Hack Education

Moodle Discussion board

Add in the fact that Schoology and GoingOn Networks have their own LMS entries that are Drupal based and you might see where this is heading.  Enter the main event and one of three major discussions to come out of Drupalcon in my mind (for education at least): The discussion board on Drupal.org that’s starting to heat up.

There were a lot of discussions at Drupalcon about what it would take to make Drupal a full blown LMS.  Many vendors and organizations in the past have mashed up Drupal and Moodle to get the best of CMS world and best of free LMS world.

The reviews in the room (about 20ish) were mixed as to the result.  It was ok but not great.  There also seemed to be the feeling that the moodle community might be in decline from an outsiders perspective.  Based on the last 24 hours, it would appear that Moodle is about to be at an inflection point in adoption.  Either BB will help bring about the death of Moodle on FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) alone; or the community will continue with an influx of passionate educators and edtech leaders taking the charge.

As some other interesting notes from the shake up worth mentioning:

• Dr Chuck from Sakai is also going to be involved in getting Blackboard to be promoting that project.  I’m not sure what impact this will have on that project but I know there’s a lot of fear about a project lead of his clout “jumping ship”.  While I don’t view it that way, especially from talking to him in the past, there will still be that perception (FUD)
• Moodlerooms had a bunch of ex-Angel employees; funny how now suddenly BB isn’t going to be sun setting Angel.  Curious to see if those Angel people who jumped ship once will do so again to other moodle shops.

I also mentioned that there were three important things for Drupal in education as a movement to come out of Drupalcon Denver 2012. The second one was that Drupal in Education Unconferences will now be a yearly thing thanks to FunnyMonkey.  Drupalcon is in Portland next year (Funnymonkey’s hometown) and so the Unconference should be epic!

The last point is something that’s currently in the works and has been active for about six months, just under the radar.  A Drupal in Higher Education UnConsortium which is currently in the process of adopting a charter and more official name.  This un-developer network was announced at Drupalcon Denver and has had about 10 active members that meet monthly and have standards they are working towards to the benefit of all of education.  I’ll have more information about that in the coming weeks.

As I’ve written before, I believe fully that better technologies / frameworks breed better, more sustainable solutions.  As such, it may seem counter-intuitive to put all this effort into something that is inherently non-educational.  I’ve done this to maximize the impact and eyes that can get on the code at all levels.  If this was just something that worked for educators (like Moodle is) then I’d be more or less barring 80% of the community from caring.

While previous versions of ELMS were mired in the context of Courses and Offerings of courses, as of Alpha 6 I’ve been able to break free of these connotations at a code level.  Everything you see with ELMS that makes you think it is specific just to education has been abstracted.  Here’s how:

• Install Cores – ELMS ships with two install cores as of Alpha 6.  This is mostly just to showcase that it is possible to install the system towards very different purposes off 95% of the same code-base. The Instructional CMS (ICMS) is what was originally being developed towards solely, this will now enable me (or anyone) to develop towards a more collaborative learning environment (CLE) while reusing almost all of the work I’ve done for ICMS.
• String Overrides – All language that references Courses, Versions, Offerings, and things specific to the ICMS have been written back to a single variable in the database.  The module providing this is called String Overrides and essentially allows you to alter the context of the system’s language globally with a simple form.  ICMS alters this language a little different from CLE, and suddenly we start to have two very different systems.
• No required Theme – This is a major difference between ELMS and all the current distributions out there. ELMS has no required theme. While it ships with a theme called Cube enabled for the system layer, this and any theme from drupal.org should be able to be used in the mini-sites that are created.  Most of what a system is to people is in the theme layer so this is critical in my mind.
• Regions – ELMS as a system layer is more of a wrapper on top of traditional Drupal.  This wrapper (provided by a project called Regions) enables the user to do one very important thing: Never have to touch Drupal pages. I think this will take some getting used to for some devs but ultimately it provides much more consistent, touch friendly interface elements that keep people focused on the site without detracting from it.
• Kit Compliant Features – if functionality works one place it works many.  That’s what Kit packaged Features in Drupal allow you.  It’s like modules and configuration of how to use them all rolled into a simple enable button.  Because ELMS features are kit compliant they will work in the various implementations of ELMS that are going to come down the pipe (ICMS and CLE are the beginning)

It is for these reason that I’m so excited about the potential for the types of systems that ELMS can create.  It also puts my mind to rest knowing that I can swap out the entire connotation of the system on install. This vision is of a picture I’ve had in my head for the better part of a year, driving me slowly to madness .

