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June 29, 2006
Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education
On June 22, 2006 the of Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a 27-page preliminary report that heavily criticizes higher education in the United States of America.
It is interesting to read this report along with Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. Both the Secretary of Education and Friedman make the cast that there is a need to “flatten” higher education.
From the Future of Higher Education draft… “What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, frequently self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. It is an enterprise that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing educational needs of a knowledge economy. It has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies, an increasingly diverse and aging population, and an evolving marketplace characterized by new needs and new paradigms.”
The report finds that “The challenges and opportunities we found in our nation’s higher education system fall under four general headings: Access, affordability, quality and innovation, and accountability.”
"We want a system that is accessible to all qualified students in all life stages, regardless of their financial status"
"a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students."
Some recommendations to address these issued include:
“Another cost-reduction strategy would simply be to strengthen relatively new competitors to traditional four-year institutions, notably community colleges and non-traditional providers. The lower cost of community colleges and private for-profit providers suggests that great reductions in average per student costs are obtainable by increasing the proportion of students using these less expensive alternatives. This can be partially accomplished by reducing barriers to the transfer of credit between institutions, and reducing unnecessary accrediting constraints on new institutions.”
“Do more to support and harness the power of distance learning to meet educational needs of rural students, adult learners and workforce development.” P. 20
“The Secretary of Education should take the lead in developing a national strategy to keep the U.S. at the forefront of the knowledge revolution, creating a system that encourages knowledge and skills to be obtained and continuously updated on a regular basis through a lifetime of learning. The Secretary’s plan should emphasize innovation incentives, development of tailored, digital delivery of knowledge, ability to transfer credits among institutions easily and the ability to acquire units linked to skill certification in addition to degrees.”
See the Commission’s Draft Report at http://insidehighered.com/index.php/content/download/70817/971018/file/Draft%20Report%206.22%20watermarked.pdf
Further information:
A Stinging First Draft
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/27/commission
By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2006
Panel's Draft Report Calls for an Overhaul of Higher Education Nationwide
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/education/27educ.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
by Karen W. Arenson, The New York Times, June 27, 2006
Commission Draft Report Calls for Shake-up in Higher Education
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060626-1418-highereducationcommission.html
by Justin Pope, The Associated Press, June 26, 2006
Draft Report From Federal Panel on Higher Education Takes Aim at Academe
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/06/2006062701n.htm
by Kelly Field, The Chronicle of Higher Education (requires subscription), June 27, 2006
Posted by mlindema at 09:39 AM
June 21, 2006
Moodle 1.6 is now available for download!
On Tuesday, June 20 2006 Martin Dougiamas announced that Moodle 1.6 is now available for download!
ION will be upgrading its ION Moodle server (used to host non-MVCR moodle courses) this week. The MVCR Moodle server will be upgraded following the conclusion of summer courses.
Some of the major highlights include:
* 100% Unicode support - all 70 existing languages are now compatible and can be mixed wherever you like.
* New documentation wiki - a one-stop shop for all documentation, integrated from within each page of Moodle itself.
* Database module - a new activity module for collaborative collection and display of arbitrary data
* Blogs - finally Moodle has blogs for ongoing personal reflections, viewable by course, by group, by individual etc
* New reports - plug-in reports enable you to create and share new report types. New statistics reports are included in Moodle 1.6.
* Questions - quiz question types are now a centralised structure so any module will be able to use them in future.
* LAMS - a new activity module and course format allow LAMS to be easily integrated with Moodle if you need to
* My Moodle - a new customizable dashboard page with an overview of all your own courses and what is new
* Hive integration - Moodle can be closely integrated with Hive, a leading object repository, with single-sign-on etc.
* Multiple groups - users can be part of any number of groups in a course
* IMS content packages - can now be loaded as resources
* New Chameleon theme - can be customised in your browser on the fly!
* Granularised backup - allows you to backup only selected activities
* Multi Enrolments - use any number of Moodle's enrolment methods at once, including the new IMS Enterprise methods
For full information see the Moodle 1.6 release notes
Posted by mlindema at 08:56 AM
June 20, 2006
Ohio OSPILOT Update (with an Emphasis on ePortfolios)
I just participated in TeachU’s Online Seminar titled “Ohio OSPILOT Update (with an Emphasis on ePortfolios)" presented by Dr. Scott Siddall, Assistant Provost and Director of Instructional Technology, Denison University.
Siddall began by giving an overview of OLN's Open Source Pilot, which hosts Sakai, Moodle, OSP ePortfolio, and uPortal for 21 member institutions. We should be providing a similar service for educational institutions in Illinois!
My reflections from today’s presentation:
It appears that the user interface of OSP has improved in version 2.1 . I played around with an earlier version last year and found it difficult to navigate. I should give this new version another look.
The new version of OSP is a toolset of Sakai. I think this means that you need to install Sakai to run OSP. However, one of the participants in today’s presentation said that you can hide the CMS aspects of Sakai is you want.
A big issue for OSP, and all other ePortfolio systems (TaskStream, LiveText, etc.) is the transportability of an ePortfolio from one system to another. Siddall said today that OSP has not figured out how to easily and import other ePortfolios (e.g. LiveText and TaskStream) into OSP or to export an OSP ePortfolio into another system.
