My highs and lows:

Not sure I can top Paul's summary but my highs and lows are:

Highs:
Michael Crock - an impressive, extremely clever person who is also really nice and generous with knowledge (...and gives prizes!)
Jessica Finnefrock - ditto (except the prizes)
Chris Etesse's portal chapter - excellent!
The rapid progress made on Backpack - worth considering for its time management functions alone.
Content system - lessons learned from so many different places
Finding out Maricopa is a Bb client
Ideas exchange reception - lots of good networks
Information ecology processes
Michael Chasen's voice (pardon the pun) - I don't care what Paul says I love watching him speak - pacing up and down, waving his arms around and his voice getting faster and higher until only dogs can hear him (and an opportunity for me to further refine my impression)

Lows:
Chicago-San Diego flight (obviously)
Being very, very ill on Wednesday
Same old UK thing going on
Bb roadmap keynote (also classed as a high because of Chasen) but "content lite" - a lot of repeats from last year and the big set piece announcements were a bit rubbish really...
The Caliper presentation - good idea, but is it just another distraction away from the core product?
Nothing new from vendors/exhibitors

The Bad...

• Having to talk to a learning repository salesman with a very distressing hairstyle, and wanting to say the words “wig” and “rug” and “would it like a saucer of milk?” all the time
• Watching the UK delegates still not realising that, yes, the drinks at the receptions are free, but, no, that doesn’t mean you have to swill them back quite so quickly
• Watching UK people pretend they don’t understand tipping protocols
• Listening to Chasen’s voice get higher and higher, and quicker and quicker. An Alvin and the Chipmunks tribute band anyone?
• Seeing LAMS – and the bloke who runs it wittering on about Helen R as if he is her best friend. Liz, if Helen ever offers to show you LAMS, prepare yourself as it looks exactly like all those flaming diagrams we drew from the diaries. Nurse! The screens!
• Being sat next to some of the most ill mannered individuals you could ever meet, step forward:

• The Blackberry addict with the keyboard click on who clicked her way through a whole session – don’t leave Oz in future, or turn your click off! OK?
• The bloke who decided it would be a good idea to eat his breakfast next to me, actually during a session. It sure sounded lip smacking good. Get there on time in future! OK?
• The person who left their cell phone on and as it went off three times in a session, barged their way past me to answer it. You knocked my water over twice, and nearly got my laptop once. Turn it off! OK?
• And finally, the chap who asked to feel how light my Vaio is, mauled it with his greasy paws and handed it back saying “its kinda a ladies laptop isn’t it buddy?” No, its not, its just quite good and quite expensive! and you havent got one, OK?

And very finally, getting up every morning here when it is 2 in the afternoon in the UK and having a sackload of email, and completely losing the plot of what day it is, never mind the time.

See you all next week

Blackboard Product Development

Had a really, really useful meeting yesterday with the Blackboard's Senior Director of Product Development, Jessica Finnefrock (along with Aaron Goldstein and Carl O'Keefe). Discussed our assessment requirements in detail and got some good information about the product roadmap and how this might help with what we are trying to do. Jessica's team are going to look into our QA for randomised questions issue - they think they might be able to find a workable solution for us. We also talked a lot about the content system, portfolios and anticipated developments for user interface. Jessica is keen to work with us to feed our user requirements into product development planning and also for feedback on "work in progress" developments. I have to say I was really impressed by Jessica - she clearly knows the product inside out - big picture and detail. Everything I raised - she quickly got to the nub of the issue, discussed workable solutions or work arounds - it was great!

I also went to a product development process session which gave a really useful overview of the processes (particularly those that have changed since 6.2). A couple of headlines:

I'm not sure we are doing enough to put product enhancement tickets in - they are looking for a lot more of these from the staff/student facing perspective
Reference was made of "Quick guides" produced by Bb Training - I picked some up and they are really good - we should be using more of these with staff
All "Faculty-facing" documentation is now available as word docs so they can be edited and customised by institutions - (another) we should be using more of these
7.1 is available now as open beta - with the major changes planned for discussion board we should be looking, testing, etc

The Good...

• SHU most name checked of any non-US institution
• looks like WebCT has had its day
• Boy, did we make the right decision when we bought Bb
• we have stuff that would be the envy of 90% of the people here (staff, resources, buy in)
• People have forgotten about UKeU, and NHSU
• some people still think open source is worth thinking about
• Some places are still worried about Bb adoption by academic staff
• We met some really impressive people from Bb, who came back with what they promised
• Carl O’Keefe actually buying me a drink; Carl O’Keefe’s plane being cancelled; Carl O’Keefe saying the Welsh language Bb is a good thing.
• Andrew Rosen losing a “who knows most about Husker Du and their back catalog” argument with me
• Meeting a Chinese angel investor – possibly the richest person I have ever spoken to, He gave me his card, and I lost it.