I’ll be presenting at Drupalcamp Baltimore Friday on this concept of using one distribution to mutate into many. I think you could reduce the development time of many complex systems as a result of the ELMS code-base.  The code / feature set allows for anything that meets these requirements:

• There is a wrapper of some kind (parent, or course) that has micro-sites associated to it
• There is a micro-site (site, or version) that can function also to the same level of flexibility as a full Drupal site

Here are some concepts that I think could be built with ELMS pretty quickly:

• Popular Blog site dot com – This web service has a User to Blog relationship (ELMS + blog theme + blog + simple aggregators)
• Popular Survey site dot com – This web service could have a User to Survey or Organization to Surveys relationship (ELMS + Webform)
• E Portfolio -  1 to 1 Student to slightly different kind of blogging platform (Popular blog site dot com + a few image views)
• Rubric Management service — Course to Instructor relationship (ELMS + Rubric)
• Student Club management — Club to website relationship (ELMS + a few themes + features from atrium / commons for collaboration)
• Asset Management System — Organization to Project relationship (ELMS + few content types to handle media implementation)
• Traditional LMS – While i wouldn’t recommend this, it’s certainly not far off (ELMS + Quiz + Gradebook + LTI)

I know a few people have asked if this is an LMS platform to which I say, this is about transforming the LMS model.

2012 is the year that Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) starts to hollow out the Learning Management System (LMS).

Last year—and flowing into this year—the groundwork and infrastructure has been laid that will bring about the death of the traditional, single point of entry LMS.  I believe that technology standard is something known as  (LTI).

What is LTI?

LTI works essentially the same way Twitter and Facebook do when authorizing other apps to share a login.  Using a standard called OAuth, FB and Twitter are able to generate a secure one-time login time of address that is only valid during the current connection.  In plain English, it’s a secure way of letting you login without creating an account.

LTI brings this same type of security standard to the LMS world.  Site builders can create trusted login relationships between the traditional LMS and toolsets outside the LMS.  This allows you to pass information about students and instructors (and other roles) between systems, creating a seamless experience for the end user. You can then pass someone multiple directions as needed.

LMS (e.g., Canvas) to LMS (e.g., Moodle or Sakai) and, more importantly in my mind, LMS to non-LMS.  Maybe you can understand the next heading when framed with the following context:

• All major LMS projects (proprietary included) are getting behind LTI;
• LTI is far less complicated to understand and implement than SCORM; and
• LTI can easily be implemented in non-LMS systems to bridge them with LMS systems

The Trojan Horse

LTI is how we finally escape the pit of singular system that has boxed up educational experiences for so long.  Why do you think faculty and students always end up utilizing ad-hoc methods to manage and communicate knowledge?  We provide them with tools for drop boxes, they use Flickr. We give them email, they want light-weight chat integration.  We give them forums to structure content, they use Google Docs.

LMSs and the scale they need to be built to, combined with the pace at which universities adopt new systems is a perfect storm scenario.  We constantly are behind the needs of our users, off-the-shelf and custom solutions never meet needs for long or fully satisfy audiences.  It’s not because the tools are poor, it’s because the structure is wrong.

LTI allows instructional designers, instructors, developers and management to think differently about the way they plan and implement learning systems.

A Structured Anarchy Future

Many of my ideas for my original Structured Anarchy post were borne from trends I noticed in the non-edu space with regard to technology; ideas that have turned into my obsession.  LTI/OAuth is the solution to a problem that the corporate/Web 2.0 crowd solved many years ago — pervasive logins across multiple websites / servers.

Students don’t want to have to learn multiple interfaces, yet Google seems to have over a dozen services strung across different addresses and different functions and are very successful.  Have you ever not used Google maps because the interface was strikingly different from Gmail? I realize I’m just pinging on Google, but Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft and many others are doing similar things.  

