OpenCast Project Full Steam Ahead

The OpenCast Project team has been busy planning our upcoming workshop, June 5 &6, in Berkeley and our open house event on June 13, right after the WWDC.

There will be ten universities attending the workshop to dig into the requirements and best practices for open casting of university content. As you know from my previous posts this is not new to Berkeley, but what is new is our upcoming release of our newly architected application (I say with my knuckles turning white as I grasp the arms of my chair) this Fall along with the engagement of a much larger community of folks from around higher ed to work with us on developing the roadmap for soup-to-nuts open system. Open Source to Open Content.

The OpenCast Project has a new Blog (very new) which over the next few weeks will be gaining a new look and feel (thanks to our great friends over at Graphic Mint) and much more content. Much of the content from the early wiki will be moved over and new information added as we start to release the (oh so secret) plans for our workshops. The community best practices will start going up after our June workshop. If you are interested in contributing to this effort in any way (best practices, ideas, requirements, etc…) please don’t hesitate to contact me or someone else on the team.

Open Cast Planning Grant

Thanks to WIlliam and Flora Hewlett and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations for joining together to support the Open Cast project (new site will be coming out soon) planning grant. This funding will support the project in conducting three requirements and best practices workshops to explore the requirements and readiness for a new community source effort around the shared development and design of an open source podcast capture and delivery system for higher ed. Outcomes will be documentation of the resulting requirements and best practices, the development of a collaborative community (already well underway with over 200 individual participants), and a well defined proposal for next steps.

Why is this important?

UC Berkeley has been delivering open webcast content (audio and video) since the mid-90’s. As we have increasingly automated the process, brought down the cost to sustain the system, disseminated the content to popular platforms such as YouTube and iTunes (go to where the viewers/learners/users are), and increased our installations, we have found that this program makes a difference in both lives and professions.

First, professions.

In Spring 2006, UC Berkeley launched a free podcasting service, which leveraged Berkeley’s existing video webcast infrastructure in general assignment classrooms and our central scheduling and capture system. In doing so, humanities curriculum was exposed to an eager public. These humanities podcasts have had a tremendous impact on the public and far exceed the popularity of the sciences – becoming some of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, wedged between notable media outlets like CNN and National Geographic. Popular courses include “Man, God, and Society in Western Literature,” taught by Philosophy Professor Herbert Dreyfus and Professor Michael Nagler’s “Non-Violence Today”

Webcast video and audio helps to spotlight humanities curriculum and faculty at a time when the humanities are struggling to receive funds and recognition. The American Historical Society, for example, highlights the Berkeley History curriculum on its website . One young Berkeley history lecturer used the webcasting of her course to promote her teaching and scholarship, eventually earning an assistant professorship at the University of Virginia. Without a scalable and affordable system and set of best practices, the sharing of this content and exposure for the Berkeley History Department would not be possible.

Now, lives.

ETS and our webcasting faculty get amazing letters from learners around the world. These webcasts are engaging, entertaining, educating millions of people. There is not a continent that has gone untouched. Here are a couple of examples:

“…As far as I’ve been watching it’s been great, though I’ve only been watching Physics 10 with Professor Richard A. Muller because he’s really such an interesting teacher. I’m interested, I’m laughing and I’m learning…”

“Is there a course on art history? If so I beg on bended knee for that to be uploaded!
Thank you a million times for allowing us to watch your lectures here!
The person who had this idea should be knighted or maybe a petition for sainthood!
The free flow of information is an essential part of the evolution of any society!
Thank you again!!!”

No kidding. Comments like this come in like candy, reminding us why we come to work every day at such an incredible public institution like UC Berkeley.

Interestingly, the UC Berkeley students seem to get it too. They are absolutely in love with webcast because it helps them learn better. In recent focus groups with ETS they have talked about using it to review the lecture and to listen to other teachers from other semesters on the same subjects. They will review the lecture notes at night and then listen to the podcast on the way to school in the morning. Several students have mentioned that while they would love to have these embedded in their course sites, they also don’t want to deprive the public of them. One student mentioned how the MIT OCW helped her augment her studies as a high school student in India and credited her acceptance to Berkeley because of that.

Wouldn’t it be great if more schools could/would do this too?

We hope that Open Cast will make it easier for them to join in.

OCW Sustainability Formula?

I attended the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) conference in beautiful Logan, Utah at the end of September. The OCW “movement” is still relatively young (2002ish?), and the OCWC organization is busy trying to define its mission and structure.

