July 17, 2006
Impact 2006: Final Keynote: ePortfolios: Digital Stories of Deep Learning
The final keynote was provided by Dr. Helen Barrett of the University of Alaska in Anchorage. She had a very interesting take on what an ePortfolio is. Some people see it as a way to save assignments to demonstrate work. Others see it as a way for institutions to track accreditation. But Dr. Barrett sees ePorfolios as a way for people to tell stories about their life.
See her website at http://www.electronicportfolios.org/ for more information.
The premise of this talk is that an ePortfolio is a way for a person to tell the story of his or her life. It consists of taking the raw artifacts (letters, movie clips, sound bytes, pictures, newspaper clippings, certificates, etc.), collecting them all together in one place, then adding some context to this raw information by telling stories about your life. Some of these stories may be aimed at specific audiences (like potential employers), while others may be open for the world.
The types of things that go into an ePortfolio are exactly the types of things that you want to find about your long dead ancestors when researching your family history. Facts like diplomas they had, marriage and divorce dates, etc. Stories like a series of loveletters, scrapbooks, postcard collections, etc. These are the kinds of things that our decendants will want to see in our ePortfolios.
The current state of ePortfolios has several problems:
- Portfolios currently live in silos. We have a potfolio for work, another one for hobbies, another one for education. It is very difficult to move information between portfolios. What we need is one portfolio system that keeps all the relevant artifacts, then we can build different kinds of stories around those artifacts.
- Current ePortfolios are temporary. You have an ePortfolio of your course work while in University, but as soon as you graduate it is deleted. What we really need is a permanent ePortfolio system that continues on long after you are dead. The ePortfolio starts with your birth certificate and baby book, and ends with your obituary, and stays around for people ten generations from now to see and research. Someplace safe from a fire or flood that can destroy priceless pictures, letters, and other memories.
Some people think that the curent electronic age is creating a hole in history. There will be no family photo albums to cherish through the ages because pictures (and now films) are stored online. There will be no loveletters to review at your 60th wedding anniversary because those emails will have been deleted long ago in a disk crash. Future generations won't be able to see the notes hastily written on postcards that people sent you to add to your postcard collection because now people just instant message other people on the phone.
Some useful books:
- "The World is Flat" - Friedman, 2006
- "A Whole New Mind" - Daniel Pink, 2004
- As We May Think - Vannevar Bush
- OurMedia.Org - digital archive for life
One of the most interesting quotes was written by Vannevar Bush in the article "As We May Think" in 1945.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
He was describing a personal microfilm reader. But this can apply equally well to the computer, and to ePortfolios.
Posted by kvl014 at 03:37 PM
Impact 2006: Friday Session 2: Decentralized Administration and Faculty Support
This session discusses the University of Western Ontario's experiences in decentralized administration of WebCT services.
Their Environment
UWO is integrated with the Peoplesoft Student Information System. They load studeints into WebCT using a batch process that runs twice a day. They are using Vista 3, so have full access to the community manager (admin hierarchies) and learning objects manager (templates). CE6 doesn't have these features unless we pay extra for them.
WebCT with the community manager allows administrators at the group, course, and section levels. (WebCT 6 without this does not allow the group level). For example, the group could be "College of Law",. course is "Law 100", and section is "Law 100 section 01". Students can only log into the section levels.
'Their Administration Structure
UWO set up group designers, enrollment managers, and template managers at the "group" level, so that college support staff can manage these areas for their colleges. This lets college staff manage templates, end of term roll-overs, assist faculty in course development, and provide focused training and support for that college.
They discussed support for their Medicine and Law colleges. These both had unique requirements. For example, Law has different term start and end dates.
Problems they've found
- Non-academic use of WebCT is increasing for things like continuing education courses, campus-wide worker health and safety course, orientation for prospective students, etc. This means they have to deal with people who do not have UWO accounts (like our NSID). Our NSID policy gets people accounts a bit easier.
- We have to watch out for java updates. It is very important to have ONLY the java update recommended, and no others on the system. Diagnosing popup problems and java problems are the biggest help desk headache.
- Also watch out for "frozen" computer labs. Installing updates may mean that the labs must be "unfrozen", modified, then "frozen" again. For example, there was an issue with security certificates which expired in the middle of a term.
Best Quote
"If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk.
