Brainstorm in Progress: Angel Learning

Showing posts with label Angel Learning. Show all posts

Monday, July 01, 2013

Learning Analytics Summer Institute

Marist College Student Center.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although this is really short notice on my part, I like to post professional development opportunities on this blog to help support our faculty and instructional designers. I have been interested in learning analytics since I was up in Washington State at Tacoma Community College where we started working with the Angel learning management system. At the time, it seemed to have a lot of analytics capabilities built in. I continued that work at College of the Redwoods where we partnered with Josh Baron at Marist College and participated in a Next Generation Learning Challenges learning analytics grant. Here is the latest from Stanford this summer:

George Siemens posted this to his blog:

"...Next week, we (SoLAR, IEDMS and others) are organizing a Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI). A call for attendance was held earlier this year and the event was/is (massively) oversubscribed. We were only able to accept 100 attendees due to space and cost constraints. Since then, we have heard from numerous disappointed individuals. In response, LASI is organizing a series of local events and live-streamed keynotes.

We have an outstanding program:

Monday, July 1, 2013
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Friday, July 5, 2013

How to join us:

1. Information on joining the live stream: http://lasionline.ning.com/blog/tuning-into-stanford-webcasts.
2. Join the LASI Ning
3. Join any of our local LASI events from around the world
4. Join the distributed conversation on Twitter/your blog/wherever: #LASI13

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The Needs and Frustrations of Teaching Staff Using Vula at UCT

Image via WikipediaIn this presentation I am going to explore the common themes as they appear in the 2008, 2009 and 2010 staff surveys. I will be analyzing the comments on the annual staff survey using Nivo to establish the common complaints and likes/dislikes and determine how this issue relates to the use of Sakai at UCT. I will link this to the debate regarding online teaching and learning at a tertiary institution and whether the needs and frustrations have changed over time.

Presenter bio: Roger Brown: Despite a background in environmental studies (BSc Protected Area Management; Mphil Env. Management) I've worked in online teaching environments for the past 15 years - 1st at Griffith University in Queensland Australia and now at the University of Cape Town, where I am the operations manager of the learning technologies team.I am responsible for effective delivery and support of Sakai, Adobe Connect, the open educational resource directory, Turnitin and other initiatives for online teaching and learning. In addition I manage the front line support team and provide faculty and general staff training.At the moment (June 2011) I am, amongst a lot of other things, working on the Opencast/Matterhorn pilot project and an Early Warning System for at 'at risk' students at UCT.

I think it is really refreshing that there is a session dedicated to the problems with Sakai. He is sharing the comments that were made in a 2008 - 2010 survey. He wanted to know what they liked best and what they thought needed improvement.

UCT is largely a face-to-face institution. They are running 2.7.

His surveys are open for 2 weeks and open to all staff. His response rates are only 6-7%. They survey about tech in general. They are getting a large percent that generally agree that it has improved their teaching. He is looking at how staff look at the tool in environment, Ease of use, effectiveness, engagement, administration, and other.

What his staff liked the most was that it allowed them to easily administrate their classes.

The most frustrating things about Sakai was how complicated it was to use - small fonts, clunky, grading displays not in chronological order, not intuitive. TRANSFERRING FILES FROM ONE YEAR TO THE NEXT.

To most important improvements are about ease of use: they want the ability to change the layout of the page and make the calendar easier to use. They want to be able to mass download multiple documents, easier to bring in images. Simplify the course evaluation tool.

There were comments about needing to integrate SMS (phone texting).

What would help you use Sakai better? Increased bandwidth, more hours in the day, The help files need improvement.

One of the respondents referred to their IT staff as "clueless, in-fighting depressives."

Conclusions: staff use and value Sakai even when they don't see positive direct benefits in terms of teaching and learning. UCT teaching staff DO NOT see Sakai as a platform that enables effective education or better student engagement.

I think a lot of this is about integration of tools and a user interface. There needs to be more customization available.

Conclusions:
Needs to be made easier to use - break down the silos between the tools.
Streamline internal processes
Sakai needs to move beyond an administrative too
Strengthen Sakai as a platform that enables student engagement and effective teaching

I think a lot of these issues were addressed in Angel Learning.

Collis (2001) "A model for predicting the educational use of information and communication technologies"

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Farewell, Drop.Io: Too fast to live, too young to die...

Image via WikipediaI have often heard that one of the weaknesses of open source is that is that it is an unstable model. Somehow, open source software is supposedly more buggy, not as robust, not enough people supporting it, or too many people involved, etc. And yet, commercial programs drop like flies as the forces of an unbridled lassez-faire tech economy steam-roll through cyberspace like a nuclear tractor load of mixed metaphors and rampant hyperbole. Last week, I had to say goodbye to a favorite tool: Drop.Io. Free file storage, gave an embed code for what ever you stored up there, and a phone number where you could call in and it would record your message and host it as an embeddable MP3 file. Completely brilliant. As an online instructor, this was an extremely useful tool. They were not open source, but I didn't think they had a plan for making money - until Facebook bought them out. And good for them for getting bought out - the service was so good at the ground level right out of the gate that it was not clear how they would have turned it into "premium ware." So the service goes away and the programmers get absorbed by Facebook's production team.
This happened to Angel Learning and is now happening to Elluminate (quel dommage!) and Wimba Voice Tools (good riddance!). Ironically, the most stable model is going to turn out to be foundation-supported open source tools like Sakai. Sakai will continue to grow and change in some really interesting directions: it is one of the few players in online learning that can't get sued or bought out of existence by Blackboard. Goodbye, Drop.Io, you were the James Dean of free file sharing services.