And finally, that I finally got to keep a blog. I know I have a long way to go, but I have enjoyed it.

Conference review

Overall, I think the conference was one of the better Bb ones - even though they had tried to get more sessions, there was still too much down time for my liking. Why on earth start a conference at 7 am, yet have a one and a half hour break in the afternoon???

It is clear that we are pretty much in the vanguard of e-learning, and that no-one in the UK is close. Louise has done wonders with Crock from Griffith - we can learn a lot from them. Bb are notorious for vapourware, every year Pittinsky stands up and gibbers on about "cool new things in the next version", as does the other half of the Pinky and Perky show, Mr Helium himself, Michael Chasen. However, this year, though they did that, there were one or two things that look promising - the Backpack, further work on the content system. If they concentrated on making what we have work, instead of "cool stuff" we would all be happier.

Slightly disapointing on the pedagogic front. Very few speakers with anything to say about the complexity of blended learning, in fact too many falling back on distance learning pedagogy in basically trying to replicate classroom instructional models through technology.

The challenge we face in the LTI, and in LITS, is to convince the university to be more adventurous in its e-learning efforts - and by that I mean all members of the university. We have a lead and need to consolidate and develop. Certain folk around SHU may not agree, but e-learning, for me, is part of the brand.

Today is a bit of a Backpack day...

Went to a Bb demo session for Backpack - take note, Helen, this is moving on a pace and the licencing arrangements has recently been restructured. Still not entirely sure whether this is something we are ready for but we definitely need to move it further up our development agenda. The interface is getting better all the time and the issues around tasks and calendaring within Bb itself are addressed really well in Backpack. Has lots and lots of relevance for our incoming nursing students.

Following that - I went to the keynote from Chris Thomas, Chief Strategist at Intel - which was about mobilising learning and centred around moving online learning offline to create greater flexibility of place, time and pace (sound familiar anyone??) and he was basically saying that Backpack is a way of making that happen. Also inputs from Grand Rapids, Kettering, Nang Yang, Dusquesne and Illinois about their deployments to build competitive advantage.

More on this later - got to dash right now.

Learning@Griffith

Went to a great session by one of my new favourite people, Michael Crock from Griffith. Spoke to him on phone/webex/email etc but this conference is the first time we've met.

The premise of the session was about having used Bb at scale and mission critical for a while now - how do we balance innovation and sustainability, scale and risk, change and sanity. Run as a proper round table Michael shared the Griffith experience and got others in the audience to put their suggestions forward too. There were even prizes for input - I got two! The key messages of the session were great - keep a sense of perspective, assess risk sensibly, remember that change is inevitable, enjoy what you're doing (and when you don't - stop - very Aus) and that (as we've heard loads of times now) - there is no such thing as "steady state". Practically he talked about listening to users, planning properly and, oh dear, documentation - documentation -documentation. Some frequent nods from the audience on that point, it seems to be a point of contention for service delivery across the board, group-hug kind of moment.

Asked some great questions - biggest mistake you've ever made professionally, biggest risk you've ever taken, biggest single success, biggest sustained success, what one thing you could do today (and are empowered to do) to make the biggest enhancement to service quality.

In this, and other conversations with Michael, I have got some great metrics for benchmarking and we have agreed to share some planning objectives, numbers and trends to learn from each other. As well as a few interesting leads on other collaborative activities that we might explore further later in the year (she said enigmatically). As most of you know, Griffith has always been our preferred benchmarking partner for e-learning and now we are LITS (which is a similar configuration to Griffith) it makes it all the more meaningful.

Sort of related to the session (but nothing to do with Griffith) - have had a similar conversation with Maricopa re content system deployment and have a connection planned with U of Southern Florida re content system (particularly technical end/quotas etc).

Managing a Large Scale Student Environment: a Case Study

From Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey

Usually known as ITESM, in a previous job, around mid to late 90s they were the largest e-learning installation in the world, with IBM Learning Space. I was once just about to go out to check them out, but got another job and moved on. As it turned out I didn’t miss anything as these guys literally spit out the words “learning space” now.

