Forum Statistics for OU Courses

One thing I like to do is track forum usage statistics, a primitive form of learning analytics. Since we changed to Moodle from FirstClass, I don’t find this very easy. In FirstClass, not only could you do standard types of search on message data, but the read history of each message was also searchable. Combine that with a built-in way to restrict the search to specific conferences, sort the output by conference, user, or date, and group by conference or user, and you could determine all kinds of things. Some of my favourites were:

• Total # of messages posted.
• Total # of unique posters.
• Total # of unique readers contrasted with enrolled students.
• Percentage of posts that were moderators/course news versus students.
• Top ten student posters and % of overall posts they contributed.
• A breakdown of posting activity by logical parts and subparts, e.g. “Block 1″ overall but also “Block 1: Software Support” and “Block 1: Discussion”.

The last one was useful to examine between different presentations when combined with knowledge of total number of students enrolled. It permitted me to see where students had the most problems and collect evidence if, when changes had been made for the following presentation, changes were having a positive effect. You could also see the trends in posting behaviour across cohorts.

Getting at the Data

In theory, some of this information is available in the Moodle logs. I just downloaded the log for one of my past courses I chaired and was surprised to note I could see “add reply” buried amongst the many “view forumng” entries. It’s downloadable as a CSV, so you’d have to roll your own data analysis tools to pull out the relevant bits. There are built-in statistics analysis facilities but they always seemed to be disabled on my courses, making download logs the only real option.

The problem is access to those logs isn’t always available. As a course chair on Moodle 1.x, if the course was “editable”, then the admin tools were visible and the logs could be accessed. My last presentation (2012B, ending May 2012) somehow got into LTS’s update loop and the status/workflow changed back to needing to request access, so the admin links aren’t visible. I was able to hack the URL based on access to another course and get at it but that’s a bit of a pain.

On my Moodle 2.x version course, I can see “Reports” but not a link to logs anywhere. I could edit the course site and back up the content, but perhaps I don’t have the permissions to access the logs. Certainly a typical moderator likely wouldn’t.

What I Do in Moodle

My approach generally in Moodle, regardless of the version, has therefore been very simplistic. I discovered that if I used Safari (but not Firefox) and copied the table listing the threads in a given forum and then pasted that into a spreadsheet, the HTML table’s columns were preserved. I could then have it sum the total number of messages per forum as one of the columns was number of thread posts. This isn’t very automated. I have to do it per forum and copy the totals into an appropriate place and most forums have multiple pages, each of which has to be handled separately.

To Automate Or Not

This is ripe for automation because certain actions are predictable, repeatable, and tedious. It’s the classic story though: do I spend the time trying to write something to automate it or just do it? Which will take less time? In the long run, if you do this yearly and across many courses, then automating it will save you time but there’s that up-front cost.

A tool would also need to have a settings file, probably listing the module’s base URL and containing a list of the forum ID numbers/URLs and names. These are required because every presentation has a different ID and every forum has its own unique ID used to access it. Most modules don’t maintain a page that solely lists only the forums and the number/structure of those forums would vary between different modules. I suggested including names—or at least names I’d like to use to refer to them in reports—because otherwise you have to scrape that off the forum pages too and I’d find shorter ones more useful than the full, formal names.

Another issue to contend with is authentication. I don’t already have code that can sign into the OU and maintain authentication for the session, although I know some people must. Before we had the “Dashboard”, one T320 AL wrote a tool to scrape metadata from the VLE and stored it in a local MySQL database. He then had an interface producing a dashboard for him that was something more than just a list of forums per course with an unread message indicator. I’ve recently heard, however, he gave up on his tool because VLE changes kept breaking it.

Conclusion

Here I am writing about what I should be doing rather than doing it, but the process of thinking about it is always useful. Perhaps someone’s already done some of or all of this? My bet would be on Tony Hirst, but LTS colleagues may have some tools and I just don’t know about them.

Image: The Open Source Initiative’s Open Source logo.

