From your organization's
perspective, what are the most exciting opportunities for
improving the learning experience resulting from potential
innovation in the sharing of data among learning and/or
administrative systems?
Feng said this is an area where vendors can
begin to enable more of the kind of interaction than just
students being able to view their syllabuses online. Oracle has
released, for example, its student administration integration
pack, which is their implementation of the LIS standard. Based on
the work that has been done by the LIS working group during the
past two years, implementing that standard into their software
they felt was the best way to feed that data back into the
specifications being finalized now. Oracle has integrated their
application with Sakai, Moodle, and Desire2Learn as well as
working with Inigral to produce a version of Schools Facebook,
which enables students in a class to share data and communicate
with one another.
"Another area where vendors can enhance the
process using LIS standards is with analytics," said Feng. "Where
you have data coming from the gradebook, it can be more finely
grained. We can have the outcomes defined in such a way that we
can gather that interesting information and have in place the
early warning systems to monitor and take action to help students
and improve their retention. Having the LIS standards allows us
to have access to the same kind of data using all these various
applications. It enables choice for the students and faculty,
which is what we're all trying to do, which is not try to lock
someone into just having one way of doing something. Professors
want to be able to have a new and interesting way to deliver
content and introduce a new way of learning to their
students."
As co-chair of the LIS workgroup, Feng said
early versions of their work provided information about work
being done in the integration area, but subsequent effort has
been made with regard to providing a service model. The group
worked on several different internal drafts which has evolved
into a CM/DN (Contributing Members/Development Network) Draft
which will be available to about 80 IMS Global voting member
organizations as well as the IMS Development Network members.
After trial implementations have been conducted and refined, it
is hoped the models can then go public toward the end of
2009.
From the university perspective, the most
exciting opportunities for improving the learning experience is
the pending cornucopia of integrated services, said Leonhardt.
Although complexity of integrated systems is a current problem,
he believes several areas are reaching a tipping point. "The
course management system has been a very important tool for us
over the last 10 years. We've seen nothing but consistent growth
in terms of the number of users and courses, as well as the
training of internal communities like faculty and staff." As a
result, he said they have done some key integrations at
Georgetown such as adding a rich media environment that has
allowed them to add hundreds of thousands of audio and video
objects per semester to the system. They've also done integration
with an asynchronous environment. Leonhardt sees future
integration with library services, blog and wiki tools, a host of
social networks, and moving toward Google applications in a very
serious way. Beyond all that, he sees mobile technology as an
area for learning where a lot of exciting things can happen. "I
think the whole notion of building applications for mobile
environments, for providing content in mobile ways, is really the
wave of the future."
Fontaine is a big believer in choice theory
in that by simplifying people's choices, they will take better
actions as a result. As we try to improve the teaching and
learning experience to our system, being able to provide better
business rules and best practices around these systems will have
a huge impact. They have already seen on a lot of campuses that
have adopted Blackboard, for example, that when institutions
automatically create course sites for faculty as opposed to
waiting for faculty to request those sites, the adoption rate
increases dramatically. "I really think that as we expand the
level of services we're going to provide with LIS and simplify
the submission of final grades that we provide to the Registrar's
Office, you're going to find that the quality of instruction goes
up."
LIS 2.0 takes us to a point of maturity in
terms of a service oriented approach to integration where
institutions can participate in a lot of what's currently
available on the market, said Moon. "Once you have that entry
pass to the party, it opens up a whole new world in terms of
business process management tools, and you can plug into those
services and events." The whole notion of web-oriented
architecture, he said, exposing capabilities from Google, Amazon,
e-Bay, and the like. "Where you have access to this global
network that is the Web, once you can participate, you can take
advantage of all that. Cloud computing, SaaS (Software as a
Service), you are able to draw on all of that. It enables you to
create a more engaging environment for your learners."