Ultimately, you need to make a focused Web service; do something REALLY well; create project teams to sustain development for it and then feed users to it; create a singular method of login; make the experience seamless or reduce it to a “click to connect to {XYZ};” and provide standard UX / UI elements.

Personal Learning Environments

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is the suite-of-tools approach to learning systems designed to minimize the LMS.  Look, we need an LMS/central system (at least until this gets wider implementation) —it’s just the role of that system needs to be far more minimalist.  

An instructor wants to create a blog for their course. Let’s provide them with the best tool possible. Name the LMS that handles blogging well, please. (while I don’t support using this) WordPress comes to mind for blogging.

An instructional designer wants to create an e-text that’s separate from the LMS because it’s mostly static content. Name the LMS that handles content really well. Hence the need for an Instructional Content Management System.

An instructor wants their students to have a conversation around video / audio assignments.  Name the LMS doing that well.  I’m told they are getting better at it but will they ever be youtube or a youtube clone?

Students want to collaborative work in teams and manage their project.  LMSs project group spaces and areas for document management, but do they come close to Google Docs, Basecamp, or Atrium?

Now, rubrics, gradebooks, email communication…I’ll leave these to the LMS.  Social interaction on the Internet is changing at light speed, while university and college infrastructure was built to house knowledge in a similar form for decades at a time.  It’s time for a change.  Universities and colleges need to transform or fade away.

An old adage is that college is an experience, and that many people are paying for that experience.  As that experience becomes increasingly more digital, let’s build systems that can help provide the best experiences possible.

If only there was a system positioning itself as part of the learning platform revolution…

Image from Development Seed

Features in Drupal are the key to the creation and sustainability of LARGE scale systems.  These platforms, like Open Atrium or ELMS, can almost take on a life of their own yet still, at their core, are Drupal.

Features allows developers to not only package code but package configuration.  Configuration, while still drastically easier to work with then code, is still difficult because of the high knowledge barrier Drupal has.

Feature Server and Kit allow for the creation of larger ecosystems to crop-up around platforms built on Features. Feature Server is a Drupal site that can allow other Drupal sites to ask it if they are up to date.  Whenever you download a module from Drupal.org your drupal module can tell you if its out of date or not.  Feature Server essentially allows you to run your own mini-drupal.org.

Visualization of a Drupal ecosystem

So what’s the big deal with that? Well, imagine if different universities across the globe setup their own feature servers.  You would start to get a picture of Drupal more like what you see on the right.  Instead of code being required to live on drupal.org, code can live and be upgradable (and ultimately sustainable) from sources external to drupal.org (like drupal.psu.edu).

Here’s the big “so what”: let’s take this concept one step further.  Let’s say we have a platform that makes it easier to assemble learning materials and interaction.  This empowers learning designers and instructor communities to (hopefully) build better materials and interactions.  Create better tools, dedicate more time to the resource generation and less time fighting the technology.  That platform will be built on Drupal Features and Feature server, if you can think of what it might be…

So we have sustainable code and configuration changes, but let’s not stop there.

We’ve already packaged code and configuration at a Drupal level, What’s the next thing to package then? Open Educational Resources.  OER has sputtered in recent years because of a lack of sustainability planning with great press but little “what’s in it for me” factor for faculty.  This is where ELMS and Features come in. ELMS could be packaged with a “Feature server”-like functionality for broadcasting what OER packages it has on it.

Again though, who cares? Oh, I forgot to mention that Features can package content too!  SO, if we map all of these concepts to OER, we now have a sustainable method of passing OER between not just institutions, but directly to distributed learners.

ELMS App Store Visual at a University

Build something like the Aquia Stack Installer for a one-click installation of ELMS on local machines and suddenly you have a completely distributed system of knowledge produces and consumers.  Producers could even broadcast from their local machine if they wanted that they are producing knowledge for consumption (like Kahn Academy).  Consumers could go to their favorite knowledge producers and download any OER materials they have to their local ELMS instances.

btopro's OER Hub

This will start to create an “App Store” model for OER content or for-pay content for that matter with limited alteration.  These ELMS Hubs could be thought of much in the same way you think of TV stations or major aggregator websites of today.  All they’re doing is being produced by an individual or group of individuals and you are choosing to consume their content (channels or blog posts or articles or whatever).  This way not only major university bodies could pull together a listing of their resources and share them with others, but individuals have a seat at the table as well.