One of my jobs at The Open University is chairing TT381, the course on Open Source philosophies and PHP development.  T381 is the fifth of the Web Apps Development (WAD) courses.  I’ve been involved with the presentation and development of the course since its launch.

Although TT381 doesn’t start again until February, I’m forced to remember that the brilliant Keith Evetts has resigned as the Student Café moderator.  I need to make some recommendations for a replacement.  I’m therefore soliciting expressions of interest from former students for the paid position of Café moderator.  In theory, the Café moderator is responsible for overseeing the social forum, which means making the atmosphere fun and inviting.  He or she should also work together with the course team to deal with any issues that are raised in the Café.   Keith Evetts, of course, went far beyond this.  He also actively participated in all of the course forums and ran a series of optional coding exercises where you can never have too many parrots.  He’s set the bar high!

If you’re interested in being considered for the job, please send me an e-mail (M.A.Hoyle AT open -DOT- ac -DOT- uk) with no more than 250 words explaining why you’d like to do it and why you think you’d be good for the job.   As I need to get this sorted soon, please send me the e-mail on or before December 10th.  I’ve been told the fee is £250.  I’m going to claim the prestige and fun is priceless.  (-:

After December 10th, I will consider the expressions of interest that have been received.  Based on what you have written and whatever I happen to remember about you, I will make up an ordered shortlist of people I will be recommending.   My course administrator will then contact people in that order to formally offer them the position.  There is only one job, alas.  I will post an update here and in the Web Apps Survivors forum on FirstClass (if still available) about the shortlist.

I will also take, in comments here as well as in the Web Apps Survivors forum, any recommendations you have for other people who you think would be good as the Café moderator for TT381.

Windows Live Mail mailbox in Redmond, WA

I joined the Open University (OU) as an Associate Lecturer (AL) back in May 2000 to teach the university’s T171: You, Your Computer and the Net course, the university’s first large-scale foray into online teaching. As one of hundreds of new ALs, I was thrown into the world of FirstClass, the university’s chosen platform for collaboration and discussion in its courses, and among its students and associate lecturers. If you haven’t already heard, the death knell for FirstClass has been sounded. I believe the transition away from FirstClass for courses is expected to be complete by October 2010. As part of that transition, our e-mail accounts need to go somewhere, but where?

Sample Google Mail Spam Folder

If you’re a student, you may already be using your own personal, non-OU e-mail address at the university. If you’re an associate lecturer or other academic/support staff, having a .open.ac.uk e-mail address is an important part of your professional identity. According to David Wilson, director of strategic planning in LTS, a choice is being considered between Google Apps Education Edition and Microsoft Live@edu and should be made shortly (in Snowball 36 – November 2009). It will definitely be put into place for students, but it may extend further than that. The decision has not yet been made, so we have a very small window of opportunity to provide some input as to our preferences. I’ve constructed a very small, unofficial survey at SurveyMonkey to do that.

Both of the cloud offerings offer considerably more functionality than just e-mail. Google Mail’s been joined by Google Docs, instant messaging, and calendars. Microsoft’s HotMail has been combined with Outlook Live, a remote file locker, calendaring, instant messaging, and Microsoft Office workspace to share documents. If you’re not familiar with some of these systems, here are some resources:

• Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Mail About

• Microsoft Live@edu
• Microsoft Live@edu’s Outlook Live/Hotmail Live E-mail Service Features
• Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps” (March 2008)
• Google Apps for Education vs Microsoft’s Live@edu
  (3-part blog series): Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Thanks, Lynn, for Part 3 pointer).

The survey is open to any Open University community member, whether staff, consultant, or student. The survey will run between November 22nd and November 29th. I’ve specifically asked in the survey about your role, because I recognise that different university community members will have different needs. The survey results, broken down by role, will be forwarded onto the senior decision-making committee. I can’t guarantee how much attention they’ll pay, but the more of us who participate, the stronger the impact our voice and preferences will have.

You may feel you don’t know enough to make a choice between the two systems on offer. That’s OK, too. There’s a choice in the survey to indicate that or even that you don’t care either way.