Unfortunately, much of the session was way too techie for me, if hearing about a database server that has 32 CPUs and 48 Gb of RAM is your thing, you would have liked it. I nearly sneaked out next door to “Surviving Katrina: Bb at the University of New Orleans” where they had to put up 1500 courses in double quick time, turning a campus institution into a totally online one in a matter of weeks. But I didn’t.

I woke up a bit in the ITESM session at their stats:

• 14000 groups in Bb
• 25000 “concurrent users” – or online at peak times
• 344000 enrolled students (in the same sense we use at SHU)

they ran out of time for the “educational stuff”, but it was a bit of an eye opener when they talked of letting tutors pick which platform to use, ie they use others than Bb, a home grown one, and they are looking at open source as well. They appear to do a lot of research into expectations etc that sounded very similar to what we do and we should contact them to share stuff. They have a Knowledge Transfer strategy as not all their teachers use their own materials, which also looked worth a look.

global elearning report

This was quite an interesting session, mainly about the UK and China. It was surprisingly well attended, and the Americans there were as interested in UK developments as the Chinese ones. SHU were namechecked twice, once about out research efforts and once about our future plans regarding assessment. Dundee got a big shout for their work with portfolios. He also mentioned the London Vet College using the content system to share learning objects with other vet colleges in UK.

Aaron Goldstein introduced the session with the statement that all countries now view education as strategic, in the developed world this is about competitiveness; in the rest of the world it is about development.

The top 3 countries for Bb are the US, UK, and China, and they are now looking to increase their presence in Japan, Brazil, France, and the Middle East. Quite a bit of this is based on the language packs, and it was mildly amusing to see Carl O’Keefe keep a straight face as he described the Welsh language Blackboard. He did then make a serious point about UK institutions being able to use the language pack to turn UK Bb into the Queen’s English.

The stats of licences in the UK are:

205 Bb licences, WebCT have around 140, so the new merged company will have 90% of the HE market in UK.

We were shown a meta analysis of various surveys of elearning priorities (including UCISA, Educause, and Gartner) and the top 3 were:

• security and reliability
• aligning teaching and technology
• dashboards, portals, data management

emerging themes look likely to be:

• high stakes assessment
• distance learning is back on the agenda
• international students and attracting them through international portals

The other Karl spoke about China. As everyone knows, the way to get a foot in China is to partner, and Bb made a good call a few years back by partnering with CERNET (sort of the Chinese JANET).

The stats about China are always worth restating:

• 2000 publicly funded universities
• 20m students (with another 20m turned away because there is no room)
• 300m school students (more than the population of the US)

CERNET has 1300 university clients and 18m users. The Chinese government is anxious that CERNET is tied back into LTA, as they have had the same problem all other countries have had of students using the academic network for everything but learning.

The Chinese are seriously into content sharing as there are many standardised courses. 15 Chinese universities are represented here, and I spoke to them all night before last. They all tell similar stories as Prof Li who you may have seen me with last week – it is perhaps apocryphal, but it goes like this:

Chinese LTI type person: Professor, why don’t you let your students ask you questions?

Professor: because I am there to tell them the answers

Chinese LTI type person: well you could always just leave a bit of time at the end for questions.

Professor: are you kidding me, I have been giving that lecture for 20 years and I have now got it to exactly 60 minutes!

How I laughed.

Large scale content system roll out

Edmonds Community College (Seattle)

This was a really good session around educational change strategies and drew heavily upon information ecologies models, implementing a major change through characterising the organisational ecosystem (people, tools, content, culture, and context) in terms of:

• Institutional readiness
• Policies and practices
• Technological infrastructure
• Content types
• Content uses
• Leadership and change

They had a great diagram which my lack of visual skills prevents me from re-producing, but they are going to email me a copy – so I’ll share it when I get it – then the above will make a lot more sense.

There aim was to move from a ubiquitous u drive for sharing institution wide information to more effective document/information management through the content system. The work they had done on information use cases (templates that again they are sharing by email) is something we could easily replicate for our LTA application of the content system.

They had put a lot of effort into making sure that the introduction of the content system was user led, having had a bad experience with a portal roll out they had tried the previous year which had been top down and expensive but also entirely supply driven (inside out in SHU terms) – the quote that stuck with me was “the user community could not see value in the work and failure to meet user expectations significantly diminished the perceive value of the achievements that were actually made” – a valuable lesson for all change efforts.