Posted by kvl014 at 01:40 PM
Impact 2006: Friday Session 1: How we Made Vista 4 Work - Administration and Migration
This session discusses how Northern Arizona University handled setting up their Vista 4 system.
For more, see http://www2.nau.edu/~d-elearn/conference/
Some Stats
This fall they had 80,000 enrollments in over 6500 sections. They make a course shell for every course offered. Their University has 30,000 students in one course, "Orientation to IT Survices".. They also have all their library e-reserves online. They are also using Elluminate (web conferencing), TurnItIn (plaigerism detection) and ITV (streaming video) powerlinks.
Migration
They started out over a year ago by migrating from CE 4.1 to Vista 3 in a pilot project. In the middle of the pilot, Vista 4 was announced. So they decided to migrate the remaining systems directly to Vista 4, then do a further migration of the courses already moved to Vista 3. They found the Vista 4 migration much easier, with much better migration tools.
Here's a list of things they did related to migration:
- They reviewed all classes before migrating the class.
- They realized most classes will require some sort of cleanup after migration
- They developed a recipe that students could follow to do this cleanup then trained four students to do this task.Thge recipe for Vista 4 ended up being about 1/3 the size of the recipe for Vista 3.
- They developed a "Migration database" to track the migration status of all classes. that makes sense for 6500 sections, but may not be necessary for our system.
Their migration database had some interesting features:
- Central IT / learning centre staff did the initial migration for the faculty. This was to make sure some of the strange issues with the migration were handled properly.
- The users had a "migration request" form where they indicated what courses they wanted to migrate (one at a time). They found it easier to ask people to cut and paste the course URLs into this form to avoid confusion. They also asked when the course should be migrated, and when it would next be taught.
- The data entered went into a database, where the hired students reviewed the form for correctness, checked the priority, and updated the status as they migrated the courses.
- Priority was set based on how soon the course is to be taught, and how much time was between the migration date and the teaching date.
- There was also areas for the college dean, department heads, etc. to enter comments related to the course migration.
- All migrations were initiated by the end users. Whatever was not asked tio be migrated was left behind.
- A report was written to give to the instructor noting any problems, etc.
Lessons Learned:
- Communication is key. You must drill into people that the old server is disappearing, and they need to migrate their courses. Don't let them wait until the last minute. Communicate early, and often.
- Utilize student workers if possible.
- Give users a blank shell option instead of migrating old courses. Some users may want to simply start from scratch.
- Run some "migration labs" to help instructors with the migration. A place where they can go to get assistance during the migration.
- When using students, make sure they don't have access to live data. Give them the big scary "FERPA" speach (they could be expelled for poking about, etc.)
- It takes time to move courses between multiple servers.
- Have dedicated instructor support, and dedicated student support.
- It is good to have several administrators to cover for each other for vacations, etc.
Posted by kvl014 at 12:48 PM
July 13, 2006
Impact 2006: Thursday Session 6: Automating Adminstrative Processes
This session talked about systems University of Notre Dame put in place to automate some of their administrative tasks.
Their Environment
- Using Banner, but using batch imports, not transaction processing. So they can massage the XML before importing it into CE6.
- Using luminis, but only using CPAS for single signon to myWebCT. They do not use the Luminis course tools to SSO to WebCT because they didn't like that it bypassed the "MyWebCT" page.
- They do not load all their courses into WebCT.
The Tools
They will be posting the source for these tools on DEVnet. They built three tools:
- Supersection creation. Lets instructors do their own crosslisting. Queries Banner to see what courses they have access to and what their crosslist status is. Gives them a menu to let them select courses available to crosslist. They select the courses, and this gets passed to a script that writes the appropriate XML and uses SIAPI to do the crosslisting.
- Course Activation. This allows the instructors to hide courses from students in myWebCT. They do this by messing with the course dates. Their method won't work when integrated with Luminis like us, so not useful for our case. They are trying to emulate the ability in WebCT 4 to mark students "active" and "inactive", which hides the course in their myWebCT screen. Apparantly WebCT 6 only allows you to mark students "deny access" or not, there is no separate "active/inactive" setting.
- Content Transfer. This automates transfer of course content between sections. May be useful for us. They are looking forward to Vista 4 / CE6 where users can say what class they are copying courses from when they first log in, but that doesn't help if the wrong instructor logs in who doesn't have access to last year's courses, etc. We need better procedures around that.