I believe very much in Connectivism knowledge creation and I’d be curious to see what others thoughts are about this concept.  Drupal is no longer just some neat tool that you should look into for education, I fully believe this is a major component to saving it.  Hopefully when the next release of the platform comes out you’ll start to believe too.

• Any time you use a system that you know is open and it has Feature XYZ; you immediately get irritated if you can’t have that functionality without hacking it back out
• ELMS support and sustainability model is very decentralized (as it always will be)
• Most of the functionality of elms can be applicable to any Drupal site / system (and should be)
• I am treating ELMS as a consumer of Drupal, not the author of a new Drupal (huh?)

What am I referring to?  Here are the five modules released in the last week:

Reusable components

Too often ideas are written for a specific context and then point 1 is reached through hacking functionality back out and the cycle starts again.

• Drupalcon Szeged 2008
• Drupalcon Paris
• Drupalcon DC
• Drupal Camp PSU (internal to PSU faculty / staff / students) 120+ attendees

Sure, the hook and alter system are fantastic.  Sure it’s extendable and ultra flexible.  If you really know what you’re doing you can bend Drupal to your will without breaking a darn thing. But none of that would be important without the people who get up and drive the Drupal bus every day.

The people in the above photos are just a few of the thousands who have stood for DrupalCon and Drupal Camp photos over the last many years.  Every event I’ve gone to someone inevitably tries to get a group photo.  Partly I think because they can’t believe the sheer volume of people there, interested in learning about a web development platform.  Now it’s time to spread this community to the education world.

I started a discussion thread on groups.drupal.org recently that seems to have caught some fire and I hope continues to burn (see article Forming a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium).  Drupal already has a major foothold in many universities and colleges but I don’t know that people really understand the scale to which this has taken place.  A recently study by w3techs.com found that:

“Drupal is used by 27.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know and that use .edu as top level domain.” http://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-edu-/content_management

So how to best keep this momentum going?  I’ll be putting together a document soon and sharing it with the community about how I think we should be positioning Drupal in higher education. Here are a few of the main points so far:

• We have seen nation wide budget cuts and need to continue to innovate in the face of tight budgets, increasingly doing more with less
• Standardizing on Drupal and we can unite staff roles and technology stacks on the web under a common platform.  No other web platform could power websites, intranets, learning management systems, content management systems, knowledge bases, blogs, asset management systems.  Train your staff once, deploy against multiple web projects.
• Hang out in common IRC channels, unite social media presences under consistent hash tags, as well as form a website that can aggregate to all drupal.{myschool}.edu sites participating in the consortium.
• Create a list of best practices such as reasons to use certain modules and distributions as well as those recommended for use in education
• Pay knowledge forward, ultimately we’re all trying to serve the interests of faculty and students so let’s help advance things forward together

I’ll have a more complete document for my vision for what a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium would look like but these are my key thoughts at the moment.  You’ll notice most of them are structured around the people impacted by the world of today as opposed to “views is awesome and drupal is king”.

Drupal is much more then just technology much in the same way that I am much more then just a programmer.

To me, Drupal is an idea that aligns heavily with the fundamental mission of education — empowerment.

Some additional thoughts on this topic

I was accused of starting to build an LMS a couple years ago when we started talking about ELMS (pronounced elms like the tree not E {pause} LMS).  I say accused because many open source LMSers will tell you to use Moodle and that anything else is a replication of effort.  As a side note just to make sure its in writing: ELMS is not an LMS, if anything it’s closer to a LCMS — Learning Content management system but as there is no fine grain user tracking or grade book component it’s not a learning management system.  I’m writing this to give exposure to a larger movement that seems to be afoot to make drupal a LMS.

Now as I’ve found in the past, you don’t bad-mouth Moodle, especially not while sitting in a MoodleMoot presentation .  Trust me, I’m sure you’d get a lot of platform fan-boyism from me about Drupal if criticized too, everyone loves their own kids :p.  But here are the reasons I usually steer people to Drupal away from Moodle.

