WebcT – Doug Connery e-portfolio

Case Study Moodle or Vista – my reflection

After reflecting for a week on my quick response to these two case studies and reading my class mates responses, I realized that I live and breathe these types of scenarios on a day-to-day basis and I did not even need to think when I created my responses. My responses were based on my experiences from my institute and I realize now that most of my classmates have very little experience in this area so struggled a bit. This is a change as many of the theory based discussion topics in other courses have been a struggle for me; however this a good way to learn when placed outside ones comfort zone. I believe we covered this in one of the learning theory’s – zone of proximal ….?

Scenarios like this; deciding on which LMS option to choose and scoping out the time to create a course is difficult to do without knowing many factors not provided by the case study. That of course is not the purpose of this exercise, it is to think about the factors involved using one of the two frameworks we are studying this week: Chickering and Gamson and the SECTIONS model from Bates and Poole. This was a great exercise to apply the frameworks mentioned above in a case study.

Below is the case study and my responses:

Case Study: Moodle or WebCT/Vista?

Benoît is a sessional instructor in the English department of a large, research-intensive university. Previously he has used WebCT to disseminate lecture notes and readings for his face-to-face Business Writing course.

His department head has approached him about offering an online version of Business Writing. However, WebCT is no longer available at his university and Benoît must choose either WebCT/Vista or Moodle. WebCT/Vista is the university’s “official” LMS and has university-wide IT support, but the Help Desk is difficult to get a hold of and can be very slow in responding to e-mail. Moodle is hosted within the Faculty of Arts, but operates as a stand-alone tool with no real technical support: instructors need to set up their own courses from scratch. More and more faculty and instructors in the English Department now use Moodle, since it isn’t administered by IT support: less paperwork, less red tape.

Benoît is very comfortable in the design mode of WebCT; he has also done some general web design, mostly for personal use. In terms of web design he’s developed content, uploaded it via FTP and then left it there. He’s heard from colleagues that WebCT/Vista is dreadful, that doesn’t have half the functionality of WebCT, though he has not yet had time to do any evaluation himself.

Because of his teaching load, Benoît estimates he could spend up to 5 hours a week developing the online version of Business Writing. The course would go live next semester.

Discussion questions

Please answer in the discussion forum:

1. Moodle or WebCT/Vista for Benoît?

How might Benoît go about deciding whether to go with Moodle or WebCT/Vista? What questions might he ask himself? Come up with one specific question and post it in the Benoît discussion thread. Be sure to explain why this is an important question.

My Response:

This case study has so many hidden messages and there is a lot that can be gleaned by reading between the lines. It sounds like it is based on a real scenario somewhere.

Designing and developing a fully on-line course is no easy task, Benoit may not know what he is in for. As a sessional instructor he may not know all of the politics in his department and the institute in regards to the switch over to WebCT Vista and the real reasons why faculty are using Moodle. He has heard lots of things, but he needs to validate what is real and what is not as one factor to help him decide which LMS to use.

Institutes quite often have funding and resources available to help with the development of courses and for changing delivery modes; for example from F-2-F to fully online. Funding could amount to some offload so he could have more than 5 hours/week available. They may also have resource support available: Instructional Designer so the course is designed and developed so students will be successful, multimedia support to ease the burden of uploading content, Writer/editor support to review and edit his content and copyright support to advise him on what he can upload/access freely and what will need permission or what he should not use. Any funding or institute resource support may depend on the LMS he uses; the institute LMS: WebCT Vista or the “Lone Ranger approach” (Bates, 2000) and use Moodle.

He should do some reading about online course development, for example Bates (2000), Bates and Pool (2003), Bullen and Janes (2007) and Garrison and Vaughan (2008). He should also talk to colleagues in his institute and perhaps other institutes about developing on-line courses to get a sense of their experiences in general and with different LMS’s. He should also talk to the person responsible for distance education in his department to determine what is expected in a fully online course. Then with a list of questions, meet with his department head to clarify what is expected of him and any institutional resources available to support him. Then he should have enough information to decide if he is still interested in developing the course and if he is which LMS to use.

References:

Bates, A.W. (2000). Managing technological change: strategies for colleges and university leaders. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.

Bullen, M. and D.P. Janes (2007). Making the Transition to E-Learning: Strategies and Issues. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.

Garrison, D.R., & Vaughan, N.D. (2008). Blended Learning in Higher Education, San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

After a request from the Instructor to give one question only, my response was:

Okay, round two without reading between the lines and knowing what goes on in the background.

Benoit would need to consider whether no technical support is better or worse then poor technical support. Considering that technical support not only applies to the instructor, it also applies to the students, he would need to ask himself: “Which would be better for the students?”

2. Benoît’s time

How much development time (in weeks) would you estimate Benoît would need to develop Business Writing, the online version? Post your estimation in weeks in the Module 2: Business Writing development timeframe discussion thread. Be sure to explain how you came up with this number.