No personal details, not even your IP address, will be collected and stored with the survey. It’s completely anonymous. It’s also unofficial. I’m doing this because I think we should have some sort of say and I’m motivated to provide a mechanism, however imperfect, to provide at least an indication of our preferences as a community. Comments or questions can be directed to me on this blog entry or via @Eingang on Twitter.

You’ll find the survey at the short URL of http://tr.im/OUinCloud. I hope you’ll participate. Feel free to point people at this blog entry, re-tweet the survey or blog address, or otherwise let as many of your fellow students and OU associates know about the survey. We only have a week and more participation is better, so let’s make it count!

Thanks!
Michelle A. Hoyle,
Open University Associate Lecturer and postgraduate student

Shortcuts:

• The survey: http://tr.im/OUinCloud or http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=IztCuXuYgqMj_2bVFGct_2f8Qg_3d_3d if the tr.im URL isn’t working.
• This entry: http://tr.im/OUCloudBlog

Images:

• Windows Live Mailbox:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/timheuer/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
• Google Mail Spam Folder: Michelle A. Hoyle

However, the music industry has been forced to change. The talent was still scarce, but production and distribution were now abundant. As we know, artists can even easily self-publish and promote, taking that power out of the record industry’s grasping hands. Educational resources are now experiencing the same sort of revolution. It’s suddenly easy for content developers to share their content; it’s the age of abundance.

Weller listed several requisites for the pedagogy of abundance:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Social-based
• Network is valuable
• Crowdsourcing

Looking at that list, it’s very heavily influenced by principles of the Open Source movement and, consequently, the Open Educational Resources movement. That movement was given a huge boost in terms of available content, quality of content, and certainly profile by MIT’s large-scale OpenCourseWare project.

One problem, however, with this model is that, while the content is free to consumers, it’s not free to the producers. In a November 10th Guardian article, author Harriet Swain states that it costs MIT between $10,000 and $15,000 to put material for each course online. She also mentions that Utah State University recently had to freeze its own project after failing to raise an addition $120,000 US/year needed to fund their project. MIT’s project is being paid for—at least partially—with donations and corporate sponsors. I suspect some of that cost is rights clearance for materials and converting courses developed prior to the project to the OpenCourseWare format. If so, the cost should go down as authors are encouraged to make use of free materials and develop in a format appropriate for easy publication via OpenCourseWare. Still, it does demonstrate that producing and disseminating high-quality free content is in itself not necessarily free.

Nevertheless, several institutions, including the Open University, are still committed to producing this content, not to mention countless individuals. Free content that we can remix. reuse, and repurpose fits beautifully and naturally into several of Weller’s suggested models, like resource-based learning and problem-based learning. However, it can also fit into constructivism, communities of practice, and connectivism too, where we’re actively building a shared understanding of materials through exploration and collaboration.

With the glut of content available, it’s easy to drown. Backchannel discussion talked about the need for information filters and crap detection (see Howard Rheingold’s excellent article). With too much choice comes uncertainty and second-guessing, something Barry Schwartz has done some research on. Shared exploration and collaboration works well with the “guide on the side” metaphor, where you have subject expert mentors who help create “paths” through the sea of content, providing an intelligent information filter.

George Siemens mentioned that this was similar to Darken’s (1996) “wayfinder” metaphor from gaming, an apt linkage. This skill is necessary for both learners and mentors, because we’re both in a transition period between scarcity and abundance. The information filtering issue probably won’t be as pronounced or maybe even worth mentioning by subsequent generations. Does that render the pedagogy of abundance a meaningless discussion or concept? I don’t think so, because we’re still talking about ways to promote participatory learning and encourage connected constructivism, regardless of the strategies people use to locate the content needed to do that.

Weller’s presentation ends with three conclusions:

1. There’s nothing in a pedagogy of abundance.
2. There are sufficient theories already; they just need to be recast.
3. None of the existing theories adequately captures the technology and behaviour, so a new theory is required.

