Course planning?

I'm teaching a first year seminar next semester on the intersection of materials science and society- how the development of the materials we use has affected the course of history. This is a new thing for me- I'm used to teaching chemistry, where you have your textbook, you cover chapters 1-10 and you have to do all of them since the next semester (taught by someone else) covers 11-20, and you have to do them in rough order since the text assumes you already know chp3 when you do the problems in chp5.

Now suddenly I have total freedom- I barely have a text, I have no schedule, no specific goal I have to meet beyond what I design myself. I have stacks of articles to read from various online and print resources. I have group projects and demos. I have discussion questions. And I have 20+ topics I can organize in any format or order I want.

Uh, yeah. Freedom isn't always free- how do I manage this to build some coherent piece with assignments, lecture notes, discussion questions and responses, daily readings, etc? I usually just work up a notebook of stuff to discuss in lecture- topic outlines, sample problems, etc. Easy since I already know what I need to say, but now that's clearly not going to do it.

I can't seem to find anything obvious online. Google calendar + a wiki maybe? Any actual readers have any ideas?

Google apps

I'm up at the CLAC conference right now and sat through a very interesting discussion led by Hope college, who ditched their old email system and went totally to Google apps.  A couple of the interesting takeaway points

• Google has detailed terms of use policies which go through privacy, data mining and email ownership issues.  They do *not* own the data or emails- that's up to the given organizations if the person or the college owns it.  They can potentially data mine, but won't report anything identifiable.  A couple of colleges have had counsel look over the contracts and they have no issues with the setup and don't think that it exposes them to any FERPA/HIPPA related issues.
  
• 6 month lead time for changes in policy, so you'll have a bit of warning if they decide to start charging.  Folks using it said they'd be willing to pay anyway- you go back to senior staff and talk about how much money you've already saved
• Search not sort: you have to train your faculty to not throw things away and not to bother sorting into folders.  Google can search them faster
• Delete in gmail really means delete- you *cannot* get it back under any circumstances.  This is by design due to privacy issues
• They can include campus-wide directories for emails
• Calendaring has grown organically at schools using it, to the point it's now the default calendaring system even if there are others available.
• They now have a blackberry connector.
• Gmail will *not* do mass email.  You need to keep some solution for alum and admissions to mass-email folks
• They want folks to move over to Google mail for alums as well- oh, that has ads...

With google docs available as well and all the issues around large scale saving of email (See our SAN issues) I won't be surprised to see more and more people moving to this.

When software dies

So we're kind of stuck here. Our biology department uses a nice little program called the Genetics Construction Kit what allows students to try and determine the inheritance pattern for various traits in a virtual lab full of flies. You pick two flies with specific traits out of vials, mate them and see the pattern of what comes out. Repeat with some other flies and you can build up a case for understanding the underlying genetics of the system. It's a slick little program and the bio department has built a bunch of labs around it.

It was also written for the Mac Plus. You know, the little all-in-one machine with a 9" screen and a floppy drive that was all the rage in about 1987? It's never been significantly updated, and runs on a bunch of old Mac laptops that run OSX 10.3. That's the last version of OSX that will run GCK- newer versions of MacOSX don't have the OS9 compatibility mode anymore.

So what now? We can keep trying to use the old Mac laptops, but as with any computer their lifespan is finite- they're five years old now. We could try and replace it with something else, but the closest thing I've been able to find is the Virtual Genetics Lab. This is a Java based version with some changes in the types of experiments that can be done. VGL adds the ability to do both XX/XY and ZZ/ZW sex linking as well as 3 allele problems involving circulal or heirarchical dominance. Too bad the bio department doesn't care about that but instead uses the bits they removed- multiple trait problems and codominance-based systems.

We could try to keep the old GCK running using Windows emulators but they have significant limitations- you can't print, can't cut&paste, etc. It still ties us to an aging program that frankly, really shows how far we've come in UI design since 1988, and we're left with additional support questions- does the emulator run on Vista? We could try to roll one ourselves, but this is a significant amount of work and then we have to support it. We can simply give up and redo the labs to use VGL, but then the students lose out. We can lobby the publishers, but according to folks in the department biology profs have been doing this for years with no success. There really aren't any good options- I suspect we might try for rolling one ourselves. (Hey, I like to tinker...)

Ugh.

Coolest picture you'll see this year

Absolutely nothing to do with instructional tech, but just amazingly cool. How you manage to get a satellite hundreds of millions of miles away to get a photo of a tiny, very fast moving object with a highly uncertain position from a couple of hundred miles away, all without any real time guidance since Mars->Earth->Mars round trip radio time is well over 20 minutes is just beyond me...

