Digital learning - could open source hold the key?

by Elena Blanco on 3 July 2006 , last updated

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Introduction

Digital learning has a bit of a bad press in some quarters. It’s easy to understand why this may be. From the overly ambitious projects that you just know will prove to be unsustainable to the frankly unimaginative and uninspiring resources created by simply using a virtual learning environment as a repository for the same old word processor documents that have been used to teach for the course for years. Sadly it is easy to come across examples of each. However, it doesn’t need to be like this. And for each of these two extremes the open source world may just hold an answer.

Sustainable projects - Moodle

The issue of sustainability in a project can be solved by the development of community. With community comes collective effort and many hands can make light work of keeping a project alive and sustained. Additionally, a thriving community can also bring support and inspiration through the sharing of ideas. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to turn to a worldwide community of your peers?

Welcome to the Moodle community. Moodle, an open source course management system, has an impressive community with over 400,000 registered users on the moodle.org website spanning over 190 countries. The Moodle software is a fully featured virtual learning environment that is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas in Australia. Although Martin remains the project leader, Moodle is a truly collaborative effort with contributions from developers around the world.

Interestingly Moodle has developed a network of Moodle partners across the world who are able to give support and hosting capabilities to customers who want a commercial support or hosting contract. Although the Moodle community is renowned for its excellent community based support, these Moodle partners are able to offer support contracts that may fit in better with an institution’s culture and they can often provide installation and consultancy services as required.

The virtual learning arena is currently a hot topic and most institutions now offer some form of virtual learning environment (VLE). There has traditionally been big commercial players in this market with Blackboard and WebCT (who merged into a single company), but it is noticeable how Moodle has had a huge impact. Up until recently, the lack of take up within the higher education sector has been a criticism levelled at Moodle. However, at the start of 2006 the Open University announced that they had chosen Moodle to replace their home grown VLE called First Class. This will result in the largest Moodle deployment in the world to date and puts an end to concerns over Moodle’s place in the higher education sector.

Inspiring resources - LAMS

Of course the virtual learning environment is not enough on its own, most deployments stand or fall on the quality of the learning experience and the embedding of the use of the VLE in the broader pedogogical and institutional context. We have already touched on the way that a community can provide support and inspiration by bringing people with similar interests and goals together to share ideas and experiences. On a more practical note, the open source world brings us a resource that can help with the development of the learning resources themselves. LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) is an open source tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. By using LAMS teachers gain access to a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities may be individual tasks, small group work or whole class activities.

The philosophy behind LAMS is based on the belief that learning does not arise simply from interacting with content but from interacting with teachers and peers. The creation of content-based, self–paced learning objects for single learners is now well understood in the field of e-learning. However, the creation of sequences of learning activities which involve groups of learners interacting within a structured set of collaborative environments, referred to as “learning design”, is less common and LAMS allows teachers to both create and deliver such sequences. In essence LAMS provides a practical way to describe multi-learner activity sequences and the tools required to support these.

Athough LAMS can be used as a standalone e-learning system it is usually integrated into an existing Learning Management System or VLE. Although LAMS is an open source product it has no agenda with regard to the other educational software systems that it is likely to be used with, it integrates with proprietary and open source software alike. Currently, LAMS can be integrated with Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, and .LRN and development work to integrate LAMS with WebCT and uPortal is in progress.

The LAMS Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that manages research and development into LAMS and the concepts of learning design. The Foundation is based at Macquarie University, Australia as part of the Macquarie E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE).

Standards

As ever, standards play a crucial role in allowing software and resources to interoperate. In the e-learning field the most significant players are:

  • The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS). IMS came into existence as a project within the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative of EDUCAUSE but now covers the whole education sector from schools to higher education to government and corporate training. IMS develops draft specifications that outline the way that software must be built in order to achieve interoperability between different software components in the e-learning market.
  • The Advanced Digital Learning (ADL) Initiative. Funded by the US government, the ADL has developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM). SCORM is a collection of standards and specifications adapted from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive suite of e-learning capabilities that enable interoperability, accessibility, and reusability of Web-based learning content.
  • Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS). CETIS is funded by JISC and represents UK Higher and Further Education on international educational standards initiatives including the IMS. CETIS also advises universities and colleges on the implications of educational technology standards and provides strategic and technical input to JISC programmes such as X4L, and the e-learning framework programmes.

Joining everything up

The eXe project is developing a freely available open source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. Resources authored in eXe can be exported in IMS Content Package, SCORM 1.2, or IMS Common Cartridge formats or as simple self-contained web pages. This allows users to author, adapt, and transfer learning objects between authoring and design tools (such as Macromedia Dreamweaver), local and distributed digital repositories (such as the JISC funded JORUM+ Object Repository), and virtual learning environments (such as Moodle and BlackBoard).

eXe is currently supported by CORE Education, a New Zealand-based not-for-profit educational research and development organisation. eXe grew out of the New Zealand Government Tertiary Education Commission’s eCollaboration Fund and was led by the University of Auckland, The Auckland University of Technology, and Tairawhiti Polytechnic.

RELOAD is a UK-based open source set of tools originally funded by the JISC. The primary aims of RELOAD were to facilitate the creation, sharing and reuse of learning objects and services and to enhance the range of pedagogical approaches realisable through the use of lesson plans. Unfortunately RELOAD is not undergoing significant development effort at this time. The most recent open source release via their Sourceforge project site was made available in January 2005.

So why open source?

For most of us, the licence under which software is released is of little importance. Alongside the total cost of ownership, the fuctionality and robustness of the software are usually the most important factors that influence our choice of software. But, perhaps more so in the field of e-learning than elsewhere, software that is open source brings with it the very things that e-learning seeks to engender: community and collaboration. Of course user communities may also develop around proprietary products but these are usually of secondary importance, the ideas of community and collaboration are at the very heart of what makes an open source project successful. So, when building e-learning resources that seek to inspire and bring learners together why not use software that has already demonstrably done just that? After all they must be the experts.

Further reading

Links

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