Initially, I tended towards two, although I commented during the presentation that many of the suggested pedagogies can be mixed and matched. If you’re mixing and matching, you could end up creating something new, which could potentially make it number three.

Resources and References:

• Darken, R.P. & Sibert, J.L. (1996) ‘Wayfinding Strategies and Behaviors in Large Virtual Worlds’, presented at Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Common Ground, Vancouver, Canada, April 13-18, ACM. pp:142-149.
• Rheingold, H. (2009) ‘Crap Detection 101’, SFGate, blog entry posted June 30, 2009. Accessed November 17, 2009.
• Schwartz, B. (2004) ‘The Tyranny of Choice’, Scientific American, April 2004.
• Schwartz, B (2006) A Paradox of Choice – TED talk by Barry Schwartz
• Swain, H. (2009) ‘Any Student, Any Subject, Anywhere’, The Guardian, News -> Education -> Access to University. Accessed November 10, 2009.
• Weller, M. (2009) A Pedagogy of Abundance slides at Slideshare (with audio track)

A recent activity asked us to reflect on influences on our teaching practices, considering: practices arising from personal experiences as a student; practices from our departments; and practices we can attribute to other sources. In addition, we were asked to consider aspects of our workplace that favoured or hindered good practice. I starting making notes on the 14th of October. I did not post them to my group because I felt this was a really important activity. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it can be difficult to move ahead in a purposeful fashion. I wanted this activity to serve as a good baseline, so I invested a substantial amount of effort into thinking about it and writing it up in a coherent, cohesive fashion.

What Do I Know?

A Reflection on Influences

Activity 3 (The Open University n.d.) mentions research by Peter Knight revealing that our experiences as students can significantly influence our teaching practices. This is very reminiscent of the commonly held belief that, try as people might, they often end up behaving like their parents did when they have families of their own. Considering both ideas, they are obviously generalizations that do not always hold true. Anecdotes abound of cases where a student or a child exposed to some very extreme practices rebelled by going to the other end of the extreme. Exposure to negative or adverse practices can make us better people and better teachers, as can exposure to good practices.

Table 1: Practices learned as a student and their effects.

While enumerating my positive or negative teaching practice influences, I realized that adversity has made me a stronger person and I did l learn some important things about teaching while a student (see

Table 1). For example, reading from slides or teaching directly to the book does not add any value to the learning experience because students can do that for themselves; and a lack of enthusiasm from the instructor is clearly communicated to students, resulting in a dismissive, disinterested attitude to the material. The latter might not technically be classified as a “teaching practice”, but its effect is just as important, if not more so, than teaching practice. Enthusiasm and passion can overcome defects in materials and teaching experience, just as learning by doing can.

Table 2: Practices learned as from the Faculty of Technology at the Open University

These are not the strongest influences on my teaching practices, though. Practices at the Open University, which I joined in 2000, have very significantly affected the way I view and practice teaching, even though I had considerable experience and more responsibility at bricks-and-mortar institutions previously. The Faculty of Technology—now the Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology— first introduced me to the closely related trio of: monitoring, reflection, and mentoring (see

Table 2). Mentoring is where an associate lecturer is given a more experienced colleague to give advice on practices and culture at the Open University. Monitoring is where another colleague—staff tutor, experienced associate lecturer, or course team member—double marks some of your assignments and provides feedback on how closely you are adhering to the marking guidelines and on the quality of your correspondence tuition. Reflection helps tie these two other practices together. If you think about what you have done and how it has worked or has not worked and you take into account advice and feedback you are being given, you can actively plan ways to improve your practice.

Table 3: Aspects of the Open University that Promote Good Practice

Possibly surprisingly, the biggest personal benefit I derived from mentoring and monitoring was not from receiving it myself but in providing it to others. One of the aspects of the Open University that hinders good practice is the geographical distance between associate lecturers in the same faculty or even on the same course. While the faculty does try to encourage good practice by holding staff development conference (see

Table 3), these are few and far between. Prior to the recent explosion of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk¹, associate lecturers tended to be fairly isolated. The Open University tried to overcome that by having various FirstClass discussion forums, but the opportunity to directly observe the practices of others was non-existent for most associate lecturers due to the digital divide². Seeing and reflecting on the practice of others as a monitor and as a mentor has been extremely rewarding. I highly recommend volunteering to mentor or monitor if you have the opportunity. You can learn as much by teaching others as others learn from your teaching in some cases.

