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First impressions: NC-LOR, the North Carolina K-20 learning materials repository
This web site collects state-wide learning resources. Contained are also the NC-net (“Network for excellence in teaching”) submissions: “The purpose of the North Carolina Network for Excellence in Teaching is to share professional development resources statewide. This helps avoid duplication and encourages replication of best practices. The Resource Exchange offers your college the opportunity to showcase and share its best professional development resources and teaching tools.”
NC-LOR is based on TheLearningEdge’s equella, one of the erepository software systems that I have managed learning materials in.
NC-LOR training materials are hosted on WordPress. Of special interest to us should be the Moodle integration: “How to Use the NCLOR with Moodle 1.9.x (4.1): This tutorial should be reviewed by faculty of institutions who use Moodle as their course management system. This tutorial includes topics like: defining LMS integration, deciding what type of learning activities to put in a course, understanding how to use Moodle with the NCLOR, understanding how to update item links and information on learning object creation”. However, UNCC has not implemented NC-LOR integration as of yet:
Even without the Moodle integration, while students can access NC-LOR materials only from within Moodle, as member of the UNC system, you can either browse NC-LOR as a Guest, or ask for a Contributor account, my request had a turnaround of only a few minutes. Once you have a contributor profile, you can subscribe to receiving workflow updates from within your profile:
However, what I would like to see, but cannot find is the capability to subscribe to an RSS-feed which notifies me of updates of new submissions in a certain subject-“folder”.
The most important subject folders for LCS and ELTI are here:
There are only about 120 resources (snapshot at bottom) in the root folder, mostly links (reminds me that around 2000, I managed about a 1000 language learning links in a self-adapted PERL-CGI repository…) to freely available internet resources most of which should be in subfolders which, however, are empty.
This may be indicative of a number of typical problems I have encountered with learning materials repositories.
Language Learning Links of Lore: A Links Management System around Y2K
Based on GossamerThreads’ Links Management systems (one of the best open source PERL-CGI resource web database systems of its era), this language learning links system that I first implemented in Canada in the late 90s and took with me to the US.
Benefits: The system went beyond the usual “visit a website” foreign language elearning exercise of this pre-LMS day by allowing students to publish online, thus introducing a Web 2.0 collaboration element that shared meaningful exercises in the German learning community. We had contributions from Kingston, Toronto, Detroit and Des Moines.
The system was both reasonably easy to use for teachers (How_to_add_a_links_assignment_in_90secs) and productive for students who could improve their language skills by interacting with, reviewing and presenting authentic target language websites, while having quick access to other computerized language learning resources, like fledgling online dictionaries (also stored in and searchable from the same interface).
Example output:
Highlights included reviews of websites dedicated to online shopping, travel booking, mapping, live webcams, and much more…
See here is an example of an Yippee! assignment conducted during one of the face-to-face classes in the language center:
Limitations: All links needed to fit into a pre-tagging strictly hierarchical categorization tree. A GUI, but no batches – I preferred to write myself PERL scripts to batch update the underlying database files.
Learning Materials eRepositories: Thoughts & Considerations
Cost- and time-saving benefits of learning material eRepositories include:
- sharing and reuse of content for the teacher ad learner
- de-duplication for the IT support
Typical issues I have encountered with learning materials repositories:
- questionable applicability of the software-object-oriented-design (OOD)-derived concept of encapsulated and reusable learning “objects” to highly progressive subjects like language arts;
- also, a not uncommon problem of OOD gone wrong: having a “God-object” vs. SOLID-principled object-design, is even more of a risk with “learning objects”: Don’t they not always tend to be too complex to truly reap the benefits of having a design based on many small encapsulated and reusable objects in software programming?
