Integrating Access to Content

Seamless integration of academic content and tools with a school’s learning management systems (LMS) really shouldn’t be an issue. However, institutions regularly face challenges in integrating digital learning materials with all the different campus systems.

“When solutions integrate well, the students and professors shouldn’t notice any differences between our platforms and the external content,” said Steve Kessinger, director of information services and technology at Bluefield College, Bluefield, VA. “Integrations should enhance the educational experience, not be a barrier.”

Integration should make access to digital content possible from the institution’s LMS interface and not in a new window from a new interface. Students shouldn’t have to log into the LMS a second time to access the material. Seamless integration can also make it possible for students to immediately access content as soon as they register for a class through their LMS accounts.

A well-integrated system allows students’ quiz and homework grades to go directly to the LMS gradebook for review by the instructor. It should also be easy for instructors to edit and share content with students, while administrators should be able to see analytics and student performance measurements.

To make it all happen, colleges and universities, along with instructors, need to be working with LMS providers on universal standards.

“When vendors adhere to sets of standards as opposed to proprietary approaches, it becomes far easier for institutions to adopt their solutions,” Kessinger said. “Our application development resources are extremely limited. Developing custom integrations can be very time-consuming and costly.”

Chatbots in the Classroom

Chatbots are being used in retail and finance to provide answers to common customer-service issues on e-commerce sites. Instructors at the BI Norwegian Business School are working on ways to use the same technology in the classroom.

Not satisfied with the choices in learning management systems, advisor Erik Bøylestad Nilsen and his team worked with the educational technology startup Edtech Foundry to pilot Differ, a solution that uses chatbots to encourage students to interact with course materials. Differ is able to respond to frequently asked questions and urges students to participate in class discussions and forums.

“Students have a lot of the same questions over and over again,” Nilsen said in an article for EdSurge. “They’re looking for the answers to easy administrative questions and they have similar types of questions regarding their subjects each year. Chatbots help get rid of some of the noise. Students are able to get answers as quick as possible and move on.”

Chatbots use data from the courses to learn the answers and spot student behaviors. They can also be used to send direct messages to individual students rather than posting information to the entire class. Students using the tool appear to be more open to talking to chatbots than originally envisioned.

“They’re afraid of being judged,” Nilsen said. “There’s no space where they can ask the silly questions, where they can stay out of the faculty’s loop.”

App Keeps Students Organized

An app is now being offered in the United States that provides college students one-stop access to all of their educational content and resources. The digital academic organizer Myday collects information from across a university and makes it available to all student devices.

The app, developed by the U.K.-tech firm Collabco, gathers content from an institution’s learning- and student-management systems and even provides students with information on bus routes, social media updates, and homework assignments. The app uses a single login and can be customized by each student.

In addition, the mobile app can be branded for each university that uses it, has multiple-language support, and can be integrated with other tools such as Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, and Office 365. Collabco also provides a support team to guide colleges through the setup procedure.

“Colleges and universities are always looking for new ways to attract and retain students in an increasingly digital world,” Collabco CEO Mark Francis said in a report for Campus Technology. “The key to this is to make education a highly personalized, engaging experience for each individual.”

Campus Blockchain Initiative Underway

Blockchain technology, developed as a digital ledger to record transactions using the digital currency bitcoin, is finding its way onto campus. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and educational software provider Learning Machine recently launched an open-source initiative that allows institutions to create, share, and verify blockchain-based educational credentials.

The potential uses of blockchain technology on campus include providing credential verification and tracking students’ progress through their coursework. Through the platform, credentials collected by students can be securely shared with anyone, such as an employer, who requires official documents.

The platform ensures the documentation sent is authentic and valid, according to a release on Blockchain News.

“The goal of our collaboration with the MIT Media Lab is to empower individuals with shareable credentials that can be used peer-to-peer and verified as authentic,” said Chris Jagers, co-founder and CEO of Learning Machine. “The current system for sharing official records is slow, complicated, expensive, and broken for everyone in a myriad of ways. The first generation of students to grow up entirely during the Internet age have started applying for college, and many admissions officers can share stories about applicants trying to text photos of their academic records. The expectations, while seemingly humorous, convey an honest impression about the way things should work. It should be that easy for people to share certified records directly with others and have them trusted as authentic.”