Being in an institution that actively research into good practice is also extremely beneficial. The Open University’s Institute for Educational Technology (IET) is comprised of many individuals who are passionately interested in exploring what makes for good teaching in an online world and how our pedagogical practices can be leveraged through the use of educational technology. That research and expertise eventually makes its way into postgraduate courses that the Open University offers, such as their latest course H810: Accessible Online Learning³. Many of their courses can be taken free of charge by Open University staff to help further their personal development either via a fee waiver or through a staff grant⁴. These are excellent opportunities to explore recent advances or to acquire a firmer pedagogical grounding for existing practice.

Table 4: Aspects of the Open University that Hinder Good Practice

Although the Open University has been very good about encouraging professional development of associate lecturers, in my position as a course chair and content developer I have been exposed to the negative sides of Open University practices (see

Table 4). For example, even on courses delivered completely online, like H812 or TT281, course authors are strongly encouraged to have all the material developed or updated months in advance of the course’s start date. Furthermore, once the course has begun, there is very little opportunity to change any material. That means it cannot be adapted to the needs of the current cohort easily if need be. It is what it is. The production schedule does help ensure quality content but it sacrifices flexibility and situation adaptation as the course unfolds.

Closely related to the lack of flexibility is a factor that Will Swann, Director of Students at the Open University, commented on a year or so ago⁵: course teams tend to be divorced from the learners. Typically a course team develops the content but the learning process is overseen by associate lecturers who, in the current corporate ethos, are not seen as teaching but as supporting learners. Who is teaching the learners then? Nobody! The students, in this model, have no interaction with the course team who developed the content and therefore no contact with any “teachers.” The reality is actually quite different, with many associate lecturers engaging in traditional “teaching” activities. However, perception of the associate lecturer role, while a negative factor, is tangential to the other important issues listed in

Table 4.

Table 5: Other Influences on My Practices

I have not relied solely on the Open University and my own educational experiences to shape my teaching practices. I am also influenced by a community of educational technologists around the world and my own experiences with information processing and learners.

Table 5

outlines some of the other factors I have drawn upon. The first three —forum facilitation, organization, and presentations—have been crucial in molding my approaches to higher online education and content delivery and they are based solely upon active reflection of my own experiences and attempts. The last three reflect my interest in community building and the power of social knowledge. These are the topics underpinning the phenomenal success of a Web 2.0 world with Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia. Like John Seely Brown, I believe there is great potential there for learning and teaching outside the very staid “sage on the stage” model so much in favour still in higher education, which is why I have chosen to work in this area for my D.Phil. research. This is also a topic of interest at the Open University. Martin Weller and Simon Buckingham Shum are involved with the SocialLearn project⁷, which is looking at developing tools to facilitate social learning online.

So where do we go from here? Should we be belittling academics at universities for their poor teaching practices? With the exception of the Open University, which is not a university using a traditional teaching style, it is difficult to be critical of lecturers in higher education, because the vast majority of them, unless they are in a department involved in the teaching of educational principles, have received no training in how to teach. Their practices are the result of what they have been exposed to. The other issue is that universities are also driven by different demands at different times. At the moment, many universities seem driven to improve their research so as to get more research money; as a result, teaching tends to get short-shrifted. There also previously was very little incentive to be good at teaching, at least from the institutions themselves. Even students were fairly resigned to the endless, boring lectures. With the advent of HEFCE monitoring of the “student experience” plus the change to students paying fees, I am hopeful we might see a resurgence of institutionally-supported professional development and accreditation for lecturers in higher education. I recognize that I am lucky to be situated where I am in the Open University, with a wealth of resources and opportunities for improvement and practice available to me.

