Rowin’s blog

Despite being a distributed organisation that frequently works with people across the UK and beyond, we’ve never looked very hard at running meetings and events online.  Environmental concerns, tightened budgets, and simple practicalities such as overly busy schedules or arranging work cover or childcare are issues we and those we work with regularly face, and so we felt that the time was long overdue for us to take our first steps in online conferencing.  We’ve been looking at various tools available with some interesting results, and we thought it would be useful to share them with you.

Our requirements

We were looking for something that would allow voice, text, file sharing, presentation abilities, with minimal support needed to set up and run it.  We were happy to use a paid-for service if it met all our requirements and wasn’t wildly expensive.  We tried three systems, and considered but rejected a fourth without trying it.

The one we looked at but didn’t try was FlashMeeting from the Open University.  Although this is a well respected and popular system, we were looking for something we could use for both internal and public events and the terms of use state that ‘your meetings will be recorded and reviewed and may be used in research publications in professional learning. Do NOT have confidential meetings on this research server!!!’, making this an unsuitable system for us to use.

We didn’t try Wimba, InstantPresenter, Media on Demand or WebEx as we felt that we’d found a good system for us.  We also didn’t try any VNC, IRC and VoIP combinations as we wanted a single system rather than trying to coordinate multiple tools with so much more potential for things to go wrong!

DimDim

The first one we tried was Dimdim.  This is open source, works on Window, Mac and Linux, and works directly in IE, Firefox and Safari (but sadly not Chrome) rather than requiring any installation.  It offers a range of presentation facilities, and ranges from free for up to 20 people, to $75 per month for 100 seat webinars.

We ran into a number of issues with our free trial tests.  The biggest issue was problems with audio and video, with audio cutting out if we had more than one video feed, and we had to find a workaround for getting Flash to recognise the onboard camera on Macs.  It offered the ability to record meetings, but recording can’t be paused and when new presenter takes over, the previous recording is stopped and overwritten.  There’s a neat widget for sending out invites (though again, it doesn’t work in Chrome), but the agenda didn’t seem to be carried through to the meeting room.  PollDaddy integration appealed to our resident widget lovers, but didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, and only the presenter was able to scroll embedded pages which caused problems reading them.  There were too many issues for us to be able to recommend it for trialing in a larger group.

Elluminate

Anyone who’s attended the JISC Online Conference or one of the many elearning webinars regularly on offer will have encountered Elluminate, so we were very optimistic that this would be a good option for us.  Again, we were using the free (vRoom) version, though there are various payment tiers available with vOffice for 20 users at $1536 a year and prices for larger group available on request.  Unfortunately one of our testers was completely unable to get into our vRoom on either Mac or PC, and others have had problems with permission settings and proxy settings giving some odd results in the past.  Despite our expectations and generally positive previous experiences, we felt that it didn’t meet our ‘works straight off’ requirement, and so kept looking.

Adobe Acrobat Connect

I’ve used Connect in its past incarnation as Macromedia Breeze and found it very easy to use and very good quality, so I was keen to see what my colleagues thought.  Our first attempt used the free ConnectNow Beta which is limited to three people, and we then bought a month trial for $62 to run a larger meeting with most of the CETIS staff; annual payments are also available for a lower overall cost.

We did have some initial problems with audio issues, but once everything settled down we were impressed with the quality of the sound and video, and the very pleasant interface.  It worked fine in Chrome, IE and Firefox, but the meeting couldn’t be launched in Safari and there were problems installing the required software in Linux, though it did run eventually.  The meeting administration interface for adding participants and scheduling meetings is far less elegant and intuitive than the actual meeting interface.  There are lots of nice little features, and the overall feeling from both our trial meetings was that this is a mature and stable system that is very pleasant to use.

There was however one major black mark against this system: very poor customer service when dealing with payments.  Buying one month’s access requires a credit card, which is then automatically debited each month until the arrangement is cancelled.  Unfortunately, actually cancelling this recurring payment is not an easy process, and Sharon spent several hours trying to do so online and following dead links on their website before finally learning that the only way to cancel these payments is by telephoning their customer services in the US.  Had we not had other meetings already arranged in Connect by the time we discovered this, this experience would almost certainly have made us continue our search for a suitable system.

Conclusions

We hold our monthly team calls in voice-only services such as Skype or PowWowNow, so we’re all very familiar with these types of virtual meetings.  I was surprised that quite a few of my colleagues felt less connected with the meeting when speaking because there wasn’t any feedback, but I think that’s something that people should be able to get used to fairly quickly.  On my part, I found being able to share slides and the ability to have mulitple webcam feeds really helped me to get much more from the session than I do from audio-only meetings, but that may depend on the individual participant.

A year’s subscription to the system we settled on costs less than it cost for me to travel to our most recent event, and far less than the cost of venue hire, catering, etc.  I’ll be using it for our next QTI WG meeting, and it’s definitely worth noting that this meeting would have been difficult to schedule without having an online option, and it would not have been possible to get everyone who can make the online meeting together for a face-to-face meeting.