Other Notes
They say that "siapi" creates a new java instance every time it is called, which is why it can be quite slow to start.
I'm not certain there is much there we can use in the U of S implementation. But it is worth looking at.
Posted by kvl014 at 05:51 PM
Impact 2006: Thursday Session 5: Lessons Learned Migrating to CE 6
This was a panel discussion where members of the CE 6 Pilot project discuss their experiences migrating to CE6. Members include Brown University, CSU Chico, Southern Illinois, San Diego University, and Washington State University.
i won't go into the details from each university. Instead I'll discuss common themes:
- Existing WebCT 4.1 instructors initially hate CE 6. They are used to how 4.1 works, and get confused and upset when they cannot find things. This is why taking it slow and emphasizing training and user support is important. Eventually they come around once they become familiar with CE6. TRAINING, TRAINING, TRAINING.
- Give existing users sandboxes to play in so they can experiment without worrying about screwing up their real courses.
- New faculty who have never used 4.1 appear really like CE6 and have no problems.
- Students appear to have very little problems with CE6 itself. There are the typical help desk problems (popup blockers, java runtime, etc.) but once they get past that it seems easy to use.
- There were some issues with Macs, but those appear to have mostly been resolved with the later service paks.
- Course migration is not as easy as clicking a button. Instructors will require assistance in changing their courses to fit within the new CE6 way of doing things. There will be problems with things like moving 4.1 "organizer pages" which contained only text blocks, no content. Those don't migrate. Need quality control and a procedure in place to make sure faculty check the courses after migration.
- Consider re-branding the system to eliminate "WebCT". For example, call it "My Courses". After all the name is now "Blackboard" and the new version coming down the line will be something different. No sense tying in a specific product name.
- Expect it to take longer than you expect. Remember that schedules are not set in stone. CE 4.1 doesn't leave support until January 2008 so there's lots of time to do it right.
- Take it slow. Have a pilot with a few courses to get support and operational procedures down. Don't try to migrate everyone immediately. Run 4.1 and 6.0 in parallel for a while to provide a fallback if necessary.
- Get oracle training (doesn't apply to us, we have oracle expertise).
- Work with your instructional designers. Give them first crack at the system. They will be the ones assisting people with redesigining their courses to work better in WebCT 6.
- Always do a backup before installing any service paks so you can easily back out of the service pak.
- Washington State put a firewall between their WebCT cluster and the rest of campus. This let them bring up the production cluster and test it before making it available to the rest of campus to use.
- Be patient with WebLogic. It can take a long time to do things. For example, 5 minutes to stop it.
- Keep a change log of ALL changes, configuration settings, etc. which includes the action taken, and the date and time it was taken. Often there are changes which have side-effects elsewhere. Keeping a log will help in tracking down what changed to cause a problem.
- Several institutions used wikis to do their online documentation. Some open just to administrators (to do change log, etc.) Others used public wikis to develop support documentation, letting students, instructors, and builders build on the wiki as problems arise. An interesting way to get better and up-to-date documentation.
- Update your disaster recovery plan for CE6 and TEST IT.
Posted by kvl014 at 05:31 PM
Impact 2006: Thursday Session 3: Blackboard Executive Listening Session
This was a session where Blackboard executives listen to the concerns and comments from conference attendies. Detailed notes will be published online after the conference.
Plans for Future Conferences and support
- They indend to merge the BlackBoard and WebCT conferences into one conference called "Blackboard World". It will be held in the summer, when Impact normally happened. (Blackboard normally had theirs in the spring).
- The general pedegogical tracks are comparable in both conferences.
- Will continue with the pre conference workshops. This is something Blackboard never did before.
- They will be merging the community sites and web sites soon.
- They are examining the certification programs for trainers. They plan to continue this, but need more work on the details.
Licensing Questions
- They will continue to honour multi-year agreements that are in place and will continue to offer multi-year contracts.
- Some people voiced concerns for the portfolio licencing model. Their site would have to pay $37,000 which they said just wouldn't happen. Blackboard is offering some discounts for pilot programs. Talk to the service managers.
- They will be discontinuing perpetual licenses, but will grandfather those who already have these licenses.
- They will continue to offer consortia licensing. Currently negotiating these on a case by case basis.
New Support Structure
- There will now be a dedicated technical suppport rep for each institution who will be familiar with our setup. dedicated as in the person may support several institutions, but that person always will support our institution (aside from vacations, etc.)