Footnotes:

1. Twitter and Plurk are so-called “microblogging” sites where you have friends and fans who follow your postings. Postings are extremely short, limited to 140 characters. Facebook is perhaps more well-known, sometimes negatively as people post compromising pictures of themselves that result in lost jobs or denial to universities. Used in a positive way, though, these sites can reduce isolation caused by working in a digital world. Twitter:

http://twitter.com/. Plurk:

/http://www.plurk.com/. FaceBook:

http://www.facebook.com/.

2. The Wikipedia quick and dirty definition of “digital divide” is “the gap between those people with effective access to digital and information technology and those without.” (Wikipedia, 2008). The term originates, as far as I can tell, in a paper reporting the findings from a national survey done in 1996 by James Katz (Katz & Aspden, 1997) contrasting those who have computer and Internet access and those who do not.

Although the Faculty of Technology did not have this problem, I am aware that other faculties at the Open University have been slow to embrace initiatives like the eTMA system, TutorHome, etc., due to a lack of comfort with computers or lack of access in their own personal lives. The OU branch of the UCU (University and College Union) was just recently (October, 2008) conducting a survey of ALs about workload and computer-related conditions and expenses, as I think hard data that is accessible is in short supply.

3. H810: Accessible Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students is currently in its pilot presentation. More information is available from

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

4. Information on course fee waivers is available from

http://www.open.ac.uk/tutors/development/staff-fee-waivers.php. Information on the Associate Lecturer Development Fund can be found at

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

5. Unfortunately, I don’t have a reference to this on hand. I believe I read about it summarized in

Sesame

or another OU publication aimed at staff.

6. The Drupal-based Social Media Classroom is now available for download and use by other educators. It is also being used to build a community of practice, led by Howard Rheingold, around the use of social media in education.

(Accessed October 26, 2008) for more information.

7. The SocialLearn platform is a collection of tools with the intention of making the education system adapt to the learner by leveraging the values and principles found in new social web technologies.

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

References:

Brown, John Seely, and Richard P. Adler. 2008. “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.” Educause Review 43(1) :16-32. Available from

(Accessed August 22, 2008).

Katz, James, and Philip Aspden. 1997. “Motivations for and Barriers to Internet Usage: Results of a National Public Opinion Survey.” Internet Research 7(3) :170-188.

The Open University (n.d.) H812-08J: Activity 3:

What Do You Know?

The Open University. Web page.

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

Wikipedia (2008.) Digital Divide. Web page.

(Accessed October 26, 2008).

These are my slides for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the “Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning”. The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education. Each slide has been annotated based on my presentation preparation notes. A downloadable version is available.

Title Slide

Title slide for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the “Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning”. The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education.

E-Learning Challenges

I ran across this paper from Educause Quarterly by John Campbell and Diana Oblinger about the top ten challenges for teaching and learning for 2007. I guess they had to wait until 2007 was almost over before knowing what those challenges were because this didn’t appear until November.

I was particularly struck by issue number four: “Selecting Models and Strategies for E-Learning”. One of the key questions posed there was “What are the learners’ characteristics (educational preparation, desired outcomes, preferred delivery modality, technology, skills, services, and support needed?” This was intended for general e-learning, but I think it’s even more important to e-learning for the disabled.

Range of Disabilities

There’s a wide spectrum of disabilities that people might present with in
higher education, especially with e-learning.

Many people, when thinking about disabilities, probably think of the more
common, visible disabilities in the lower left-hand quadrant: sensory
disabilities, like hearing impairments, visual impairments — including
colour blindness — and speech impairments; or perhaps they think of
the various kinds of mobility impairments: quadriplegics or paraplegics.

I’d rather focus on the more unusual or “invisible” disabilities. For example,
I think we should include RSI — repetitive stress injury –
as that’s a mobility disability that’s affecting an increasing number
of people and presents issues for e-learning.

In the upper left-hand corner, I have the autistic spectrum, with
Aspergers, autism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
which I have myself. These bring with them their own requirements for
information presentation and processing.