UC Berkeley joined OCWC in August, although we have been delivering “open courseware” via our online lectures since 1995 (http://webcast.berkeley.edu). This began as a research project managed by Professor Larry Rowe in his Berkeley Multimedia Research Center (BMRC) as the BIBS project (Berkeley Internet Broadcast System). We are now busy on what we call webcast NG, the next generation of the webcasting infrastructure that is being built upon Sakai’s open source framework and new infrastructure that includes some key elements from one of our favorite education and media companies, Apple. I gave a little talk about this while at OCWC and have attached my slides as a PDF if you are interested in learning more about what we do at UC Berkeley.

Some of the discussions I enjoyed the most were about sustainability. This is always of interest to me, as someone who is responsible for providing centrally supported services to my campus. Sustainability was talked about in terms of the OCWC organization and in terms of the OCW effort in general.

I think a central criterion for sustainability in the open content arena is “perceived value”. This means the value provided by the supporting organizations, and the value provided by the activity of providing the content (think about the alignment of university mission for this one), and, hopefully, the value of the content itself.

I suspect there is a formula for something like this that looks like, sustainability + meeting real (local and global) need + innovation = value. When looking through the lens of this formula, there may be an opportunity to expand the definition of OCW and its associated activities. To date it has often been defined as a publishing model which reflects the artifacts and experiences of a traditional course taught in the physical space of a classroom as well as those represented in an LMS or CLE. When thinking about sustainability, a publishing model makes good sense. However, while sustainability remains (and should be) prominent for most of us (this need is driving UCB’s current efforts), I doubt there is value in constraining the OCW vision to this in the future: innovation and meeting real needs will begin to take us well beyond this.

In regards to the meeting real needs part of the formula, at UCB we deliver videos and podcasts of complete courses via the capture of lectures. As we all know, a lecture is in no way the entirety of the course and this limitation is one of the common arguments used to convince a professor that public webcasts or podcasts are an OK thing to do — we are not giving away the keys to the kingdom! In fact, I think I would be hard pressed to find a large contingent of UC Berkeley professors at this moment who would be willing to release their entire course content in the manner of MIT’s powerful OCW program, let alone obtain an operating budget that would enable me to do so. That said, the email we receive from people all over the world indicates that in many cases, they consider these videos and podcasts alone as fantastic learning aids that expand their thinking and knowledge in valuable ways – these course web & pod casts improve lives! Now, if we could only get the funding to make all this content fully accessible through captioning, then we would truly be meeting real needs.

Adding “innovation” into the mix

While UCB is heads-down on getting our NG infrastructure in place, we are anxiously thinking ahead about new tools that will improve the experience of interacting with this content and help learners manage and share their own learning. These can be simple widgets with discrete interactions, to more complex applications that need to integrate with each other to manage institutional data through a CLE-type environment. Supporting these types of interactions begin to round out the value proposition since the activities that support managing an individual’s own learning and engaging with others to build knowledge are key motivators for learners. One way in which we can start to jump start this and alleviate costs is to form partnerships across higher ed and with companies doing interesting work such as YouTube and Apple, as well as building our platforms in an open enough way that our own constituencies can start to add to the value proposition!

User-Centered Design and Pedagogy

In my blog post at Penn’s State Terra Incognita blog, I talked a little about how UX designers can help bridge the gap between instructional designers and developers of teaching and learning software:

Another challenge in creating applications for academia is that many of the user goals are embedded in pedagogical methods that may be discipline specific or not expressed in a generalizable way. Instructional designers and faculty are rarely part of a development team. In the higher education community source environment we have an opportunity to remedy this. It may require reaching across local organizational divides to ensure that the user and instructional goals are adequately being met: Often, instructors don’t speak the language of technology, so the instructional designer can help translate, generalize, and communicate their needs. In turn, the instructional designer often doesn’t speak the language of the application programmer, and the UI designer can help translate and represent their needs within the design and work flow of the application for the developers. Here is a diagram that attempts to illustrate this point and show how UX can be a bridging activity: UCD in Higher Education

Since that writing, there has been a string of emails across the Sakai UI and Pedagogy email lists pertaining to this issue (just lucky timing I think). Mark Notess, a usability expert from the University of Michigan pointed the list to an article he wrote for eLearn magazine back in 2001, titled Usability, User Experience, and Learner Experience. While somewhat dated (according to Mark) there are still plenty of points that hold true today as we work on Sakai. This one in particular caught my attention:

Learner-Centered Design

How do the concepts and processes of user experience apply to online learning? To the extent that an online learning system is another piece of software, the applicability is straightforward. All of our methods that have worked well with software applications should be used with online learning and should work equally well. But creating online learning is not identical to creating typical software applications because we have to concern ourselves with things like instructional strategies, content sequencing, and quality of learning.