Use of E-Portfolios Growing in Higher Ed

There was a time when portfolios were primarily used by faculty as a way to gather information on student progress. Times have clearly changed because the California State University system rolled out an e-portfolio initiative in November that is available for use by more than three million students and alumni.

An e-portfolio provides students with a place to collect evidence of lifelong learning and skills. The electronic repository provides employers information that help match students with jobs. Colleges and universities are also using e-portfolios to identify tools and training needed to help students become more attractive job candidates.

“Tuition costs are up, perceived value is down,” Ryan Craig wrote in a report for TechCrunch. “Reports suggest that half of recent graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Colleges and universities need to provide students and graduates with additional training and tools to improve immediate employability.”

More than 30 states now require students as early as middle school to create e-portfolios and individualized learning plans. Students will be able to provide colleges and universities with examples of their best work, helping to make it easier identify the abilities and potential of prospective applicants.

“Once a sideshow, e-portfolios are beginning to play a more central role in higher education, connecting both forward (graduates to jobs) and backwards (high school students to admissions),” Craig wrote. “Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the days of viewing e-portfolios as peripheral rather than central are dead.”

Higher Ed Heads for the Cloud

Some higher education campuses are cautiously trading in their well-worn learning management systems for cloud computing, reported EdTech magazine. Schools are also shifting other technology services to the cloud, such as student email accounts and administrative applications.

The move isn’t usually about cutting costs. “Cloud services are not necessarily cheaper,” noted a university official. “The value lies in the ways they accelerate the speed of innovation and free you from day-to-day maintenance.”

The colleges and universities highlighted in the article chose cloud services as a means to scale technology services as necessary, remain more nimble as each school’s needs change, and provide reliability to students, especially for schools with a large commuter enrollment.

With many schools tapping into licensed reading materials through their learning management systems, it’s possible cloud services could offer the same. Marian University, Indianapolis, IN, used the cloud to provide electronic textbooks to students at its medical school, along with lecture capture, electronic polling, and assessments.

'Fair' Fight over Copyright in Canada

Content owners and content users have been battling over whose rights take precedence almost since the first stone tablet was carved. The latest tussle, according to Publishers Weekly, is in Canada, where publishers are growing concerned about the amount of content used by educational institutions without permission or payment.

In 2012, Canadian legislators updated the copyright law, extending the uses allowed under “fair dealing” (known as fair use in the U.S.) to include education as well as satire and parody. Already permitted were news reporting, research, personal study, and criticism. Although the law in Canada, as in the U.S., doesn’t provide a specific limit, in general it has been acknowledged that “fair” means permitted users can copy no more than 10% of a work.

Some schools may be stretching that 10% interpretation. In comments to Publishers Weekly, the executive director of the nonprofit Access Copyright licensing organization said educational institutions seem to “believe it is fair to copy a chapter, put it on a course management website, and share it with a class of 10 students or a class of 150 students…. It would be fair to take chapters from multiple publications, journal articles, and 10% of a book, compile it all into a coursepack, and use that as the readings for a given class, without paying any of the rightsholders.”

Publishers have seen a drop in textbook sales since the copyright law was amended and Access Copyright reported fewer universities are renewing their collective licensing agreements. Other educational organizations claimed those declines are due to other factors.

The revised law is up for legislative review in 2017 and a court case involving fair-dealing guidelines is set to be heard in May 2016. 

Mobile Apps Coming into Focus on Campus

Nearly 80% of the colleges and universities responding to the 2013 Campus Computing Survey reported they either have mobile platforms for their students or are in the process of developing one. These platforms allow students to use their smartphones to keep tabs on nearly every aspect of college life.

“The challenge is it’s a very rapidly evolving field, so you want something that is flexible to do applications you don’t even know about today,” Michael Barrett, associate vice president and chief information officer at Florida State University, told University Business.