Finally, in the right-hand quadrant, the various learning
disabilities, many of which may co-occur with disorders in the
autistic spectrum: dyslexia, dyscalculia — difficulty in learning or
understanding mathematics — dysgraphia–difficulty in the ability to write — and
dyspraxia, the partial loss of the ability to coordinate and perform certain
purposeful movements and gestures.

I have specifically omitted mental disorders like bipolar disorder and
depression, as they don’t affect the presentation or access to learning so
much.

Challenges (1)

So what are some of the challenges affecting the disabled in e-learning? One of them is the variety of interfaces and how accessible those interfaces are to
various disabilities.

At the top we have Plurk, a microblogging service like Twitter,
where you have 140 characters to explore what you’re doing now. Unlike
Twitter, Plurk is threaded (see the threaded example inset) and is
displayed on a timeline. The interface, though, is quirky and
difficult to use by non-disabled on portable devices, like the iPhone.
If you had a mobility problem, with all the fine clicking and
moving of the mouse to choose between different threads, Plurk would be
very difficult to use. Twitter, in comparison, is very linear, and accessible
to people on different devices and those using assistive software.

On the bottom is Seesmic’s interface. Seesmic is a video blogging or
a video conversation site.

Some of the interface issues can be overcome by better design. Unfortunately,
we don’t always have control over the design of materials used in e-learning.
I just read about a new adaptive interface system called Supple, presented by
Dan Weld et al. at this year’s AAAI convention in Chicago in July. If you’ve
ever used a Palm Pilot, you might recall that the first thing it asks you to do
is tap the screen in various corners, so it can calibrate how accurate you are
pointing on the screen with the stylus. Supple does something similar but
with user interfaces and then can rearrange the interface elements to accommodate
motor problems, for example. Dan Weld’s team indicated that one of potential
application areas for this was web pages and I know that Niall Sclater at the Open University is already interested in it for exactly that.

Challenges (2)

Closely related to different interfaces is the multiple methods of
content delivery possible in e-learning: slides, spreadsheets,
PDF documents, word processing documents, and audio-video
presentations. Each of which presents its own accessibility issues.

Some of them require special equipment, like book readers or
screen readers or mobility assist devices to aid in pointing, typing,
or clicking. Some of this equipment is very expensive, so there’s an
issue of financial accessibility as well.

Challenges (3)

Once media accessibility has been addressed, there are still the traditional
issues around content support. This is a challenge that all students
face.

Disabled students may also have a challenge in finding adequate support
for their specialized assistive software or equipment. At the Open
University, a student’s tutor is often their first port of call for problems,
so it’s not unreasonable to expect some ideas about how to solve common
technical issues or know where to point students for help.

Challenges (4)

More so than other students, disabled students are more likely to
suffer from emotional issues related to returning to study or
taking university courses via distance education. That might include
doing too much or too little, perfectionism (not that I know anything
about that!), not wanting to be a special case, confidence, and
self-image problems. The last three are particularly common.

Challenges (5)

A familiar problem to everyone in distance education is that of
students feeling isolated. This is a not-so-familiar problem for
undergraduate students at traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions
and very familiar for many disabled who may have spent a lifetime already
feeling “different” and left out.

The good news here is that a lot of the isolation can be overcome
with Learning 2.0, a topic I’ll return to later on in the presentation.

Modes of Delivery

E-learning modes of content delivery can be broken down into
three areas: Web 2.0, Web 1.0, and printed materials. Web 2.0 can be
thought of as the new, more interactive types of web site and
online activities: Plurk/Twitter, blogs and wikis, Second Life, the video
sites like Seesmic, YouTube, and Flickr. It can also include things
like podcasts, an area the Open University has recently joined in
partnership with iTunes U. These allow people to create content, often
collaboratively, and then easily share it with others who may then
modify it or comment on it.

Web 1.0 is typified by traditional, static web pages,
converted PowerPoint presentations, and PDF documents. The possibilities for
interactivity are very minimal. This is a very traditional and common way
of presenting material online and probably not about to be supplanted
completely by Web 2.0 applications in the near future.