- They are developing the "behind the blackboard" customer self service support site. Includes incident tracking monitoriing, downloads, etc. No additional cost.
- They will be making all known issues available to users again. WebCT used to do this, then lately they stopped.
Long Term single product strategy
- They will continue to keep releasing application paks for both Blackboard and WebCT product lines. These will keep moving the two systems closer together.
- Blackboard will continue to market their other products as cross platform so they work on both systems (naturally more sales for them).
- They intend to start design of the next generation system this year. Development will start in 2007. Release will be in 2008 or 2009. (although they disclaim this and say it all might change).
Reliability of Service Paks
Lately there have been a lot of recalls on service paks. They release a service pak, then a note not to install it, then a patch for the service pak, etc. People asked Blackboard to make sure they thoroughly test a new service pak before release, because now backing out of a service pak can be extremely time consuming.
One best practices recommendation is to do a full backup of the system before installing a service pak.
Test Environments
Some people wanted some clear instructions for best practices and recommendations for setting up test environments, like what is provided for production environments.
Posted by kvl014 at 04:59 PM
Impact 2006: Thursday Session 1: Implementing a WebCT Vista Disaster Recovery Environment
This session discusses Perdue University's disaster recovery strategy for WebCT Vista. They have developed a system that is supposed to protect them from complete loss of the building containig their WebCT servers.
This session contained a lot of technical information about exact hardware used, etc. They said the presentation will be online at a later date, so I refer people to that presentation for detials.
For an idea of the scope, their system is running on Vista 3 on sun/solaris and Oracle. Their server typically has between 3000 and 4000 course sections.
Their discussion emphasized the importance of a good disaster recovery strategy. More than just relying on backups. After all, with a site as large as theirs, it could take a week to restore the courses from backup. Faster more efficient recovery strategies are required.
Some of the main points to ponder:
- Redundancy. They have redundant load balancers, redundant application servers, etc.
- They have three environments, DEV, QA, and Production. The production servers are stored in a separate location about a mile away from the other servers. They are set up so they can quicly restore the database on the test / QA systems to have them become an emergency production server if necessary.
- They pointed out there are two types of failure. Systems failure, and data failure.
- For systems failure,there is typical backup and restore procedures. They examined a variety of database recovery systems. They like RAC, but that's only available in 10g which isn't available to them until they upgrade to Vista 4 application pak 1. They do support using a standby database .
- SAN with daily BCV snapshots. This is good because they can copy the BSV snapshot to the test server to make it production. however, the snapshot is not directly recoverable.
- SRDF Copy, they didn't use that because of no internal mirroring and not protected SAN space.
- They opted for Oracle Data Guard using physical standby, maximum performance mode with no optional delay.They don't use max protection mode because if the standby crashes, the production server will lock waiting for it to return. The no optional delay option means they cannot easily recover if an instructor does something silly and wipes out a course.
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They are considering some changes including:
- Use "Max Availability" mode as a compromie between max protection and max performance.
- Changing the "no optional delay" setting so that they can recover from user errors.
- Developing a way to test the disaster recovery procedures. Currently tough to do without disrupting operations.
- Possibly move disaster recovery off campus to another city.Implies they may need better network connections.
- Explanding the use of the standby database to use in read-only mode for data mining and section archiving
Posted by kvl014 at 11:36 AM
July 12, 2006
Impact 2006: Wednesday Session 1: CE4 to 6 migration
Dallas University experiences in migrating.
This is a quick summary, more details to follow.
Main points:
- We have to re-examine the backup-restore issues. Faculty may not be able to restore their own courses even if we do set them up as course instructors, because course instructors may only be able to restore at the course level, not the section level.
- Students had little problem migrating to new system.
- 4.1 instructors oringally hated new system. There is a huge need for training and handholding to get people used to WebCT 6. most however liked it once they became familiar with it.
- New designers had very little problem with the new system.
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Need to get help desk staff involved and aware of possible problems. Most common problems are:
- Disable popup blockers
- Remove all but one version of the Java Runtime environment. Can really mess things up if you have more than one version installed. Could pass validation tests, but still not work properly.
- Make sure java runtime environment is the recommended one (1.4.2 or higher I think).
Posted by kvl014 at 12:17 PM
Impact 2006: Wednesday Morning Keynote
Dr. David Wienberger: "Rethinking Knowledge".