Students are using mobile learning apps to check grades, submit assignments, and post comments on discussion boards. They are even taking the lead in app development. In fact, one grad student at the University of Albany helped create an app that lets students know when their laundry is done.

“Make sure you understand what the users want and what they would use; those are not always the same,” said Steve Fischer, director of web and mobile at The Ohio State University. “Putting something out there with three of the right features is better than putting out something with a lot of features and only one of them gets used.”

New Way to Keep Students Engaged

Daydreaming and passing notes are so old-school when it comes to classroom distractions these days. Now, students can pass time on their mobile devices, browsing all sorts of web sites instead of paying attention in class.

Ronald Yaros, an assistant professor at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, has found a solution with what he calls a “MEEC” (manageable educational environment of collaboration).

“MEECs are a large, multifaceted approach to a collaborative environment,” Yaros told eCampus News. “You must have a set of elements that engage students for an entire class, so there is no deviation whatsoever.”

The MEEC is a mobile app with content specific to Yaros’ journalism course, part of a collection of experimental courses at Maryland that try to challenge students in unconventional ways. The app keeps students busy with relevant course material, such as polls, blog posts, quizzes, and videos, delivered to their iPads throughout the lecture. Students are simply too occupied with their classwork to surf the web.

“The interactivity is a little overwhelming the first week for students,” Yaros said, “and some of them have to adjust. Some of them don’t like it. Some look up at the end of the period and can’t believe it’s a 70-minute class.”

He is still working on the best content to engage students and the best time to introduce it during the class.

“It’s thinking every 10 minutes about what you are doing,” he said. “What could you be doing to maximize how people psychologically engage with information? In my opinion, if you don’t do that, these devices, they are a distraction.”

Blackboard Getting Into MOOC Business

After 16 years of developing classroom software, Blackboard is getting into the massive open online course (MOOC) business. The company plans to provide free hosting for MOOCs that are offered by existing customers and expects to generate revenue by providing additional services to the institutions.

Blackboard said it wanted to take its time to understand the phenomenon of MOOCs. Its results showed colleges use MOOCs to offer educational material to the widest possible audience, to experiment with new forms of online teaching, and to attract students by featuring their top instructors.

“Institutions need more flexible options for experimenting with MOOCs and running online courses that meet their individual needs,” said Katie Blot, president of education services. “As schools better define how they want to experiment with MOOCs, it’s becoming clear that the best platform is usually the one they already have.”

The Blackboard plan allows institutions to connect their learning management systems and MOOC platforms in areas such as content and social learning. A mobile application through the Blackboard Learn platform also provides students and instructors access to MOOC content through iOS and Android devices.

Columbia Basin to Mine Social Media Data

Colleges and universities have many ways to gather information on their students, from course selection to analyzing social media usage. Columbia Basin College (CBC), Pasco, WA, is working on a plan to put such information to use.

The college is proposing to track its students by classes and grades, archived records, and information generated by students on social networks, particularly Facebook since students use it to list preferences on a whole range of issues, according to a report in eCampus News. It’s hoped the information will give the school a clearer understanding about best teaching methods, subjects students are interested in, and the services they need.

CBC’s timing is practically flawless. The University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released a survey of 456 four-year colleges and universities in the 2010-11 academic year that showed Twitter use has expanded 84% since 2008-09 and 98% of responding schools reported using Facebook.

The problem for CBC is its computer system is outdated and the data it wants to use are scattered across servers, networks, and storage locations that aren’t connected. The college is meeting with a data-management firm about its plans but understands the project will likely take more than a year to complete.

Pearson, Top Hat Monocle Partner

While clickers have become part of college students’ everyday lives, it was only a matter of time before something better came along. The new distribution agreement between Top Hat Monocle and Pearson may offer just that.

The agreement allows students who buy participating Pearson textbooks to purchase an additional subscription for the Top Hat Monocle interactive learning application tool. For $20 per semester or $38 for a five-year subscription, students gain access to a tool that replaces the classroom clicker with their mobile device, allowing them to answer questions or polls in class, run interactive demonstrations, download course notes, and submit homework.