And, as much as we’d like to claim we’re a paperless university, the
truth of the matter is we still have books and other printed materials.
Web-based content can be made accessible sometimes with screen readers. Even
with book readers, though, sometimes printed content is inaccessible. For example,
on TT281, our course text had commentary in inset blocks and code on the rest
of the page. Our blind student was unable to “read” the book satisfactory because
of the layout. We contacted the publisher but, because of when we were first
alerted to the problem, there was insufficient time to have something appropriate
made available.

I just read about two recent initiatives by JISC TechDis, the Publishers
Association, and the RNIB that might help in such situations. The first is
“Publisher Lookup UK” where participating publishers provide contact
addresses for having special arrangements of their materials made available.
The second initiative is a guide to obtaining textbooks in alternative forms,
providing advice on where to go, what to expect, and what questions to ask.

Long-Tail Learning

Wikis, blogs, and social networking sites can help form the backbone of
Learning 2.0, synonymous with long-tail learning. I first read about this
back in January this year in another Educause article called
“Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0“.
In this article, Brown et al. discuss how 80% of sales in a bookstore
come from 20% of the titles. That’s the fat part of the “tail.” Amazon,
Chapters, and Borders turned that around by offering a huge selection, so
large that the majority of their sales actually comes from the “long tail” of the
sales curve. In education, content delivery is the fat part of the “tail”
but the “long tail” comes from people’s interactions with learning and knowledge.

So in “long-tail learning”, Brown says that learning is a social activity
and that understanding is socially constructed. This is contrasted with
E-Learn 1.0, which was
Cartesian learning, where knowledge is substance. That is, teachers
impart “knowledge” to their students who somehow “learn it”. Learning is a
commodity to be boxed up and distributed.

Social networks are a strong, positive force here, especially for the disabled
as they’re not restricted from participating by their disabilities, unlike
possibly real-world social networking. We know that students benefit from
study groups, because they engage more with the material. Blogs, wikis, and
social networks offer a powerful opportunity for the disabled.

E-Learn 2.0 Opportunity

I think e-learning for the disabled isn’t so much a challenge as
an opportunity to provide a level playing field. However, that
opportunity will only be there if we remember certain things.
The first is to adhere to standards, like those
proposed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and WebAIM. Stay away from technologies that are accessibility unfriendly, like
Flash, or provide alternative access to the content if it’s core to the
learning experience.

It’s an opportunity if we focus on accessibility, both in terms of
access to the content and in terms of the content itself. I haven’t spoken a lot about web-based
accessibility as I teach courses here at the Open University and author
course content on it, discussed in my original application and in my CV, but
I will add the following comments about content: write
clearly and comprehensibly, and use white space appropriately; engage in sensible paragraph planning paragraphs for
those with attentional or focussing difficulties. Accessibility
isn’t just about the disabled. Paying attention to these details
benefits everyone.

Finally, it’s an opportunity if we remember our primary motivation:

Primary Motivation

Teach, yes, but also foster a willingness (and ability) to learn and to continue
to learn.

In conclusion, lifelong learning is compatible with long-tail learning. Social networks can go on long after the “course” ends. E-learning does have challenges for the disabled, but it’s also a
great opportunity to move forward by using E-Learn 2.0 and Web 2.0 in a
focussed, accessible way.

Downloadable Resources:
- A4 PDF Version of H810 Interview Talk on Challenges Affecting the Disabled in E-Learning (1.5 MB)

1. Open the Keynote preferences. This is in the program menu (or Apple/Cmd ,).

2. Go to the “Slideshow” tab.

3. Ensure that “Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen” is enabled with a checkmark beside it.

That’s it! Now you can use OmniDazzle in your Keynote presentations.

I’m currently working on my HEA accreditation again. I told the facilitator that this would be the year I would succeed. Unfortunately, I’m rapidly running out of time. I need to make a huge push next weekend to get the bulk of it done and out the door. It’s been so low-priority that it keeps falling off my radar.

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