons is our place for hierarchical content, Common Cartridge Import, selective release and all the gooey goodness that defines content within an LMS. And now it has xpLor integration as well. Prior to BbWorld, I could not work with Chuck Hedrick and Eric Jeney of Rutgers on the implementation / Lessons integration. Now I can sit down with them in the next few weeks and get things nicely integrated into Lessons working with Eric and Chuck.
I don’t want to release the integration code yet because I still want to change the APIs a bit but once things are locked down, I will simply check the code into the trunk of LTI. The API code is only about 350 lines of additions to:
The patches are not yet in that code – but once things settle down – they will be. I doubt it will make it into Sakai 2.9.0 – perhaps 2.9.1. But since the patches are so localized they could easily go back to 2.8 or 2.9.0 for Beta use when I get the done. By the time all of the things I want to change are completed, it will likely touch a few more files and perhaps a bit of work in Lessons.
The xpLor folks are working up a Beta program and I am hoping to get at least five Sakai schools into the very first Beta and then as the Beta expands, perhaps make it available to more schools with a membership in the Sakai foundation. When you are making a real cloud service it needs be carefully tuned for scalability. No promises here – just telling you what I am hoping for. I will let folks know as this progresses.
While I am totally excited about the relationship between xpLor and the Sakai CLE, I am even more excited about how the xpLor can work with Sakai OAE. Throughout the OAE project there has been this tension between whether OAE should follow the path of being a “new” LMS and rewrite everything that is in Sakai CLE or should OAE focus on new ways of thinking about collaboration across teaching and research in education. The “hybrid mode” has been the compromise to broaden the scope of the OAE to get it feature-rich enough for production without requiring a full-on re-build of the traditional LMS functionality present in the CLE. But there is a bit of an impedance mis-match between the CLE and OAE in hybrid mode as each is architected to be the “top level organizer” of the entire experience.
The combination of OAE+xpLor will not suffer from this impedance mis-match. The xpLor system was designed from its core to *not* be the top-level organizer of the user experience. the xpLor system was designed to support *whatever* organizing principle that a particular LMS has produced. Lessons in CLE is one approach to organizing, activities in Moodle is another approach, while Content in Learn is another approach. OAE is still another approach to organization, workflow, authorization, navigation, etc. The xpLor design is intended to work with all of these approaches and fit in gently to all of them.
I don’t think that the xpLor will replace hybrid mode as the functionality in xpLor is simple, pretty and generic – almost Google-like in its UI designs. The xpLor approach is to stay simple and generic (like Google) and as such needs to work with more complex tools like Message Center or Samigo in Sakai CLE. Sometimes you want things that are simple and can be thrown around like widgets and other times you need something larger with more precise use cases. OAE+xpLor+hybrid will be a very nice combination.
As I have time, I will meet with some of the OAE stakeholders to give some in-depth demonstrations and begin the discussion. I would hope to have an OAE school in the first round of Beta testers. If I have time (sheesh), I may even start to develop a more rich integration of xpLor into OAE or I may find someone in the OAE world that can help me do it. Any work would have to be under NDA for a while until things with the API are more solid and officially released – but the code would eventually be open source and part of the core OAE code base. For me OAE is a lower priority than CLE 2.9 – but I am excited enough about xpLor that I would pull this up in the priority – at least to get the OAE conversation and thinking started.
Summary
It has been a *heck* of a four months. I am so glad that I can talk openly about xpLor. I have been hinting to all my friends in the Sakai community about “good things to come” and now I can talk about it and do demos and be more open – which is my nature. I feed off openness and I feed off sharing and learning from that sharing.
The culture at Blackboard is great. I am getting so much support from my friends at Learn, Engage, MoodleRooms, and the shared services teams. There is absolutely no resistance to standards and interoperability. I just don’t have enough hours in the day to work on all the fun things and move the cause of flexible choices in teaching and learning forward. I may need to be getting some help soon in order for me not to be the weakest link.
Oh yeah, and if you think this is all pretty exciting, remember that this is *just* the beginning. It is just the beginning. It is just the first four months. Hang on – this will be a fun ride.