Pearson is also working to integrate its higher education content into the Top Hat Monocle platform and will make its high-demand titles available on it at the start of the fall 2013 semester. 

Canvas Network Opens Up Online Education

Educational software firm Instructure is set to launch a new network that will make it possible for colleges and universities of any size to get into the open online course game that has been limited to elite universities to this point. Canvas Network will debut in January, with schools ranging from Brown University, Providence, RI, to Scottsdale Community College, Scottsdale, AZ, already accepting students for the program.

Instructors, given free rein on how the course is set up, can use the same platform institutions provide for students of tuition-based courses. Registration is open to anyone with Internet access.

“Canvas Network enables us and other participating institutions to decide the way we want to structure our courses,” said Joel Hartman, vice provost and chief information officer at the University of Central Florida, in an article for eCampus News.

More than 20 free courses are being offered in topics ranging from art appreciation to Gender Through Comic Books, offered by Ball State University and facilitated by Spider-Man creator Stan Lee.

“Hundreds of institutions already use Canvas to teach tens of thousands of courses,” said Instructure CEO Josh Coates. “Today, we’re enabling the institutions to make these courses open to the public through the Canvas Network.”

Bull Market in Online Course Management Services

Helping colleges and universities across the country take their academic programs online has become a growth industry. Now, those start-ups are the target for larger companies to snatch up.

John Wiley & Sons started an October buying spree by paying $220 million for Deltak.edu LLC, which develops and supports online degree and certificate programs.

“The acquisition of Deltak will extend Wiley’s global education trajectory into a high-growth segment of the market and bring additional expertise to the organization in such areas as curriculum design, student recruitment services, and next-generation technology solutions,” said Joseph Heider, senior vice president of global education at Wiley, for an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Blackboard, known for its learning management systems for higher education, followed by announcing it would increase its investments into its own online course-development and management services. Blackboard plans to attract clients with an approach that offers more options from which to choose.

“It’s more of an a la carte approach, where [colleges] can pick and choose capabilities they want and not get into this big, comprehensive, long-term commitment where a lot of them are worried about losing institutional control,” said John Kannapell, vice president of the Blackboard online program management department, in an article in Inside Higher Education.

Pearson Higher Education then joined the fray with the purchase of EmbanetCompass for $650 million. EmbanetCompass, created by the 2010 merger of Embanet and Compass Knowledge Group, is the largest player in the online course-management field.

The purchase follows Pearson’s move to launch a free, cloud-based learning-management system called OpenClass in 2012, and after teaming with software firm Knewton to replace its software packages with new ones that adapt to learners.

“As more and more schools face budget cuts, they’re looking to online education as a way to increase access, achievement, and affordability,” Trace Don Kilburn, CEO of Pearson Learning Solutions, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “We see this as a strong area of growth.”

Course Manager App Does Its Job Well

There are many things the Course Manager app from iTunes U does not do. It does not integrate with learning management systems. There are no discussion boards or blogs. There are no assessments or gradebooks. Plus, it only works on Apple devices.

On the other hand, Joshua Kim reports in his Inside Higher Education blog that it looks good and runs well. He also points out that it’s a curricular content-consumption experience that should be viewed as a supplement to a learning management system.

“Mostly, the whole experience on the iTunes U app just feels smooth and polished,” Kim wrote. “Content is easy to find, everything opens up quickly, and everything is logical and seamless.”

In an earlier post, Kim suggested curriculum content consumption supports the way students learn and that because it’s so easy to use, the iTunes U app should not be ignored.

“The fact that Course Manager and iTunes U is free to use, works with all sorts of text documents, handles video beautifully, allows for easy content downloading (hence offline viewing), and works great on an iPhone should make the incumbent coursepack platform providers take notice,” he wrote. “The iTunes U app is a significant threat to their business models.”

iTunes U Course Manager Just Might Be Big

Apple’s iTunes U Course Manager is a web-based tool that allows instructors to create “courses” that can be downloaded and synced to the iTunes U iPad app. That could be a very big deal for higher education if the platform can jump a couple of pretty big hurdles, according to Joshua Kim in a Technology and Learning blog post.