- licensing & copyright or privacy FERPA restrictions preventing uploads and specialization of interest prevents the network effects which have made the open internet so pervasive (and disruptive to some businesses);
curation using metadata implementing controlled vocabularies and ontologies , even if crowd-sourced, remains a daunting task for domain specialists for non-librarians, while it has been said to be the secret of librarians:
“als ob er jetzt das Geheimnis dieser Wände aussprechen müßte: ‘Herr General,’ sagt er ‘Sie wollen wissen, wieso ich jedes Buch kenne? Das kann ich Ihnen nun allerdings sagen: Weil ich keines lese!” Weißt du, das war mir nun beinahe wirklich zuviel! Aber er hat es mir, wie er meine Bestürzung gesehen hat, auseinandergesetzt. Es ist das Geheimnis aller guten Bibliothekare, daß sie von der ihnen anvertrauten Literatur niemals mehr als die Büchertitel und das Inhaltsverzeichnis lesen. ‘Wer sich auf den Inhalt einläßt, ist als Bibliothekar verloren!’ hat er mich belehrt. ‘Er wird niemals einen Überblick gewinnen!’” (Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)
eRepository implementations I have used:
- Our Moodle instance is still looking for an erepository system to integrate. We are getting some eRepository benefits (easy reuse across courses without need for term-wise recycling/re-upload; de-duplication) by implementing [your language here] metacourses in which we enroll all [your language here] “child courses”
- The equella eRepository is used by NC-LOR, and TBA:I have managed learning materials in it earlier, in conjunction with Blackboard – most recommended (at least then) among educational technologists, but not for the faint of heart, which seems to have limited the faculty adoption (and for which NC-LOR may have been a reference implementation, if I remember correctly). One of the things I did not like about equella when I used it (2006-2008) was the seemingly endless point-and-click-and-WWWait.
- The Blackboard content-system was WebDAV based and therefore, once you had established the connection of your client to the WebDAV share (which MS-VISTA WebDAV updates unfortunately temporarily broke ), featured an extremely user-friendly integration with the MS-Windows shell that allowed for batch-handling of files in a familiar, fast “fat client” interface.
- I was, when it was first released, and its metadata-tagging features advertised by Jon Udell, highly impressed by – and consequently have become an avid proponent of, and much more active photographer itself – MS-Windows Vista (now also in: Live) PhotoGallery which combines intuitive use with great speed . However, requirements for managing and sharing a personal photo and video collection are not nearly as complex as for shared learning materials (although I have also used it managing my personal work ePortfolio).
eRepository: How to manage multimedia learning materials? Maybe with ShareStream
Target language audio and video materials – as well as other textual, multimedia and/or interactive materials – are crucial assets (and should become “reusable learning objects”) in learning centers – how best to manage them?
I have worked for a number of HE institutions, up to the very recent past, that charge their students between $30.000 and $40.000 per year, while their learning materials handling in the learning center consisted of what DVDs and VCR tapes fit into a shoe carton, for a lab assistant to frantically browse through when faced with a learner or teacher request for materials. Not to mention teachers spending inordinate amounts of time scanning stacks of make-believe VCR and DVD “libraries” in the learning center.
I have blogged here before about various solutions that attempt to remedy this: from home-baked stop-gap measures to the introduction of eRepository offerings for digital asset management.
If you are familiar with these issues, you will understand that I am eagerly looking for better help with managing multimedia learning materials. ShareStream claims to provide a turnkey solution addressing these needs. Its architecture – according to the Tulane pilot – consists of a ShareStream server which serves as eRepository and metadata catalogue, a streaming server, and an encoding server (for lecture-capture: YAT (“yet another tag”)). ShareStream also integrates with the Blackboard LMS.
Have a look at the demo of the pilot at Georgetown University which they gave during MAALLT 2010 and which they now also offer workshops on. One interesting thing I figured out during the question period is that they avoid breaking the Digital Millennium Act when digitizing copy-protected DVD materials by capturing to digital only the analog AV output of a DVD – a reminder that a reform of copyright is sorely needed.
Blackboard: Content System: Ancillary digital textbook material reuse (publish to course participants, roll-over between terms)
If you have a well administered language program, your admin should have uploaded all digital (text, audio, textbook and table of contents) materials that come with your textbook for convenient reuse between sections and terms into the Blackboard content system.
As a Blackboard course administrator, you can easily give all course participants access in 1 step (as course administrator, you can also access the audio materials during classes from the Blackboard content system directly).