General

JISC and the Centre for Recording Achievement recently published the final report from the Study on the role of eportfolios in formative and summative assessment practices.  The report includes 34 case studies and offers a thorough examination of this form of assessment.

General

A group of students have finally lost their case against plagiarism detection service Turnitin with the judgement that Turnitin does not breach students’ copyright by retaining copies of submitted essays.  In particular, The Chronicle reports that

the district-court judge said Turnitin’s actions fell under fair use, ruling that the company ‘makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works.’  He also said the new use ‘provides a substantial public benefit.’

While the reasoning is clear, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable about the tension between the undoubted benefits to be gained from Turnitin and the fact that, as a commercial company, Turnitin’s parent company iParadigms is undeniably profiting, albeit indirectly, from other people’s intellectual property.  However, institutions frequently claim IPR rights to their students’ work, and understandably see considerable benefits from requiring the submission of essays to Turnitin.

Plagiarism is undoubtedly a serious issue facing HE, but I think my biggest issue with this is the way in which so many institutions choose to use Turnitin exclusively as a tool to detect and evidence plagiarism.  There is an assumpation inherent in this approach that all students may attempt to cheat.  Retaining papers once they’ve been checked for plagiarism for adding to the database also suggests an assumption that students cannot be trusted not to pass their work on to others.

Other institutions take a more collaborative approach, allowing students to submit their work multiple times to Turnitin and using it as a teaching aid to help students avoid indirect plagiarism and learn how to better develop their essay writing and argumentation skills and understand their relationship to their research sources.  In this approach, all students receive a direct benefit from the software, profiting significantly as learners and writers, and those who may be tempted to intentionally plagiarise may look for other ways to cheat instead.

Assessment, General, elearning, plagiarism

Something that’s always puzzled me is how often I hear the acronym CETL pronounced in what seems to me to be the ‘wrong’ way, so I ran a quick Twtpoll to find out what people thought the ‘right’ way should be.

 I was surprised to see so many vote for ‘kettle’, although @Lawrie pointed out that that is how it was pronounced by the minister who launched the scheme which may well explain it.  There was also a vote for ‘rhymes with beetle’ from @dkernohan (there’s always one :p ), although he didn’t specify whether it should be ’seetle’ or ‘keetle’.

Nicest story of all was also from @dkernohan

As a linguist, I’d argue that it should be ’settle’: ce- in English is almost invariably pronounced ’se’, and the sound in the word it’s short for (’centre’) is also pronounced with an ’s’.  It’s very interesting to see how widespread the anomalous pronunciation of CETL as ‘kettle’ actually is.

Many thanks to everyone who voted!

General, word of the day

Around 35 delegates struggled through Wednesday’s sweltering heat and the baffling mysteries of Manchester Metropolitan University Business School’s internal layout to discuss a range of issues around competences for learning, assessment and portfolio.  Delegates represented a wide range of knowledge and expertise, from novices looking to find out ‘what it’s all about’ to experienced practitioners and developers.

It was an impressively international turn out, with delegates from Norway, Greece, Austria, Spain and Belgium joining the UK contingent, mainly representing the iCoper project which is exploring the linking of assessment with competences.  Assessment interests were also represented by the University of Southampton, who are working on the automatic construction of statements of competency from QTI XML, exploring the underlying modelling of competencies for machine processing.  The majority of delegates came from a strong (e)portfolio background, with interests in the movement of information into and out of eportfolios.  JISC and CETIS participants also highlighted the relevance of this work to JISC’s Curriculum Design projects.

The morning session featured a number of short presentations (all presentations from the day can be found here) on competences requirements in the field of medical education, an area which is relatively advanced in the use of competence frameworks.  Claire Hampshire (MMU), Julie Laxton (ALPS CETL), Karen Beggs (NHS Education for Scotland) and Jad Nijjar (iCoper and Synergetics) covered a range of topics, including the desire for non-hierarchic representations, the management of massive amounts of data, and addressing the various points in a student’s career at which  information can move between one system and another.  The ownership of data in portfolios, including competency information, is an ongoing issue that still is not clear, with at least three actors involved: the data subject, data controller and data processor.  Three main points of interoperability were identified: across time (for example, undergraduate to postgraduate), across specialities (for example, from psychiatry to gynecology), and from elearning experiences to portfolios.

After coffee, Paul Horner (Newcastle University), Shane Sutherland (PebblePad), Dave Waller (MyKnowledgeMap) and Tim Brown (NHS Education for Scotland) delivered short presentations on various tools for handling competence information.  One key issue that emerged from this session was the strong need for a specification to enable the sharing of profiles between systems: while evidence can be exported as HTML, entire profiles cannot be moved between systems except in unwieldy formats such as .pdfs.  Interoperability is needed for both import and export.  There is a noticeable move away by customers from monolithic approaches towards using a variety of (Web 2.0) tools, and developers are working on building open APIs to support this. 

What struck me most from both sessions was the way in which developments around eportfolios and competence recording are very firmly rooted in actual teaching and learning practice, with requirements emerging directly from real-world practice and tool developments directly benefiting teachers and learners.