Courses created in the platform can include documents, audio, and video files, which can be read on whatever iPad app a student chooses. The information can be viewed both online and offline, provides additional features that allow students to create and share study notes, and enables course materials to be delivered to students without going through a third-party publishing platform.

The biggest obstacle to making this work on any scale is also the most obvious: Students have to be hooked into an iOS device, preferably an iPad. The student experience on an iPad is great, according to Kim, but those students without Apple devices are out of luck.

Another concern for Kim is students will have to go outside the Apple setting at some point because the platform separates content for iOS devices from the creation of blogs and discussion boards that appear on learning management systems.

“Despite these challenges, I see the evolving Course Manager and iTunes U Courses as a compelling development,” Kim writes. “We have struggled to find a robust way to deliver a combination of text and multimedia curricular content that is organized around a course narrative to mobile devices. Apple seems to be offering us, or at least those of us in the Apple universe, a solution.”

Blackboard partners with McGraw-Hill, Follett and B&N, and acquires Elluminate and Wimba

Earlier this week, CourseSmart announced a new program that will provide faculty with improved access to e-textbooks and now Blackboard has announced several significant partnerships to make accessing e-textbooks easier.

On Wednesday, Blackboard announced that is partnering with McGraw-Hill, Follett Higher Education Group, and Barnes & Noble. The partnership with McGraw-Hill will give instructors and students the ability to search McGraw-Hill Connect, the company’s e-textbook catalog, through Blackboard Learn. The catalog currently features 250 titles in 34 academic disciplines. The partnerships with Follett and B&N will allow students to purchase and access the assigned materials in Blackboard Learn.

According to the press releases, Follett’s Cafescribe and Barnes & Nobles’s NOOKstudy will also be integrated with BlackBoard learn. The CafeScribe Blackboard Building Block is already available but the Nook Blackboard Building Block will not be available until later this year.

This news follows last week’s announcement that Blackboard has acquired Elluminate and Wimba. Both companies are leading providers of online learning and student collaboration tools.
The tools can be used in a variety of ways including support for distance learning courses and to facilitate collaboration on campus with virtual office hours, tutoring, or team meetings. According to a posting on the Blackboard blog, Blackboard’s clients utilize the technologies from Elluminate and Wimba so Blackboard acquired both to serve their whole community.

In the press release, Michael L. Chasen, Blackboard President and CEO noted, “We've heard directly from our clients that this technology has become increasingly fundamental to the learning process for the online course experience and beyond. Collaboration technology is joining the range of solutions that our clients are leveraging to support and improve the teaching and learning experience. We expect this will grow as institutions look for cost-effective ways to encourage social learning and support learning interactions of all kinds."

Google Wave

Earlier this year, Google held a developers conference to unveil an impressive online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. The tool is known as Google Wave and it incorporates e-mail, wikis, instant messaging, social networking, and image/document sharing into one online tool. There is a hour long video demonstration of the tool on Google’s website that is worth a watch if you have some time. One of the most interesting features of Google Wave is the option to have live character by character transmission of a message so that others can see what is being typed as it is being typed. This feature allows users to work on a document together in real-time. Up until last week, only a certain number of developers had access to the tool but now Google has sent out 100,000 invites to beta testers. Each tester can then invite eight more people.

An article from The Chronicle of Higher Education features commentary from some college professors and administrators who believe that Google Wave could be used as an online classroom or course management system in the future. Steve Bragaw, a professor at Sweet Briar College noted, “Just from the initial look I think it will have all the features (and then some) for an all-in-one software platform for the classroom and beyond.” Greg Smith, chief technology officer at George Fox University, agreed that the system could be used in the classroom but noted that colleges will likely still use the course-management systems they currently rely on.

Google Wave could be open to the public sometime next year so it will be interesting to see how professors or universities utilize the tool.