This is a quick summary of the key points. More details to follow as I get time to enter them.
This session dealt with the idea of Knowledge in the web society. Some important points.
Traditioinal handling of Knowledge:
- Traditionally we organize knowledge in Hierarchies. This is because knowlege usually refers to specific things and you can only put things in one place at a time. For example, books in a library.
- Sometimes we take "metadata" about the physical items, and organize those separately. For example, the card catalogue for a library. We can then organizse those by author, subject, etc. But it is still very structured.
- We've come to trust other authorities to organize our knowledge for us. The encyclopedia Britanica. Librarians, etc. We trust the Encyclopedia Britannica because we know the information there is put there by experts.
The web is changing this in many ways:
- No longer a hierarchical structure. Web sites are moving more towards letting people form their own hierarchies. For example, a library where a person searches for 19th century history. Then within that searches for female authors, then within that for non-fiction. The user builds the hierarchy, not an external person. "Every time you optimize knowledge you deoptimize it for someone else".
- Metadata is disappearing. Now that we can store the entire document online, the document itself becomes the metadata. For example, I search for the first line of a song. I can then find out the author, what albums contain the song, etc. The song itself is the metadata.
- Tools like Wikipedia allow the development of community shared knowledge. The information is developed by the entire community, and NOT OWNED BY ANY INDIVIDUAL. This implies some trust in the information (is this person posting the information an expert). But it is also self regulating. As the wikipedia inventor says, a topic is stable once people stop posting corrections to it.
Posted by kvl014 at 11:56 AM
July 11, 2006
Impact 2006: Tuesday night: Vendor Displays
The last event on Tuesday night was the opening of the vendor displays. Here's some of the things I found.
As usual, there were a lot of venders hawking their wares. However, I did find a few interesting things out.
- CoursEval has built a WebCT powerlink that will automatically display links to course evaluation surveys from within WebCT courses. They are interested in having some places test this out.
- Centra had a rep there who had heard about our provincial web conferencing pilot. They mentioned that in August they will be releasing a new version of Centra that will have full macintosh support, incluidng remote desktop support. They are also beta testing a Centra Powerlink for WebCT 6.
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Apreso provides a way to record lectures and stream them. Apparantly they were talking to some people at the
U of S and we have a system in place. Contacts include Ed Pokraka, and Dion Rowney when he was in DMT. They just release a new product: "Apreso podcast", to assist instructors with setting up and distributing podcasts of their courses.
Posted by kvl014 at 06:49 PM
Impact 2006: Tuesday Evening Keynote - Blackboard 2.0
The first keynote discussed the new "Blackboard 2.0" combined Blackboard and WebCT company. Where it is going, new initiatives, etc.
They started with the typical marketing hype. The key words are "Innovation", "Openness" and "Quality".
They see the direction moving more towards the Web 2.0. A richer user experience, fully interactive web-based applictions, user communities like MySpace, Faceit, collaboration like Wikipedia, etc.
They contrasted e-learning 1.0 with e-learning 2.0:
- 1.0 dealt with putting courses online. 2.0 moves more towards social networking. Sharing resources across courses, e-portfolios to cover the entire student experience.
- 1.0 was focused on the educational segments. 2.0 is looking at lifelong learning
- 1.0 was closed platforms, 2.0 focusses on making it eaier to extend the platform
- 1.0 was focused on improving instructor productivity. 2.0 is based on student centred learning
- 1.0 was based on inputs (displaying content) 2.0 is based on outcomes management
Some announcements:
- Release of a new WebCT Portfolio product
- Incremental upgrades using their Application Pak strategy, instead of one major upgrade to new systems. Lates application pak just released includes support for student peer review, blogs, and journals. .(We have this and are installing it on WebCT 6). Expect 2 or 3 of these each year for both WebCT and Blackboard, each bringing the two products closer together.
- They have announced a new Campus Edition license. Includes a 2 node cluster, enterprise edition, powersight kit, and powerlinks kit for 45% discount over the normal pricing. There's also an additional 20% off the first year pricing for existing users.
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They are enhancing support with their "beyond" initiative. Extends both company's support to include five new initiatives:
- E-portfolios for life. A place for alumni to host their portfolios after graduating.