Got a lot of detailed notes from this session, which I’ll follow up when back at SHU, but just to summarise their lessons learned:

• The bigger the change, the greater the risk but sometimes trying to keep small to minimise risk misses the point
• You need a lot of discipline and structure to make institution wide changes – no room for idiosyncrasies
• Testing is always worth the time
• Process analysis is tool independent
• Always, always “why” before the “what” and “how”

CIO Panel: Challenges ahead, Technology in the centre

CIOs are god like beings in the US. Apart from Chief Information Officers, some institutions have CEOs or Chief Education Offices.

The four CIOs were from Monterey California, Carnegie Mellon, Cincinnatti, and Maricopa Community College (latter two are institutions we keep an eye on as they do great stuff around WP and personalised learning)

Our very own CIO will be pleased to know that they were all into balanced scorecards and dashboards, and all felt that we had to move on from being set up to have people working 40hrs 5 days a week, so at best we have 19/5 rather than 24/7

Other highlights:

• In university terms, IT is new kid on block (ie Newman didn’t mention it in “The Idea of the University”, and it is pointless to do anything that isn’t in partnership, so every one is a client
• Leaders of universities typically don’t understand impact of changes on IT – it hasn’t gotten more simple it is more complex
• A nice story of one of the senior Google people apologising for making CIO life difficult “I am sorry, we built a product that gets you millions of results instantly, but you cannot answer a simple question about how many students you have 4 weeks into teaching.”
• Shared governance kept coming up– people know a lot more than they used to about IT, and not just in the IT dept, so use it. Everyone knows something about IT, making communication even more important, so they understand what we are doing, and that we are taking care of their environment. Projects are the opportunities for better communication across other communities, offering chances for alignment.

• These CIOs felt that they have less autonomy than previously, and the question was who decides on the priorities? A broader group does, but rules of engagement are important. Governance is not information dissemination, but how are the decisions done, consensus or consultative? As more people get involved in IT you have to make the decision making process clearer. What does an advisory committee actually do, if you go ahead and make the decisions etc who should be on these committees? Not always the same people, have to be aligned with what the uni is actually going to be trying to do at that particular time. Governence shouldn’t take the place of executive sponsorship – governance cannot get you past some of the barriers
• The funding issue is the top issue in the US, less so in the UK, and all these guys were trying to have a special relationship with their CFO (F for Finance). The prices of things may be dropping, but demand is rising, and CFos have to realise this. Bring in income, don’t be a cost centre, offer services on campus and sometimes outside. Can call this a portfolio dept. eg of ISP services for schools and cities –can change relations, and have rest of organisation look differently at you. Need to get involved in programmatic change and say it has IT change implications – so improve academic and business processes. Also go after the stuff that needs to be shut down, trailing technologies (eg phones) the things with a few adherents but which nevertheless are eating into what is or could be your budget.
• Some don’t like ROI as a measure, reframe it into how does your IT services support core mission of institution – don’t talk about ROI of IT, but about are we doing anything to support core mission. Show that what you offer is costing less than if they did it on their own. Don’t talk about ROI talk about value, show linkage and alignment,Estates are not asked how many students they bring in. 100mb to the desktop isn’t seen as aligned, contribution to retention is the way to talk.
• Identity management was singled out as a Big Issue – with the Big Problem of trying to foster social computing in a world of security. We are nearly at the point where the most data about our students lives somewhere else. Trying to understand behaviours and patterns – can serve people better. A neat definition of IDM was “Who are you, prove it, and what are you entitled to?”

Facilitating challenging situations with BB discussion board

Four teachers from Shoreline Community College presented his session. The session was billed as “advanced” but message was the basic “it is good to talk”. I am not sure if this would have impressed people at the SHU Bb conference in 2002, but I have to admit that I seemed to be in a minority there

As for the depth of pedagogic knowledge on display, they kept referring to Bloom’s taxonomy as the oracle, and I kept thinking that this is why the people who came to the ELI conference presentation a few weeks ago looked the way they did – a mixture of fear and astonishment.

There were four sections:

Collective brainstorming on the DB Boardwalk (discussion board)

• Students do more writing, and are more conscious of “audience” and “the reader”
• They were writing for each other not just the instructor
• “discussions are like transcript of a f2f class” (large ahem from me)
• the discussion board serves as collective brainstorming, becomes a collaborative writing project

no evidence to support any of this was offered, and my favourite bit was when someone asked if the discussions are graded, the answer was yes, but only a small part of grade, essays are the main assessment component

Skills and talents of ESL learner

As the session went on, it seemed that they were merely replicating a transmission model of pedagogy online, or perhaps they were not doing themselves justice. There were certainly elements of the Gilly Salmon e-tivity stuff in there, and an awful lot about getting the students online in the first week

I kept expecting them to mention information literacy, but it never happened.