Web usability has been a hot topic for the past few years, but web-based learning faces some different issues. Web usability has largely concerned itself with e-commerce–product catalog navigation and converting hits to purchases. Other web usability work has focused on information seeking and finding. But web-based learning is a different experience. It raises questions like these:

• How can we keep learners engaged with large amounts of content?
• How can learners get oriented and effectively navigate an online learning environment consisting of dozens of learning resources, tools, and activities?
• How do we engender effective online collaboration between learners?

He included in his email the comment,

“My contention, which is actually motivating my current dissertation research, is that the growth of the web and web-based learning environments has increased (or perhaps created) the need for IDs to be able to work with UX people and developers such that there is a need for a common language and inclusive, cross-disciplinary processes.”

I think he and I are on the same page. When I look back to my graduate training in instructional design, the principles in conducting a needs assessment in a performance or learning environment don’t vary too much from the principles of a good UX field study. Perhaps simply finding the shared vocabulary would be a good starting point. However, UX still needs to translate to developers on the other end of the continuum. They also tend not to have the depth of knowledge (I know I am generalizing here) in understanding the tools of the trade in learning theory, and where behavior in the teaching and learning activities can be generalized and the issues and assumptions imposed by discipline, etc… However, I am starting to ponder the importance of the fact that not only do instructor’s not speak developer-speak (for the most part) they also very often don’t speak pedagogy-speak! So, that leaves us with a lot of people in different fields with common goals and close enough vocabularies to confuse the heck out of each other!

I know this is actually a good thing. I know that the fact that community source efforts allow us to be embedded in an environment where we actually have these different skills sets all organized around a common goal has the potential to be incredibly powerful. It feels like the answer is on the tip of our tongues!

bSpace 2.4 launched, Blackboard retired

UC Berkeley has officially launched its new release of the Sakai CLE, bSpace, for the Fall 2007. This is a pretty substantial change, moving from the Sakai 2.1.2 to 2.4.x code base. It will be a huge improvement for our faculty, student, and staff users. After this point we intend to be as aligned with the .x branch as possible so as to make our local deployments easier and bring the latest fixes and enhancements to the campus in a timely fashion. In addition to the UC Berkeley staff, we have many other schools and Sakai partners to thank for this release. There are many new features included in the Sakai 2.4.x release, but some additions that should be highlighted are Indiana University’s Forum tool (to replace the old discussion board), Boston University’s Mailtool (send email to specific roles within the course such as enrolled students or GSIs), and the University of Capetown’s poll tool (quick surveys). With this release, I can say with absolute confidence that the value of community source effort has been realized.

The ETS UC Berkeley Development and User Experience teams were responsible for:

• a fresh new interface (local implementation), with a vastly improved skin which not only looks good, but greatly assists users navigating Sakai.
• the integration code that campuses around the world now use to bring enterprise data into Sakai (partnered with Stanford on this)
• an improved gradebook tool (section/group mgmt, configurable spreadsheet download for egrades, grade comments)
• improved roster tool (not in official release — includes student photos now available for instructors from IU)
• section info tool (integration with SIS data, auto and manual management of sections)

For our local implementation of bSpace, our thanks goes out to the ETS training and support and QA staff, and our colleagues in IST — especially those in Karen Kato and Jeff Makaiwi’s teams for getting this release off the ground and into the hands of the users.

As of July 31, we no longer host or support courses in either Blackboard or WebCT, making Sakai the single enterprise LMS on the Berkeley campus, a goal we set out to achieve over three years ago. We also assisted the Library in their retirement of their eRes system and migrated content and users onto bSpace. We expect to retire our homegrown system, Courseweb, in January, with all the primary features for the faculty now included within bSpace. Over the next several years we will be following the Kuali student project closely to ensure that we can create the best integration points between the new student systems and Sakai. Of course, we’ll be working with them also through the Fluid Project.

Terra Incognita

I just finished a posting titled Open Source Software and the User Experience In Higher Education for the Penn State Blog, Terra Incognita, exploring new ground in higher education. Terra Incognita is managed by Ken Udas, my colleague at Penn State World Campus. I met Ken through his collaboration with Michael Feldstein at SUNY on the LMOS (Learning Management Operating System) project. LMOS had some great ideas embedded in it, but it didn’t “take” at SUNY and since then both Michael and Ken have moved on to bigger and better places (well, that’s what I think, anyway!). Perhaps some of the threads of LMOS will live on at both Penn State and Oracle.

Sakai U-Camp

Today was the second annual Sakai U-Camp, a pre-conference day of UI education and design-in. This time the group was also able to merge with the Programmer’s Cafe for an hour at the end of the day. Having spent the morning in the Sakai board meeting, I came for the latter part of the afternoon, but I got to participate in the hands-on design exercise and listen to the combined session.

