Author Archive
The new ILIAS version 3.8 offers a lot of interesting and useful Web 2.0 features like podcasts, RSS support, tagging with del.icio.us or Google Maps. All courses and groups may now have an own news feed to update their members about ongoing activities in the course or group. Every user can subscribe to a personal web feed with all news of items on the personal desktop and access these news with the client’s feed reader. User may create podcasts by uploading MP3 files to ILIAS and offering also to the outside. Google Maps have been integrated in the member lists of courses and groups. If a course or group member offers his or her personal position in the personal profile, ILIAS displays the position of the member on the map. All content items in ILIAS can be tagged and added to the personal del.icio.us site. Other Web 2.0 features will follow in the next versions. On the roadmap are a XML-based ILIAS wiki and tag clouds for content in ILIAS. For more information have a look in the «ILIAS Roadmap and Release» module.
July 2nd, 2007
A Show-me-day « Creation of Multimedia Learning Modules form Open Content » was offered by the Cologne Bazaar team at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg, April 16, 2007. The major aim of the workshop was to inform teachers about where open content is already available and how it could be used. While creating their own learning modules the teachers should learn what has to took into consideration when using open content for their own learning material.
15 teachers from four countries attended the workshop.
The « Show-me-day » was hold as a four-hour session. In the first part the participants were introduced to Open Content and what ideas are behind this concept. Manifests and political implications of Open Content were presented, but also about the tension between Open Access and Intellectual Property. The participants learned about popular Open Content licenses like Creative Commons and GNU FDL and how to use these licences for own created content and what has to take into account when using contents of others.
During a second part there was talked about how one could use Open Content for the own teaching. The following tools and resources for finding and sharing contents were presented briefly: Flickr, Internet Archive, Connexions, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, CC Search and CC Directories. Other resources were mentioned as well. For every of the presented tools or resources some minutes were reservered for exploring and trying out. The participants discussed also practices for re-using Open Content and didactical and organisational aspects of the re-use.
In the hands-on-tutorial after a coffee break, teachers created multimedia-enhanced learning module using Open Content found on the Internet. Some teachers have cooperated in groups, others preferred working by their own. One suggestion for the practical work was to create a short module about Open Content for their colleagues. Also a tool for creating the modules was suggested (OpenOffice with eLAIX extension to export a document as multimedia module to the LMS ILIAS). But some teachers preferred to work with their own environment and tools which was accepted as well.
The working atmosphere was very intense and all participants have tried out several tools and resources to find appropriate open content for their modules. During the entire workshop participants could ask for additional information or clarification. Most of the questions raised by the participants were about how marking an open content item with a licence correctly. Several participants asked for the easiest way to find open content lincenced images or textes. Most of the participants were astonished about the variety of resources the might use. But several of the german speaking and teaching participants were disapointed about the small amount of open content in German.
The evaluation of the event showed that open educational resources are not yet that important in daily work for the participants as their own produced materials. The majority of the teachers do not control the property rights of the content they use. And they pay only seldom for copyright. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of knowhow about IPR handling amongst them. But even if the knowledge about open content licences was different, the majority of the participants declared to invest further time to learn more about these licences after the workshop, even if they feel secure or partly secure in using open content licences. So the « Show-me-day » stimulated the participant’s interest in this issue - which can be seen as another step for establishing the use of open educational resources in e-learning.
May 2nd, 2007
With the success of Wikipedia, Open Content has become a popular concept for publishing any kind of creative work like texts or images and allowing to copy and to modify them by anyone. The Bazaar team offers a workshop about Open Content and IPR-handling at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg, Austria, the 16th April of 2007. In this workshop we try to explore the new opportunities offered by Open Content in combination with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for blended and distance learning.
In the first part, we talk about Open Content and which ideas are behind this concept, about the manifests and political implications of Open Content, and also about the tension between Open Access and Intellectual Property Rights. The variety of popular Open Content licenses like Creative Commons and GNU-FDL will be presented. We will show how to use these licences for content created by participants and what has to be taken into account when using Open Content of others.
During the second part, we talk about how authors could use Open Content for their work. Therefore valuable tools and resources for finding and sharing contents (like articles, pictures, audio files etc.) will be presented. And we will analyse and discuss practices for re-using Open Content. Special emphasis will be put on didactical and organisational aspects of the re-use of Open Content.
Finally, in the hands-on-tutorial, we will attempt to build a multimedia-enhanced learning module using Open Content found on the Internet. This will give participants the opportunity to use the different tools and to identify the appropriate presented licences for their content production. For the tutorial we will use OpenOffice as content editor and export these OO-documents to the Open-Source-LMS ILIAS by using the OO-extension eLAIX.
More information about the workshop and the EduMedia conference can be found at the EduMedia web site: http://edumedia.salzburgresearch.at/
April 12th, 2007
One topic of this year’s International ILIAS Conference in Göttingen, Germany, will be the integration of the ILIAS LMS into bigger IT structures of universities and companies. The question of running a LMS all alone as a single service or integrating learning management systems into t general IT services like authentication, student’s management or mail service is a top issue at german universities at the moment.