• Moodle is just an LMS
• Drupal can be anything

So let me get this straight.  You’re telling me that Drupal can be used for all these different systems?  And that we will hire Drupal people and train people in Drupal for all these different purposes and can share employee knowledge / skills across the different units of our university… except for the LMS?  That’s a special exception because of the size and scale and it just can’t be done.  We need specialized programming knowledge in order for that to be achieved.

Really? I think what we need is access to specialized end-user knowledge.  Based on some discussions and presentations floating around the web I think you’ll start to see some movement towards a Drupal LMS.

Some postings I’m referencing as my “evidence” that there is movement here:

• Learning management systems: action on the Drupal front
• AtriumED Discussion – Open Atrium version as an LMS – Most promising effort / movement so far
• 4 Open Source Drupal Applications for Higher Education
• Open Scholar home page – faculty focused but still shows movement in this area
• Drupal as LMS – others thoughts
• Drupal as an LMS — more thoughts from last year
• Drupal LMS Group
• Videola Video Training Distribution platform
• Schoology — A Drupal LMS, not open but still a Drupal LMS!

Ultimately I think various Drupal LMS platforms will start to emerge or at least good recipes for people to follow in building their own.  A few reasons as to why since I don’t need to go over them endlessly:

• Drupal’s community is huge
• Wide variety of Drupal themes
• Tons of Drupal usage in higher education
• Drupal is NOT educationally focused, so solutions are tailored to solve big architectural problems of the web (= lots of devs) and then viewed through the lens of an educator, modules can be selected and developed
• Quiz, Gradebook, Content Outline Designer modules already exist and I’m sure others will start to pop up

It’s a typical institutional reaction to large problems — buy into a large system and hope the problem goes away.  Organizational change is always harder to talk about from a political perspective then the notion of purchasing a system that mimiks your structure.

Here’s my bullet point slide of thoughts on the issue of what they’re all missing:

• The internet is not setup as a one-stop-shop for everything and no one is diverse enough to get it all right
• Great new services pop up every few months
• The future is grassroots and collaborative (heard of twitter?)
• Organizational structures needs to flatten in response to technological empowerment
• Still in 2011, customization to these people is “you can change the color and add your logo” (wow thanks!)
• There are no central hubs and we have many authorities

If we were to redesign the university’s degree programs and colleges, how would we start?  Here’s my proposal for what a university would be without the current connotations of what a university is today.

A lot of people I know graduated from college I know never end up going into the field that was their focus of study.  This indicates to me that often times we’re being trained for something that either doesn’t matter or the job market may not be large enough to handle.  Then what happens is that you find yourself applying for jobs where they just want to see a college degree and this somehow isn’t odd to people?

“Well I know your a chemist but really I’m just looking for a piece of paper”

So what’s the paper mean to the employer in this instance?  Well, the hope is that if you completed a program from a 4-year program that you follow through with things and that you have to have a certain base-line of intelligence.  As technology ramps up though I see people that are more test and fact driven then generalizable skills driven.

How do we restructure the university?  Everything is about emphasis but everyone gets the same degree.  This is the concept of “general education credits” to the extreme.  Use the world view shifting courses like philosophy and Sciences Technology and Society (STS) as a model.  The topics of the “courses” become focused on learning how to learn.  Today more then ever people need to be life long learners or their skills can silo’ed as to the careers and oppurtunities available to them.

We need to focus more on this and the practical application within different fields of study because lets be honest, the corporate world is going to tell you day one what you do and do not need to understand.  Companies will run you through what they want you to know shortly after being there regardless of your training.  Yes there will always be skills acquired in higher education but those can increasingly be looked up on the internet.