In the afternoon the meeting split into four groups, ostensibly to work on identifying and representing information structures for a purported competences specification.  In practice, my group spent most of our time discussing widely around the whole area of competences, eportfolios and assessment, but as a newbie in this field I found this hugely helpful.  Overall conclusions from the groups identified the following requirements and issues:

• ability to transfer information between different tools and systems
• transition
• curriculum progression pathways
• relationship between competences and evidence versus qualifications
• repeatable pattern of description at the core
• fairly simple structure
• identifiers for defining authority
• a definable core structure enables extension for extra semantics
• able to express the relationship between a learning object and skills, competences and knowledge
• collection of outcomes
• architectural issues: data is created and needed in many locations instead of at a central point
• competences are highly context dependent

The meeting concluded with asking delegates what they want CETIS to focus on in taking forward work on competences.  Suggestions included:

• development of a data model
• business case for interoperability
• look beyond HE/FE to workplace standards, particularly in the HR domain
• look for connections to the HIRA progress reports due out by November
• look at what has failed so far in order to learn from past experiences
• look at defining competences in such a way that a specification can be combined with XCRI
• have loosely defined competences that can be moved between systems
• need a high level map of the competency domain in comparison with curriculum description and learning objects.

CETIS will be looking at how best we can take this work forward and, as always, we very much welcome input and suggestions from our community - please feel free to leave comments here, follow up via the wiki or contact Simon or me!

Assessment, General, ccomp, competences, portfolio

A tweet from Chuck Allen of HRInterop.org reports that BlackBoard’s long-running patent action against Desire2Learn has finally been rejected.  You can read the patent office document here.

General

That’s the title of a joint JISC CETIS and Eduserv event we’re running on Friday 16 January here at the University of Strathclyde, and it’s an event I’m looking forward to enormously.  If you fancy coming along I’d advise you to register as soon as possible, as places are already filling up rapidly and if you’re not on the list you ain’t getting in.

Although there is an understandable emphasis on Second Life, the event will look beyond that particular environment to consider some of the issues and barriers to the use of virtual worlds in general in education.  It should be a hugely interesting and valuable event.

General, innovation, virtual worlds

There’s been a fascinating discussion on the use of wikis, particularly Wikipedia, as a teaching aid on the Association of Internet Researchers discussion list over the last few days.  A number of courses are already active in Wikipedia, and some useful guidance is available on the site together with sample learning activities and a list of projects.

One aspect of suggesting or requiring that students become involved with Wikipedia that seemed to cause some surprise was the extreme unwillingness of many students to engage as authors with the encyclopedia.  One possible reason suggested for this, that students don’t yet have confidence in themselves as ‘producers of knowledge’, is compelling and I sympathise with those students who were uncomfortable with the ‘public nature‘ of Wikipedia editing.  There were also some entertaining stories of students blithely vandalising Wikipedia pages as the class viewed them and an audacious attempt to avoid an accusation of plagiarism by claiming that the plagiarist actually wrote the Wikipedia entry that raise questions about how so-called ‘Generation Y’ learners relate to crowdsourced content.

General, Web 2.0

A new website from the LearnHigher Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning is now available, making resources on a range of topics freely available to support students’ learning development.  LearnHigher is a collaboration between sixteen UK universities, lead by Liverpool Hope, each with responsibility for a particular learning area; the University of York, for example, coordinates work on assessment.  There are still some tweaks that I hope to see in the site over time, such as changes to the rather unhelpful descriptions attached to search results, but the use of creative commons licensing and the team’s clear commitment to the project suggest that this should be a useful resource for all involved in learning and teaching.

Assessment, General

The Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) have just released a report on the outcomes of the 2008 survey on the use of technology enhanced learning in the UK Further and Higher Education sectors. 

There’s a wealth of valuable information here, particularly when viewed in the context of the surveys conducted in 2001, 2003 and 2005.  Like the 2008 Horizon Report, streaming media, mobile computing, and podcasting and other Web 2.0 activities are identified as major trends emerging as support priorities, with use of eassessment, eportfolios, blogs and wikis being surprisingly prevalent.

The statistics for VLE use within institutions are of particular interest.  In response to the question ‘what VLE, if any, is currently used in your institution?’, Moodle has a clear lead over second-placed BlackBoard; however, when looking at enterprise-wide adoptions Moodle is in a very poor third place behind BlackBoard and WebCT, suggesting that while community-based open source solutions effectively meet pedagogic needs at departmental level, institutional management may prefer the apparent security of lock-in to traditional vendor-and-client models.

Eassessment systems are also addressed.  Eassessment tools are the most common centrally supported systems used by students, followed by blogs, podcasting and with eportfolios in fourth place.  Respondents identified BlackBoard as the most commonly used eassessment system, followed by QuestionMark Perception, but this result should be viewed with caution as BlackBoard was also identified as the most commonly used blogging tool despite the fact ‘that BlackBoard does not have a hosted blogging tool’.  The report suggests that respondents may be confusing the VLE itself with third party plugins such as Learning Objects, which does at least suggest a seamless user experience

There’s a great deal more intriguing information in the report, including full data from the 2008 survey and a longitudinal analysis between the 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2008 surveys.

Assessment, General