The Short, Happy Life of jfkiLRN

Before the Freie Universität Berlin paid a lot of money to implement Blackboard and required everyone to use it, regardless of their needs, interests, and preferences, there were a number of web-based initiatives, and among them, jfki.LRN, a communications-based project involving faculty at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, the Otto Suhr Institute, and the Latin America Institute. Although technology was not our primary goal, we chose an open source application that suited our needs, dotLRN, which we implemented on a machine at the JFKI. Unfortunately, the university administration had other ideas, blocked our applications for e-learning support for months and until we agreed to shut down our operation and move all of our “content” over to Blackboard — even though Blackboard’s communications features were totally inadequate for our needs. We agreed to do so because we had no choice and because we believed the promises of cooperation.

Blocked: Classroom Research

Classroom Assessment Techniques und E-Learning Strategien der Einsatz an der FU. Dr. Diana Kelly. We hired Prof. Diana Kelly to lead our seminar of a dozen student assistants, who we called “learning designers” as it describes the role we thought they ought to play in mediating faculty, students, and technology. Our idea was to develop a testing mechanism, one based on providing meaningful feedback to students and faculty in the context of the seminar, as well as a reflective practice that would help us identify relevant criteria for success as well as guide our experimentation and to do so on a continuous, weekly basis, and thereby provide meaningful feedback to all.

These methods proved highly effective and were embraced in the dozen courses in three departments where we were able to implement them. Typically, faculty chose first to administer the “minute paper” to solicit feedback on teaching and learning and to the end of confirming student achievement, identifying problem areas, and faciliting discussion of classrooom learning and management. Once instructors and students learned how to use these methods in the classroom and became convinced of their effectiveness, the learning designers showed them how to use online forums to conduct the surveys a day or two before class so that everyone arrived in class knowing what others thought and thereby fully prepared to discuss how they might best proceed. Thus, the technology helped bring students and faculty together before class, extending the seminar. It helped them anticipate and prepare for that class, and thereby helping intensify it. And insofar as these and other accounts of what went on were often added to the course websites, it offered a record of achievement as well.

This initiative was vigorously opposed by the administration and considerable resources since then have been invested in an exclusively summary evaluation system (electronic tests).

Blocked: Student Needs Assessments

Computer Literacy and Connectivity Project: Report, Felix Seyfarth. The student learning designers consistently reported that at the end of the week not everyone was able to complete the web-based assignments and for a wide range of reasons. So, we decided to commission a survey of student access and needs and found a strong need for providing access to computers in addition to wireless connections, a need for developing student computing literacy more generally, as well as confirmation of the vital role the student assistants played in the design and management of relevant e-learning activities. After this report, e-learning furthering support criteria was revised to exclude support for developing student literacy and our applications to support the development of student literacy within the e-learning furthering program were rejected. For an indication of how vital student literacy might be to academic achievement, you might be interested in in the Association of American Colleges and University publication, Beyond Computer Literacy: Implications of Technology for the Content of a College Education

Blocked: Exploration of Methods

A Roadmap of Blended Learning Strategies, Bruce Spear. In 2003-4, my colleagues and I felt that we really didn’t know if our research protocol was extensive enough and we felt a more systematic approach to discovering what methods might be of assistance to students and instructors might be explored in a department-wide e-learning inititiative. Based on a Pennsysvania State University outline, I prepared a Roadmap that served as the basis of an application for e-learning furthering support. This, too, was blocked until, over a year later and with the assignment of other faculty to the project, the rejection of the experimental model and adoption of the recommended “loading dock”, was a department-wide application welcomed for submission. For an indication of how a similar approach has been constructively developed, consider the Roadmap to E-Learning @ ETH Zurich, their extensive bibliography, and in the context of their long-range planning documentation.