- Learning object catalog, encouraging existing WebCT and Blackboard users to build learning objects and share them
- Student research tool
- Collaborative benchmark and analysis for outcomes management
- Building of user communities
- Extending support. Dedicated account managers, support contact, etc. Opening the "Behind the Blackboard" web site for tracking problem tickets and other support. behind.black board.com.
- Support for developers to help develop open source plugins for WebCT. To foster this, they are making the Powerlinks kit FREE for all CE Institution license customers. That should apply to us.
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They are re-naming the product line:
- WebCT Vista becomes Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise License.
- WebCT Campus Edition Institution License becomes Blackboard Learning system CE Enterprise Limited License.
- WebCT Campus Edition Focus License becomes Blackboard Learning System CE Basic License
- they also have a new Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise Lisense. Not quite sure how this differs from the Enterprise Limited license, but it may be this package with the 40% discount to include powersight and powerlinks
- New Blackboard Connections support site. http://connections.blackboard.com/
- WebCT CE support is being extended to give people more time to upgrade to 6.0. (Didn't say when it is extended to).
Generally good news. I'm especially excited about the powerlinks kit being free. May help in some TEL course development.
Posted by kvl014 at 06:24 PM
Impact 2006: Workshop 2: WebCT E-Portfolio (Tuesday Afternoon)
The Tuesday Afternoon session delt with the new E-Portfolio option for WebCT 6.
E-portfolios allow users to store information for sharing with other individuals (other students, class, instructor, employers, etc.). This information exists outside of course space, so stay around after a course is finished. However, you can copy content from WebCT courses (discussions, assignments, etc.)
This can be made available to people outside the WebCT system. The user can control which users can see what information. (Employeers can see different information from friends).
Using portolios:
- The portfolio shows up as the "Portfolio" tab in MyWebCT.
- Select it, and you get a list of portfolios you own, and other people's portfolios you can review.
- Selecting "My Portfolio" gives a tab with a "Build Portfolio" and "View Portfolio" tab.
Buiding a portfolio:
- Similar to building a WebCT course.
- Can add files.
- Can manage guests, portfolio views, preferences, and track guests.
- Can add tools: binders, calendar, gallery, goals, message center, reflections, resume, web links
- Integrated with WebCT 6 courses. Can select discussions, assignments, grades, etc. and add to portfolio.
Tool Information:
- Galleries, collections of pictures, works, etc. Can be organized into topics.
Guests:
- Portfolio users can be from off campus!
Import/Export
- Can export the information to zip files for loading in later.
- Apparantly follows IMS standards, but not guaranteeing we can import these into other portfolio systems yet.
- There is currently no way to integrate this with applications outside of WebCT. For example, can't select "add to portfolio" from the Blog system. Perhaps development of an API for this will be a future enhancement.
Technical details
- Can have several portfolios attached to users. So a single user can get portfolios for courses, jobs, personal, etc.
- Think they can copy material between portfolios
Cost:
- This does not come with the base WebCT 6 system. We must purchase it separately.
- unknown, must talk to account manager
Posted by kvl014 at 01:25 PM
Impact 2006: Workshop 1: SCORM (Tuesday Morning)
The Tuesday morning session delt with the ability for WebCT 6 to import SCORM modules.
This session discusses how to use SCORM to develop content that can integrate with WebCT. Things like use flash applications that report grades back to the WebCT gradebook.
The SCORM session had LOTS of really useful information.
SCORM is a set of APIs that lets us integrate SCORM learning object applications with back end learning management systems (like WebCT). These APIs are accessible using Javascript in HTML documents, flash applications, etc.
These let you do a lot of cool things like:
- query information from the central LMS (like the person's name, etc.).
- Send information back to the LMS (like grades)
- Save status information. For example, people can "leave" applet and come back later where they left off.
This allows us to build interesting quiz types, simulations, etc. which expand the capabilities that already exist within WebCT. This is done in a way that is compatible with ALL SCORM learning management systems. So if you write it once, it should work with WebCT, Moodle, Sakai, etc. This makes you applications much more portable and "marketable" than sticking with something specific to WebCT.
Some applications on campus I know about where this could work well is the Flash applications in the Music 101 course, and the first year chemistry lab simulations. Applications where they couldn't do what they wanted using the normal WebCT quiz tools.
I won't go into all the details here. However, they provided me with a CD with example code and some great notes.
Posted by kvl014 at 01:04 PM