Here is a video recording of a real-world walkthrough of this process – voice-over is in German, but Blackboard interface is in English: blackboard-content-system-finding-adding-existing-content-item-to-course-access-play.wmv
|
Start Time |
Topic |
|
0,0 |
overview of teaching and learning procedure |
|
0,1 |
course add item / content collection link |
|
1,30 |
how to search for content. Remember: Search is your friend, if you have a consistent metadata system for your content (start with meaningful file names): |
|
3,15 |
hot to add permissions for other users |
|
5,3 |
add to course for for students |
|
5,4 |
listen to an example audio from course |
Once you have given course participants access to the audio materials, and you teach the course again next term, it is even easier to roll over the access: Just use the Copy link in the Blackboard Control Panel.
MS-SharePoint and the LLC
The LLC has a SharePoint team-site (Yay! ). About the first thing asked for in September when I found out searching the company website that Inside Loyola – the locally branded version of DataTEL’s ActiveCampus – is built on MS-SharePoint.
This means MS-SharePoint’s features are available to the LLC. This has benefits which come with groupware applications (aka “What’s Wrong with Email?”) that sit on top of an account management system likes AD.
On the basis of the MS-SharePoint/MS-Exchange/MS-Active directory stack, you can build, with much less effort, a much better calendaring/scheduling solution than CGI’s from the 90s provide.
Calendaring/Scheduling is a productivity task common to most businesses. Learning resource catalogues are much more vertical market specific. But if you cannot even manage the character input issues in foreign language video catalogue in your pre-.Net ASP solution, you might still find a generic solution based on SharePoint lists better.
And once you outsourced common productivity software development to MS, you can get implementing e-learning beyond watching TV.
LLC Catalogue: Video-Reserves.xlsm, Reserve desk, Schedule, using Blackboard Content System WebDAV
For a LLC video schedule, we came up with the following repurposing of existing infrastructure:
- MS-Excel: still the “Swiss army knife” of choice for the middle manager. Allows for: semi-automatic creation of reserve date sequences (insert series), given a start and end date; data validation during data entry, and, based on that, sorting and filtering and, based on that, finding.
- Blackboard Content management system (WebDAV) to manage reading and writing (editing) permissions.
- Staff can use MS-Excel to request videos – preferably at start of term – to be put on reserve within a start and end date, during which they will be periodically shown, by opening the spreadsheet from MS-Excel and filling in the green cells in the first empty row at the bottom.
- Lab Staff can use MS-Excel to periodically transfer video reserve requests into video showings.
- Lab Assistants can use MS-Excel to daily maintain video reserve desk and video showings.
- Students can use a web browser to preview video showing times during the remainder of the term.
- To open the video schedule for read-only, Loyola students and staff can simply click this link in their browser: https://blackboard.loyola.edu/bbcswebdav/users/trplagwitz/llc-pfiles/video/video-reserves.xslm. Even read-only access includes the capability to search, sort and filter the schedule data, but you cannot save back.
- To open the video schedule for editing, LLC and Modern Languages staff can start MS-Excel, click menu: File / Open, and copy/paste this link: https://blackboard.loyola.edu/bbcswebdav/users/trplagwitz/llc-pfiles/video/video-reserves.xslm, then click open.
- All users will have to authenticate with their institutional account info:
LLC Catalogue: This is not Google!
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I have been given access to the online catalogue program, learned that VS.net 2008 still supports classic ASP, and managed to make a couple of changes to the catalogue home and search result and pages which will hopefully make your learning material searches more successful.
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Other ways to find help
If you cannot find it here, look there: 5,500 Language-Learning Links and Programs for learning or teaching 150 languages
Shortcuts:Our Lists, Our Maps, LRC Staff Moodle Site,LRC Project Moodle Site, 49erexpress, UNCC Moodle, Student Recordings: s:claslcslrcsanakostudent
Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
Test the Sanako Installer, Webbrowser Popup Konfigurator for XP, or Windows7, faster LRC TeacherPC Log-in Let MS facilitate diacritics writing by installing for you US-International keyboard layout
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