Blocked: Case Studies

Using e-learning for social sciences: practical lessons from the Free University of Berlin, by Katharina Schiederig. This case study offers a student’s view of the advantages of student involvement in developing e-learning methods, including, their ability to approach e-learning as a research problem in the context of a seminar, the unique role they play in the mediation of students, faculty, course content, and web technologies, their commitment to the use of these technologies to fulfill class goals, and the unique role they play in the evaluation of these efforts. This paper was written entirely on this student’s own initiative, accepted for publication on the website of the European Union, translated into 18 languages, and viewed, as of March 2008, over 18,000 times. However, neither this paper, nor anything like it, appears or is linked on the Freie Universität Berlin’s CeDiS website. It should be noted that the CeDiS evaluations have been limited to customer satisfaction surveys designed to support the status quo and do not include any evalations of student learning (such as one finds for MIT’s iCampus, never mind any attempt to develop a cost-benefit analysis

Putting e-Learning on a Strong Disciplinary Foundation

It is easy to get the faculty to use a learning management system to post syllabi and texts, store materials in a database, or hire students to build websites that collect materials and develop flashy interactive “modules”. All you have to do is offer them grants of 10-20,000 Euros to prepare short-term projects and pressure departments to come up with a couple of these things for the annual budget review … AND not require that they do anything difficult, like redesign teaching and learning to achieve measurable cost savings, or increased achievement in student learning, or require that they open up their work, like they do with their disciplinary research, to the critical scrutiny of their peers.

Blackboard Doesn’t Let Your Mother Help You With Your Homework Either!

Blackboard is no better than using email to share Word files when it comes to helping you and your colleagues write a paper or grant application: neither control access nor keep track of versions, and any time two or more authors try to edit a file they either have to send new versions to everyone using email, which means everyone has to sort through versions in the email, and worry about wiping out each other’s work when uploading new versions. 

The conversation I overheard at the FU last week that should convince you that Blackboard is doomed.

It was a simple, everyday conversation that I overhead at the FU last week, walking down a corridor. Two students were chatting about class and how they were being made to download texts, as I’ve often heard, just to distributed the handouts they had already been given in class and the texts they could get more cheaply at the nearby copy shop, when one of them said, “forget Blackboard: let’s simply organize our own group using Google Groups.”

E-Learning and Academic Authority

I have recently left my job at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Center for Digital Systems and am trying to find a way to support those who are making an honest effort to advance e-learning, such as those contributing to the student blog, FU Watch. Below I paste my recent contributions.

An example of a class website featuring use of surveys and blogs

Review of course website featuring student blog use: “The Practice of Criticism” by Paul Schacht.

Where my previous blog post and reference to my del.icio.us site concerned websites devoted to research in the natural sciences, this blog entry includes an outline of the contents of an online course website in the humanities that might be helpful for instructors wanting to know in a more detailed fashion what kinds of information might be helpful to include, and especially, how they might go about integrating the use of blogs in their courses. What follows is a brief discussion of why this example might be important and a simple list of the material and links I have found on this site with very brief explanations.

What are blogs good for?

A new University of Leipzig study, “Blogstudie 2007: Informationssuche im Internet – Blogs als neues Recherchetool (Ergebnisbericht),” by Ansgar Zerfass and Janine Bogosyan offers a comparison of the two diagrams, on pages four and five of the online report, “Assoziationen mit dem Begriff “Blog” and “Gruende fuer die Blognutzung”, suggests that the answer depends on how the question is asked.

When people are asked what they think blogs are all about

On Blogging for Research and Teaching

When discussing the use of blogs, wikis, aggregators, tagging, and other web 2.0 technologies with instructors and students at the FU I am always confronted with two questions: a) “the technology sounds fascinating, but what can it do for me?”, and b) “show me an example”. To answer these questions I have searched for and found a number of explanations and examples and collected them in a del.icio.us website

Developing e-competence: a problem of training or management?

I have been researching various EU e-learning projects for those that might help me find a way past the bureacratic/technical approach that almost always follows from LMS-oriented e-learning implementation strategies, and I’ve finally found an article, “Ecompetence Profiles: An Instrument for Ecompetence Management,” that I think gets at the problem nicely. By bureaucratic/technical approach I mean

How and Why “Show and Tell”

To expand blogging on a university-wide basis we need a strategy that breaks the problem down into manageable, actionable pieces. By definition, we need not assist the “innovators,” because they don’t need much help: they are either already using blogs, and if not, they will take to them readily without our help. The next-easiest and potentially broader group would be the