EduGlu Sandbox

I’ve been looking for a way to export a Moodle course in a format that can be ingested in another standards-compliant

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/The+Pros+and+Cons+of+Loosely+Coupled+Teaching

The other presentation I did at WCET this year was a lot more fun. Asked to do a 15 minute spiel on a panel entitled “The Once and Future LMS” I promptly ignored the title of the session (as is my wont) and came up with my own, The Pros and Cons of Loosely Coupled Teaching.

The M.O. here was an interactive session to examine three different examples (in part culled from suggestions offered in the comments of a post from a few weeks back) of online classes taught using ‘loosely coupled tools.’ I asked the audience for their ‘Pros and Cons’ of these approaches (which Chris Lott graciously captured in the background) which I then contrasted with my own list of Pros and Cons that I had built ahead of time.

The goal here wasn’t just boosterism, but instead to be honest about the current set of tradeoffs involved with choosing these approaches, in hopes of re-focusing effort, attention and dollars towards filling these gaps rather than continued spending on walled gardens and monoliths that ultimately serve the wrong masters.

Even more importantly, my goal was to illustrate this conclusion, that the interest in these approaches and tools isn’t about strong willed kooks not wanting to conform (though there’s nothing wrong with that) but instead an issue of freedom that is not just relevant but ultimately fundamental to how we teach and learn online. The choice of tools and environments, and the *choosing* of them, is not incidental, nor is one’s attitude towards openness or authentic engagement. But we do need to move forward with stating the basic institutional requirements that need to be met and putting in place lightweight, loosely coupled mechanisms for meeting these, otherwise 5 years from now we will still be railing against the monoliths, and still forcing students and instructors who want to authentically engage with these tools and methods to act like renegades. - SWL

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Today’s keynote had a couple of huge announcements, one of which may have an incredible impact on one of their partner vendors, TurnItIn.

CIO Michael Chasen announced that starting today all of the Blackboard Learning Systems: Blackboard, CE and Vista are able to download and install via either Building Blocks or PowerLinks, a new anti-plagiarism tool, SafeAssign. The tool can act either stand-alone locally or, like TurnItIn, it can upload student work to a centralized database that will then “protect” a student’s intellectual property from inappropriate use by other user’s of SafeAssign. There were a couple of interesting features such as a direction citation tool that identifies the specific resource that appears to have been used and the ability to allow students to “opt in” to the service (which I believe can be turned off administratively thereby effectively mandating use of the service). I wonder what kind of financial impact this will have on TurnItIn when Blackboard institutions learn that they can save the tens of thousands of dollars they spend on their annual subscription costs?

In other news, Chasen also announced the availability of a new tool intended to bridge the three learning environments. Available with the licensing of one of their three systems: Community, Content or Outcomes, is their Learning Environment Connector. Although a QA tech I was speaking with thought it was already available, I haven’t been able to find it on their site to link to as of yet. The idea is that schools will be able to bridge users to other Bb LMSes, as well as to the three Systems. This is big news as it is the first sign that the company is working to bring the formerly disparate environments together. In our own university system in New Hampshire, it means that Plymouth State which employs the Campus Edition version of the LMS may well be able to leverage the community and content systems that both UNH and Granite State College were only able to access as they were Blackboard sites. Rather than worry about the differences in our LMS, we can now focus on developing points of collaboration and tangency for our respective and some times cross-pollinating student bodies.

[tags]blackboard, bbworld07, chasen, turnitin, safeassign[/tags]

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Announced at the corporate keynote at BbWorld07, SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service integrated with the LMS that attempt to uncover and/or deter plagiarism while educating the campus community about what plagiarism is. Leveraging a dedicated assignment tool, assignments are uploaded to a central service which compares the submission against their databases and other submitted works held in the Global Reference Database. Any institution running any of the newer Blackboard Learning Systems is eligible to download and install the PowerLink/Building Block for their campus free of charge. Future platform deliveries will have this service embedded and will not require separate installation.

SafeAssign checks submitted papers (Word, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML and ZIP packages of these) against the Internet using Windows Live Search technology. Blackboard has partnered with ProQuest ABI/Inform and searches against their 2.5 million articles database. SafeAssign also checks against a local institutional database of locally submitted work, as well as a Global Reference Database which is comprised of submissions volunteered by students from SafeAssign campuses. Obviously this database is expected to grow over time as the SafeAssign system is adopted by Blackboard institutions. It is important to note that the Global Reference Database is an opt-in service that students may elect to take advantage of in order to protect their own work.

Beyond the course integration aspect, SafeAssign also boasts a Direct Submit feature that allows faculty (not students as of the current release) to check documents on a “one-off” basis if they receive work that triggers their “spidey-sense.”

Gradebook integration is not yet available for CE/Vista campuses meaning that after the creation of the assignment, the faculty member will also need to create a new grading column in order to provide a grade value. It is expected that a patch will be issued that will provide this service in the coming months.

General Counsel Matthew Small noted that this new service will in no way affect the PowerLink or Building Block servicing TurnItIn, and the general flavor is that TurnItIn is still considered a strong corporate partner. Greg Ritter pointed out that those institutions currently employing TurnItIn may be loath to move away and abandon the student submissions collected through their use of the TurnItIn service.

[tags]blackboard, bbworld07, safeassign, turnitin, plagiarism[/tags]

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