In the first years of practising e-learning at universities, learning management systems were often installed for pilot projects and by teachers and institutes rather than by the computing service centers. This is why learning management systems have got a special status within an university. One reason for this was the teacher’s desire for a certain independency from the sometimes sluggish and over-evaluating IT experts at the computing centers. Most of the first used learning management systems were installed and maintained by faculties and institutes - not by the computing centers. Teachers and professors could test and evaluate those systems and run them quite independently. And because LMS are autonomous systems and usually offer all necessary features like an integrated user administration and authentication service, there was no need to connect them to other IT services provided by the computing centers themselves. This is why you find several LMS within one german university today - even if there is one general maintained LMS for the entire institution. And this is one reason why institutes have changed systems every two to three years without having big migration problems.
Today running a LMS as stand-alone system becomes more and more problematical. For a lot of universities in Germany e-learning is no longer a scientific research or pilot project but a basic service for improving teaching and learning. With the upcoming BA and MA degrees (Bologna process) a general reorganisation of the teaching takes place and e-learning is more and more important to handle the teacher’s higher workload for tutoring and assessment within these new study paths. This produces new requirements to a LMS like importing users from student directories, remote course creation from university management system or exporting user information to the university’s examination office. Another increasing requirement is the integration of a LMS into the university’s web portal.
The change from stand-alone LMS to an integrated system is mainly an organisational problem. Getting data from examination offices or student’s enrolement is a very difficult and highly political process. But even the technical realisation is not that trivial. An integrated LMS needs interfaces for connecting services and exchanging data. For some services standards are already existing - but not for all. And some of these administration systems used at universities are not standard compliant but highly proprietary.
Initialised by Novell a webservice interface has been developed for ILIAS since 2004. This SOAP interface has been extended in the last ILIAS versions and offers now a variety of services like remote user creation in ILIAS, course creation or remote role assignment. This SOAP interface has already been used to import users from the worldwide Novell user e-directory to their ILIAS training courses or for coupling the university administration system StudIP with ILIAS offering single-sign-on and single-look. At the time being the ILIAS open source team is participating in a project for developing a multi-system interface to a system called HIS-LSF used by a lot of german universities for administrating their lectures and life-courses. This interface will allow to connect HIS-LSF to a certain number of different LMS and support the remote creation of a course from HIS-LSF in ILIAS for example. A first version of this interface will be available end of the year.
This loose coupling of different systems will become essential for realising and supporting integrated e-learning services. Only those LMS will survive the next years that offers those interfaces and can be integrated in a broader IT architecture of an university. But we can think even one step beyond. Will there still be learning management systems in five year that can be seen as autonomous running applications? Or will the current systems migrate to something like “learning management services” that can be part of an administration system offering only those features and services that are need for realising e-learning? The advantages of such a concept are evident. Different from today where every LMS is a bit of an all-round software every service would focus on what it is made for - and this perfectly. LMS developers would no longer need to re-implement functionalies that are already existing in other tools (like mail or user administration).
But unfortunately learning management systems would become more or less invisible thus only the functionality is left on the user’s frontend. And the cost of re-designing the current systems would be high. This might not be a problem for Blackboard but maybe for open source tools like Moodle and ILIAS - and also for a lot of commercial systems as well. And therefore such a trend would be dangerous for the variety of LMS products on the market because only big players might have the resources for such a development and a further concentration of vendors would take place.
This process of full-integration is only a vision. But facing other changes in software development of the last decades it is not absurd. If this happens or not, it mainly depends from the user’s requirements for in e-learning. And this means, we all have a certain influence in this process.
September 15th, 2006
At May 15, 2006 the first “Show-me day” of the Bazaar project took place successfully at University of Cologne. Fourteen teachers were introduced in creating, exchanging and re-using e-learning materials with Open Source software tools. The participants came from schools and institutions for further and vocational training of the Cologne region.
The Show-me day started with an introduction to open content by Carsten Kozianka from the Cologne team. Carsten explained how one can safely copy, modify and redistribute Open Content in combination with its own learning material. Equipped with an own computer and online connection every participant could verify how easy it is to add a creative commons licence to an own image or text file.
The second part of the Show-me day was dedicated to hands-on experience in creating e-learning content. Matthias Kunkel demonstrated how to turn a simple text file into an multimedia-enhanced e-learning module by using OpenOffice with the add-on iLEX and the learning management system ILIAS. At the end of the event Carsten presented how to create and format WIKI pages as an alternative way to create content for educational purposes.
Due to the deep interest of the participants and their wish to continue this exchange of information and experience, the Bazaar team Cologne decided to open an ILIAS stall for all participants of the Show-me day and for all people interested in creating e-learning content with ILIAS.
June 7th, 2006