Posted by mlindema at 11:22 AM
June 15, 2006
Sneak Preview of Elluminate Live! Version 7.0
I just attended a webinar titled “Sneak Preview of Elluminate Live! Version 7.0.” Elluminate is a web conferencing system that allows instructors and students to communicate and collaborate synchronously. Illinois Online Network (ION) uses Elluminate for webinars, the Faculty Summer Institute, and the MVCR Courses.
Here are some new features that I am looking forward to in Version 7.0, which will be available in early July.
1.Full duplex Audio
a. Can set the number of simultaneous talkers (1,2,3, or 4)
b. Works in breakout rooms
2. User Profiles
a. Users can create a profile (name, contact info, image) that can be viewed by other participants
3. Application Sharing
a. Preview mode that shows the moderator what is being shared to participants
b. A Mini-Controller
4. Whiteboard
a. More control over monitor resolution
5. Breakout Rooms
a. Allow automatic random or assigned distribution into breakout rooms.
b. Automatically creates breakout rooms
6. Polling
a. Better publishing of poll results
7. Blended Session Enhancements
a. An “Only the Whiteboard” layout
Posted by mlindema at 02:21 PM
June 08, 2006
FSU's Web-based portfolio manager to go nationwide
FSU's Career Portfolio is an exemplary system that allows students to formulate career goals and successfully move on to a profession or graduate school. I wonder if this system, available nationally later this year, will address the other purposes of ePortfolios - such as ePortfolios for learning and ePortfolios for institutional improvement.
read more | digg story
Posted by mlindema at 12:59 PM
June 07, 2006
How P2P Will Change Collaborative Learning
Once associated with illegal file sharing and RIAA lawsuits, peer-to-peer services may now be the future of eLearning.
Good Article. My favorite quote is "As learning experiences shift from a focus on reading prepackaged content to more active learning where students explore, research, problem solve, and create, the P2P capabilities of file sharing and collaboration become ingrained in the learning process."
read more | digg story
Posted by mlindema at 08:45 PM
June 04, 2006
How to select a CMS?
After attending the presentations of Moodle, Angel, Desire2Learn and Sakai at the Course Management System Days for Illinois Higher Education, an event co-sponsored by Illinois Community Colleges Online and the Illinois Online Network, I have come up with the following list of factors that I would use to choose a CMS:
• Features
• Support
• Cost
• Company philosophy / attitude
• Ease of use
• Course conversion process
• Use of standards (SCORM, IMS, WebDAV)
• Accessibility
• Hosting options
• Multiple institution support
• Authentication (e.g. LDAP)
• Stability of Platform
Posted by mlindema at 11:32 AM
June 02, 2006
Here in D.C., the Quiet Rise Of a Software Powerhouse
Steven Pearlstein, Business Columnist for the Washington Post, writes about the success of Blackboard.
"Blackboard has quietly become the world's leader in the software used to connect students to their teachers, their textbooks, their course materials and one another. By some estimates, Blackboard now has as much as 80 percent of the U.S. market, with sales growing at 20 percent annually, 20 percent operating margins and a stock price that has doubled since its first stock offering two years ago."
It seems the business crowd really likes Blackboard. See Forbes and Motley Fool. But I think I would agree with the following conclusion in the June 2, 2006 blog entry of The Education Technology Group:
"Finally some blogish speculation of my own: Blackboard is a pretty small company (with a market capitalization of about $770M it’s a little smaller than SPSS ). Blackboard’s customers, on the other hand, include many of the largest institutions of higher education in the country, and its product, for which it has a virtual monopoly, is an increasingly critical part of their academic offerings. This strikes me as an anomaly that won’t stand up over time. I suspect that either Blackboard will be absorbed into a much larger company, or that viable competition (perhaps in the form of Sakai) will eventually emerge to challenge it."
Posted by mlindema at 10:04 PM
Oracle joins Sakai as commerical affiliate
"The Sakai Foundation announced Wednesday that Oracle has joined its collaboration and learning environment project as a commercial affiliate." Read more...
So, yet another Sakai commercial affiliate (Other affiliates of interest include Pearson Education, r-smart group, and unicon). I guess this is good news for PeopleSoft institutions. However, I don't see Oracle's partnership with Sakai influencing IT directors at Community Colleges in Illinois in their decision of whether or not to adopt Sakai as a course management system. There are only a handful using PeopleSoft and after all, how many Community Colleges can afford to run Oracle enterprise edition?
In my opinion, Sakai continues to be more appropriate for large-scale implementations (large four-year institutions like Univ. of Michigan or large consortiums like the ETUDES Alliance. However, two small liberal arts colleges participate in the Sakai Educational Partners Program, and apparently one of them is getting ready for a fall 2006 deployment. So maybe we will start to see implementations of Sakai at smaller higher-ed institutions in the near future.
Posted by mlindema at 12:13 PM
June 01, 2006
Setting up a Moodle education server
This introductory article provides step-by-step instructions for installing Moodle, a Learning Management System, on a Fedora Linux server. The article provides everything necessary to setup a full-powered intranet web-server that can support course listings, event calendars, student/teacher communication, and more. Best of all, a prototype server can be functional within about 45 minutes.
Posted by mlindema at 07:42 AM