Promoting critical skills

At this point, I realised that the presentation was somehow cumulative – we were moving up Bloom’s taxonomy (apparently), so this section was about when the students have moved onto a higher level, up to critical thinking attributes which happen with his top three. It also turned out that we were talking about a History of jazz class, and I was thinking that it just couldn’t get any better, could it?

We were shown examples of questions that promoted critical thinking:

What is the author assuming? What would someone who disagrees say? “when you say X, are you implying Y”, how could you answer the objection that X would make” “where did you get this idea”Is this question easy or hard to answer? Why? (the presenter reckoned the last one was his favourite)

And this is how we get to evaluation and synthesis, and then we finished off with…

Writing about race class and gender

Which is “scary stuff”

This works better online than f2f. It is a core course to meet multi cultural outcomes, the content is controversial the pedagogy is challenging (not my words)

We were shown a slide that had this on:

• Definition of learning environment –
• ideas,
• content,
• folks to bounce ideas off of

And were finally shown some examples. One of which was something the presenter claimed is always there on this course but never comes up in f2f class, about a student feeling persecuted as a white male for all the other problems. I couldn’t see this, if it doesn’t come up in class surely the teacher can change that…

They allows anonymous posts, and students can modify their posts at a later date – I would have liked to hear more about that.

They said that they cannot let the students talk among themselves for more than 6-8 hours, and the tutor has to be there, and the students are asked to post every day.

Portal Wars

This session was about whether you should have an Institutional Portal, an Academic Portal, or a Customised Learning System. As with many of these discussions it boils down to who is setting up and running the system... but more later on this

Some observations - half the room were using the Bb community portal, half using a home grown system, and one or two using bits of uportal. SCT Luminis was only mentioned once, it seems its day is over, and it was seen as a non-LTA portal (ie admin driven)

University of Southern Florida
have myUSF – an "online representation of all the different academic interactions we have as a university", the word "all" seems rather ambitious doesn’t it, which went live 2002

Part of the aim with this was to extend the campus for Distance Learning, and to create an "addictive and infective environment for all of academe". Like I said they are pretty ambitious.

• 25k logins, 5oo concurrent users, 2m pages a day
• have built Bb blocks around password changes, web mail etc, have single sign on
• just moving onto submitting grades online from BB to student management system
• looking to build a more sophisticated academic advising early warning system for spotting at risk students

future plans

• ecommerce
• deeper personalisation
• alumni outreach

KU Leuven

70k students in 10 institutes

Their portal is called Toledo (?) and they reckon “implementing a portal is all to do with how your organisation works.” Too true. They showed us the portal and said it needed to evolve ino an educational portal – at moment it isn’t. They have all sorts of portals – the Bb one, a library portal (Aleph), and an admin one (SAP) – their problem was that they didn’t know whether to try joining them up, or to live with a proliferation of portals.

They appeared to be using the Bb virtual installations, where individual institutes could have a distinctive look and feel, or brand – the equivalent at SHU would be that each Faculty had a different looking Bb.

University of New Hampshire

This portal was driven out of their equivalent of CIS – and was driven by identity management needs. As we did at SHU, their portal myUNH, leverages acceptance of BB by studentss and staff, being the largest application used by largest number of people, and therefore an obvious choice.

myUNH is “ your entry to electronic learning and workspace providing secure online tools, and a central point for sending and receiving information of interest about your academic work, professioinal work, and the UNH community.”

14k users, 300 organisations, 1805 available courses – just like the old days this bit as we went in for a bit of mine’s bigger than yours. They then proudly rolled out all the amazing stuff they are doing - piloting turnitin and safe assignment, running an online training application pilot, building a utility to combine courses, podcasting, piloting the content system, putting course evaluation online, and arranging parental access – sound familiar??? Except for the last of course

The question were quite interesting = in order for a portal to be successful does there need to only be one portal?

A speaker reframed that into “have one portal per user, helps to cut down on interface development.” What is the economic argument about ROI - is it cheaper to bring everything under one? Again the answer reframed: “If someone can do it all in a personalised environment then it doesn’t matter if it is institutional portal or a personal portal.”

Other useful ideas were:

• Build the Bb blocks that the students want
• Most people saying we already have Bb, why use anything else
• Building blocks are the strength – they are the way to make it happen, SIS portals are business driven, Bb is social technology and not easy, worth the effort