For the hands-on exercise, our group worked on thinking about improving the Sakai Resources tool. We looked at who the users are and tried to define their goals when using the tool. This was hard (but fun), there is so much that people want to do with content that starts to blend into an array of different tools and domains — and back! Is it really one tool or many? It is difficult not getting stuck in the current paradigm, or getting too big once you leave it. There were a number of sheets of goals, primary activities, users, etc… We attempted to identify long term and short term next steps, but it was pretty decent work for a half hour and if nothing else led to some good exploration of the issues with a cross representational group. I enjoyed the following presentations for the ucamp/programmer’s cafe get together. A few key points:

• Resources across the roles are scarce. Everyone is working hard (so give each other a break)
• Designers and developers need to design in accessibility from the start to make it efficient and effective
• The brits are funny, and Aaron is learning to be funny

Sakai Amsterdam Conference — Planning and Coordination

I am here at the Sakai Conference in Amsterdam. Well, really the conference hasn’t officially started yet, but there have been planning and coordination meetings for the past two days. The planning meeting was well attended by a diverse group of institutions and roles. One of the hot agenda items was about technical governance. At least it started there and went on to reveal many different perspectives and issues about overall product governance needs. Needless to say that after a couple of hours (was it that long?) of wandering about and exposing different parts of the elephant, we delegated the conversation to a bunch of volunteers to discuss today (Sunday).

The second part of that discussion today was much more manageable (one topic to discuss, fewer people), but we continued to grapple (and circle) with what the real problem was, and how far down the solution road we (as a group of 15 or so) should really go. At the end there are a few people who will be creating proposals to bring back to the community.

This was a lot of work. It was a lot of money for those involved. Will it make for a better release? Will it result in tangible results with concrete impact. I am skeptical — At least for today, tomorrow, who knows? At the very least I think the time and discussion has served to build some bridges and what I think is a shared set of high level principles (even though they haven’t really been articulated or documented).

I came up with a rough sketch of something that is probably too structured to begin with and reveals my biases toward some accountable organizational bodies, but at least it may give people something to poke at.

Yack Pack and WalkieTalkie Widget

There is no shortage of cool tools out there these days. Check out this one:http://www.yackpack.com/. Connecting via audio and Flash. Kiss text goodbye. Textual IM is old school. Thinking educationally, there was a presentation at Educause Western Regional that I missed, but was told about, where a professor from Stanford, BJ Fogg of the Persuasive Technology Lab, is using the WalkieTalkie widget to have a persistent presence for his students in online office hours. The rich inflection of voice being much more meaningful than sole text. I played with it for a while, but then I wondered why the phone wouldn’t do the trick. Oh, but phones are old school. But not mobile phones. (Flashback) Remember CB’s? How fun it was (and kinda scary) to try to connect with any old trucker coming down the highway? (Present) As a test, I embedded this in the resources tool in Sakai. It works. Hmmm. Now can we embed this a global presence tool in the left hand navigation bar for each site? “Yo, anybody there? It’s Sam and I don’t understand question 2 on tonight’s homework” “Hi Sammy, it’s Billy. I think I got it, what’s the problem?” and so on. Pretty nice spontaneous peer tutoring I’d say. AND its so simple it may just work.

Think of it another way. I go visit the Sakai website. At any given time there may be 5 to 10 members of the project moving through that page. You are new to the community. Click the walkietalkie tool, “Hey, does anybody on this page right now have an implementation of Sakai?” “Yes, we have been running it for 2 years. Got some questions?”… spontaneous community. Smart mobs?

And what about UI design? It is pretty darn simple. But is it a component? I’ll have to share it with my FLUID project colleagues to get their feedback.

Meanwhile, my version of wordpress won’t seem to let me embed it here. I am going to try it at U-Turn, our Educational Technology Services UX Blog.

Fleck Extension for Firefox

This is a really interesting add on for Firefox (it comes for Explorer as well, but I don’t use Explorer. You know why). It provides the ability to post a note on a web page and then share it with your Blog or email it to friends. Even if you don’t have the extension it will allow you to see my notes and pop up a tool bar so you can add some also. Try it using the link below.

Fleck.com - Fleck the Web!

The tool is in Beta still, and a little flaky. It also won’t seem to work with Sakai. It sends you into a god awful loop of logging you out, allowing you to use it on the front page (except not on our instance of Sakai, bSpace, which I think is because of the secure site). I tried linking to a “flecked page” from within the Sakai web content tool. It worked. It showed the notes and the toolbar, but they weren’t aligned.

I would love to be able to have faculty and students use this tool for analysis of websites, images, or even for peer review on a paper. If it could “cross over” into the CLE/LMS world without giving up its neutral zone status, that would be rad.