Some more details of this vision:

• Take the first 3 years and focus on teaching people HOW TO THINK CRITICALLY
• Everything I read and videos I watch indicates that skills taught in the first 2 years of the university experience for technical fields is outdated by the time they get their degree, front-load thinking and then skill acquisition becomes easier and cram that all into year 4
• Blended learning and web-augmented courses need to be the norm.  No online exclusive courses, no in class + powerpoint exclusive courses
• At the end you get the same degree as everyone else using things traditionally seen as minors to show emphasis
• Tie in all subjects to “courses” which should be more of learning experiences.  Philosophy of design is extremely important to teach as it’s a pervasive concept running through all fields (why was xyz designed the way it was historically)

In it they talk about students building their own LMS.  The discussion is framed mostly around “well, why would they do that” and my thoughts immediately came to reuse, remix and fragmentation culture.  They talk about 3 efforts by students at different universities to replace their LMS with something new.  I highly recommend checking it out as well as previous episodes as they give some thoughts on Structured Anarchy.  The talk got me thinking about the idea of students as part of development (which I’d love to flush out into its own post in the future) but it really got me churning about LMS unification vs fragmentation.

These two two camps seem to be developing in not only the LMS community but in Technology as a whole.  The unification crowd is most prominently represented by companies like Apple.  Buy into the Apple way of thinking and product line and life is good (great actually).  Get irked by the Apple-Standards (connectors, iProducts and iPeripherals) as opposed to universal standards and well, you’re more often than not in the Fragmentation or Google crowd at the moment.

I’m not saying one is better than the other.  I prefer the Android platform for personal reasons much as many prefer iOS in much the same way.  The Fragmentation crowd (which I am typically a member of) believe that the way towards the best end-product for students is to restructure the old ways of systems organization — that is large, singular systems — and instead adopt very (scary) loosely coupled systems.

Decentralization is scary because the thought is that this can cause resource waste.  And not just competing but similar efforts wasting man and woman hours in coding, testing, requirements gathering, etcetera.  And resource waste, especially during budget cuts is never something anyone wants to consider.  We need to be running more efficiently not playing around with new ways of doing the same thing.

So how do we walk (and identify) that fine line between what is better being left unified and what should be left fragmented?  Surely there are times when unification are king.  I mean no one wants a fragmented calendaring system (try scheduling a non-oracle users for a meeting).

Here is my current measuring stick for whether we should or should not unify / standardize / centralize a service:

• Is the need a simple task or can it mean different things to different people? (i.e. Calendaring system vs Content Management System)
• Is the system an actor in the interaction? (see Actor Network Theory — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory)

Let’s apply the rules to Email (protocol not client). What do people want to do? Send text from one person to another (CC/BC is the same process duplicated).  Is Email an Actor? No, in and of itself Email is not an actor in the transaction, it is simply getting a message from one place to another.  Email = Unified.  Calendaring systems line up in much the same way.

The Actor criteria is paramount to simplicity, though actors are rarely simple so they usually are just “no, yes” or “yes, no” assessments.  Is the system imbued with intelligence in some way or is it just a dumb-terminal (by design)?

Let’s look at our decision to build the ELIMedia Asset management system.  Is it a simple, single purpose system?  No, an Asset is like a node, it can be anything to anyone.  Can Asset management systems be an actor in the ANT model? Yes.  Asset management systems need to make decisions about copyright, permission, workflow, and embedding.  They should email or track usage of assets across infrastructures.  There’s a lot involved there!

So by my criteria, asset management systems should not be standardized?  Seems a bit strange yes?  I mean assets are wanted to live in one place all the time and be reused in many places many times.  That’s a 1 to many relationship, why not have a 1 AMS to many locations relationship? I argue that I may think of assets very differently from you from someone else.  Are we talking assets like video, audio and image source files?  Or are we talking tables, chairs, computers and physical assets of a university? Or maybe its documents like syllabi, Powerpoint slides, webpages, and working course documents?

Very different sounding systems based on the context they are used in, right? Hence, we run ELIMedia and while I’d love other people to use that system, my own assessment of needs suggests they should run their own version at the very least.  This is the only way they can truly tailor towards their needs.  Again, turning to concepts of fragmentation and Structured Anarchy: build and reuse part of whats already been built and tailor the last 2-10% to your own needs. (aside: ELIMedia will be released as a Distribution by the end of the year… just saying ).

I’d be interested to see my criteria applied to other systems / technologies to see what we come up with.  Grade books, Forums, Course Content, Syllabi, drop boxes?  How granular could we get and still have it make sense? As my take, Grade books and forums should be standardized / centralized, course content / syllabi / drop box environments… I think not.  How bout you?