My Response:

This is a variable with many factors. Many a project has gone off the rails without first reviewing the quality and quantity of the “content” promised by the instructor. Another unknown factor is the quality expectations of the institute, or by provincial education bodies for fully on-line courses. If institute funding and resources are available to Benoit then he may have an opportunity to update or even redesign his course as he is putting it on-line. It also depends on the institutes approach to developing courses, do they require the Instructor to work with an Instructional Designer to create a learning design or a blue print first before they start developing content. What value does the institute put on instructor time in terms of their content expertise verses their time doing other things such as loading content to an LMS that could be done more effectively with a multimedia specialist. Based on costing models and centralized technology support at my institute, and the 5 hours/week that Benoit has available, I would estimate Benoit would need the following time frame:

• Learning Design supported with a facilitated workshop: 50 hours @ 5 hours/week = 10 weeks

• Course development including updating his current course: 120-150 hours @ 5 hours/week = 24-30 weeks.

Total weeks needed: 34-40 weeks based on Benoit’s timeframe. He would need to either have his department head get a nice grant to give him a significant offload or he would be best to turn down the offer.

Applying the Frameworks: SECTIONS

As I was reading through the SECTIONS model by Bates and Pool, I found it resonated with me more than the Chickering articles. I was tempted to do a critique of the SECTIONS model as even though they state that it was modified from the distance education ACTION model to fit with campus-based universities, I am not convinced it does in all aspects. In addition, the book is now almost 10 years old and many things have changed since 2003 that could justify a revised edition, either as a rewrite or an update much along the lines that Chickering did in 1996 with Ehrmann.

Student Demographics:

Bates and Pool talk about how student’s fresh out of high school need more support as they are less independent learners. He alludes to the idea that they may not be ready for full on-line technology. Third and fourth year students are more prepared as are students who come back to post-secondary after working in the workforce. From a polytechnic or college perspective most of our programs are 3 years or less so according to Bates and Pool, we can’t expect them to study entirely through the use of technology. I wonder if 10 years later, if this is still true. I remember reading somewhere that the Net generation who are great at using technology from a social networking context, do not transfer their digital native skills well out of their comfort zones into educational technology or business technology applications. I saw a presentation from Dr. Kelly Edmonds this week about challenges of blended learning. She commented that in general, students in her study who experienced blended learning for the first time, struggled with many aspects. After thinking about this, the struggles seem to be around lack of independent learning skills so Bates and Pool ‘s comments are probably still correct.

Costs:

Costing technology in education is a hair ball, and probably not a small one from a house cat! Reading through Bates and Pool illustrates this point. They talk about the costs of using technology in education including production of technology-based materials, graphics, simulations and games, purchasing and licensing software and equipment costs, however they also weave in the costs of creating content, instructional costs, copyright costs, department photocopy costs, course development costs, thus everything blends together.

Once you factor in the mode of delivery along the e-learning spectrum from a basic web site to house the course outline and a few documents to support an F-2-F delivery through the broad range of blended learning to fully online, the question is what percentage of these costs can be attributed to technology. Another factor that was only briefly touched by Bates and Pool is how to factor in non educational technology or industry specific technology. For example in a Dental Assisting program, the X-ray equipment; is it considered educational technology or industry specific technology, perhaps educational technology? What about the tools and heavy shop equipment used in a heavy duty mechanic program, is it industry specific technology because it is not electronic, maybe, but these tools are technology and are used to help teach the skills of the trade. Another blend.

Another factor is how the program is delivered. Generally speaking, programs during the day are considered grant based programs where the money to pay for the program comes from a combination of tuition and operating grants from the province. Programs and courses offered in continuing education and distance/fully online are considered earned revenue based, as the money to pay for the program comes from tuition only. They must at least break even, and should make money to go back into maintaining the program or for developing new courses or it goes into the general institute budget. To develop and deliver a new program during the day has a different costing and revenue model than earned revenue. For example, Bates and Pool talk about the unit cost/student and the cost per student over a five year period. This is all about business cases and returns on investment which applies to the earned revenue side of education more than the grant side.

The hair ball is getting pretty big so I will stop here.

Speed:

Speed is an interesting factor and Bates and Pool give a couple of perspectives; however I will introduce some more. Going back to the earned revue vs grant or daytime programming scenarios is a great example of magnitude differences in speed. Speed of implementation on the grant side is measured in and years, continuing education and continuing education is measured in months and some institutes do corporate training which is measured in weeks. So a model to design and develop a technology based grant course will not work for corporate training and will need to be simplified to meet the needs of continuing education and distance education.

How the course is designed and developed can affect the flexibility of updating. Courses developed by central technology units to support instructors can be a nightmare to maintain because the people designing (Instructional Designers) and developers of the course sites (multimedia) generally are not involved with teaching and maintaining their final products. If a course in html is turned over to an instructor who does not work in the html world (the majority), and the course needs maintenance and updating (textbook edition change, updated schedule) at the next offering, they need to draw on scarce and sometimes expensive resources to make this happen. However if the course is designed with maintenance and upkeep in mind, then the components of the course most likely to change will not be in html, it will be in a format that the instructor can easily change and upload themselves. Thus I do challenge Bates and Pool’s comments that a web site is easier to change and update than a printed text because the web site requires specialized skills over and above those required for updating printed text or information in a word document that can be uploaded to the site by the instructor.

Final thought:

I read somewhere that UBC is going to stick with WebCT/ Blackboard and move to a higher version. I wonder if UBC used the SECTIONS model to do an evaluation of their needs and vendor products before making their decision…..