More free courses online

It looks like some Indian universities are following along in the style of MIT's Open Courseware by placing lecture videos up on Youtube. Another project like this is great news however you look at it- the world can always use more education, especially for people who otherwise might have a hard time finding it. Couple this with something like the OLPC project (assuming they can ever get Flash video to run on one) and you have a way for people who might never have access to any form of higher ed to at least begin to learn a bit.

I'll be very interested to see how this works with copyright- having been to a bunch of the MIT talks at various conferences, the folks running OCW will admit that copyright is one of their biggest hassles- they have to clear every image, bit of video, etc. For some image heavy courses such as architecture, this means 900+ clearances for a single course. Since the universities are broadcasting their own lectures rather than putting up all of the course materials, much of this is avoided, but I suspect that a) copyrighted stuff will sneak in and b) that nobody anywhere will care.

Portals and the LMS continued

So, since I'm actually hosting a roundtable on this, where do they intersect anyway?

To be honest, I really haven't seen it done well even in the all-in-one products. Sure, you get single sign on and it all looks the same, but I managed to hack that into Dokeos and Academus in about an hour. So where could (or should) they leverage each other?

1) Content management. Right now things get stuffed onto the LMS from a network drive somewhere, but there's no real thought put into content reuse, sharing and the like. Why not have the ability to upload a syllabus to the LMS and have it automatically included in a list of syllabi for current courses on the portal that the provost can browse. (Or students- I've never understood the reluctance of various faculty to publicize their syllabi.) Why can't announcements posted on the portal appear on LMS calendars if the professor wants?

2) In a similar vein, is the campus portal being used for social networking: everything from the campus events calendar to surveys to blogs to full-on networking stuff exists in most portals. Much of this can be leveraged within the LMS as well, and most of them have similar tools built into them. Why can't you just have a single interface for a survey or a blog. Of course, this assumes your students actually use the social functions in your portal and just don't go to Facebook instead.

3) Library integration. This is one area I haven't seen done well anywhere. Book searches, reserves, online journals and all the rest could be built directly into the portal+LMS combo. A single link from a course to the electronic reserves (with no login) is a huge plus.

4) Data aggregation. One area where a portal home page can really help is a "Here's everything you need today" list. Let users customize the data that appears- you can get all the course assignments and tests/quizzes, the lacrosse schedule, the dining hall menu and a pull of any clubs you might be interested in into a single space. This can also be useful for campus-wide non-critical announcements such as our upcoming campus power outage.

5) Curriculum and advising integration. If you're at a school with a somewhat odd general education program, having a degree audit system in the portal coupled to course information in the LMS could work very well. We get petitions here from students asking to exempt from a requirement or count a course for some thing that it's not explicitily listed for, but with the backing of LMS assets like syllabi for the relevant courses advising a student would become a lot easier.

So, where else can we go that's beyond my limited imagination?

So, how far do you outsource?

Back at my old job I had a server that was devoted to instructional tech- the LMS (Dokeos) ran on it and I also added a bunch of custom apps, mostly written in PHP/MySQL with an occasional bit of Flash thrown in. It was a handy place to host stuff like a Wiki that didn't really need a dedicated home as well as a place to experiment in.

I haven't had that at GBurg and I've sort of missed it. Where can I put little one-off apps, host a wiki, etc? (The Wiki in our LMS, Angel, is not exactly a biug win) But as time's gone on, I've begun to wonder if it's really necessary. Other people are happy to host stuff, and perhaps we really don't need to do much of anything much anymore.

After all, this Blog is hosted: I'm not using the blog tools in our LMS or installing a blog on a server. I ran a survey tool on a machine at my old job: when the company decided to stop free educational licensing I dumped it for an open source product, still hosted. Yet SurveyMonkey is just as good, works for a quick, small survey and if you really need a lot of stuff, it's cheaper than hosting a product yourself. We don't have a good Wiki on campus, but I just pointed a professor at Wikidot for a project they want to use. I could even outsource the entire development environment since I just got an invite to Google App Engine.

I'm not sure I'd want to host anything needing serious security- I've had people do surveys that fell squarely under HIPPA- but for a generic one off it's not so bad. I could worry about losing the company that runs the outsourced server, but in reality that's no worse than when we lost the survey tool at my old job: we still had to migrate all of the data anyway.

So how far do you go?