Fortnightly Mailing

Why do so many e-learning initiatives fail?

I missed this 152 page report [2.7 MB  PDF] by Per Arneberg, Lourdes Guàrdia, Desmond Keegan, Jüri Lõssenko, Ildikó Mázár, Pedro Fernández Michels, Morten Flate Paulsen, Torstein Rekkedal, Albert Sangrà, Jan Atle Toska and Dénes Zarka when it was published in November 2007. Thankfully a reader sent me this link to a well and independently written review of the report by Ingrid Schönwald. The report (several of whose authors are anything but recent arrivals on the e-learning scene) is based on analysis of a large number of e-learning initiatives from different parts of the world, including a handlful from the UK.

The recommendations section, on pages 127-143 contains a comprehensive series of practical guidelines for success. The seven that flowed from the report's analysis of 10 failed initiatives - headlined below - and on pages 139-143 of the report, are particularly interesting, as much because of their obviousness as anything else:

1. Realize that hard-nosed market research is essential for the success of any e-learning initiative;
2. Plan carefully for and control carefully the revenue and expenses. Seeding funding dries up quickly;
3. Choice of courses and their accreditation is crucial;
4. Define precisely the relationships of your initiative to existing providers and define precisely the institutional model you will adopt;
5. Plan carefully to manage both educational and business activities;
6. Avoid top-down political and boardroom initiatives;
7. Avoid consortia of institutions that compete with each other and the consortium.

Harvard researchers voting on whether to publish scholarly research free on the Internet

Via the Sloan-c mailing list, here is the lead-in to an article in the 12/2/2008 New York Times by Patricia Cohen:

"Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. 'In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,' said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. 'It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.'"

Blackboard v Desire2Learn: Joint Final Pre-trial Order

Here is the Joint Final Pre-trial Order [130 kB PDF] which summarises, in 16 clear pages,  the main issues that will be tested in the patent trial due to start on Monday 11 February in Lufkin, Texas. Expect a result by the end of  February.

Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?

Amended 9/2/2008, 10/2/2008, 4/3/2008

Donald Clark takes a fairly well-aimed swipe at the quality of the content being made freely available under the Open University's MIT OpenCourseWare-inspired OpenLearn initiative.

Several readers of Fortnightly Mailing will know the current ins and outs at the OU, but when I wrote about Open Learn in 2006, the OU planned to put about 5% of its materials into OpenLearn (as compared with MIT's decision to make the whole lot open); and poking about in the materials that have been made available you get the impression that the OU has been cautious about what to make open, allowing its laudable experiment to take place with only its more mundane content.

A further problem is that the implementation makes the material unpleasant to use on screen, especially if you are scan-reading it rather than using it, as it was designed, for learning. For example the course I looked at was broken down into very small chunks, and the latency between pages, with a typical "broadband" connection, was far too long for convenience.

The impression you get is that there was internal pressure from those saying "but we depend on people to pay for our courses, we cannot risk putting some of the 'top sellers' into Open Learn".

I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be  a major missed opportunity.

Firefox uptake around the world

Twice today I encountered academic web sites that did not work at all in Firefox; in both cases these were sites that simply could not afford to have users struggle with them.

It is some time since I looked at figures for the uptake of Firefox as compared with Internet Explorer and other browsers:  when I searched I found this interesting map in a late 2007 article on the French company XiTi's web site.

Scroll down the article for a much wider range of informatively organised data.

Event in London on 20/2/2008 to showcase R&D in the UK about learning mediated by technology

ALT, for which I work part time, supports a the Lab Group, a collaboration between labs which do R&D in learning mediated by technology. We are organising the 2008 Lab Group Open Day, sponsored by JISC, at Oracle's City of London offices, between 10.45 and 15.30 on Wednesday 20 February. Around a dozen labs will be presenting:

• The Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) – Cambridge University
• Inspire – Anglia Ruskin University
• Institute for Educational Cybernetics – Bolton University
• Institute of Educational Technology – Open University
• Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) – Bristol University
• Futurelab – Bristol
• Institute for Social and Technical Research (formerly Chimera) – Essex University
• Learning Science Research Institute (LSRI) – Nottingham University
• Learning Societies Lab – Southampton University
• Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI) – London Metropolitan University
• London Knowledge Lab – Birkbeck and the Institute of Education
• The Serious Games Institute (SGI) – Coventry University
• SmartLab – University of East London

The closing date for bookings is Monday 11 February 2008. (There is no charge for attendance.) Further information and booking form. Full programme for the day [140 kB PDF]. Descriptive flyer for the day [100 kB PDF].

Jakob Nielsen: "User skills improving, but only slightly"

Nielsen's  Alertbox for 4 February 2008 repeats, with evidence and examples, previous claims about what sorts of problems trip users up on an unfamiliar web site.

"Users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures."

Definitely the kind of thing to read if you want to critique an existing web site, or if you are involved in procuring a new one. Nielsen also provides insights into how users use search, which Nielsen characterises as "Google Gullibility". He concludes:

"When it comes to search, users face three problems:

• Inability to retarget queries to a different search strategy
• Inability to understand the search results and properly evaluate each destination site's likely usefulness
  
• Inability to sort through the search engine results page's polluted mass of poor results, whether from blogs or from heavily SEO-optimized sites that are insufficiently specific to really address the user's problem
  

Given these difficulties, many users are at the search engine's mercy and mainly click the top links — a behavior we might call Google Gullibility. Sadly, while these top links are often not what they really need, users don't know how to do better.

I use "Google" in labeling the behavior only because it's the search engine used by the vast majority of our test users. People using other search engines have the same problems. Still, it's vital to reestablish competition in the search engine field: it would be a tragedy for democracy to let 3 guys at one company determine what billions of people read, learn, and ultimately think."

Henry Siegman writes about Gaza’s future in the London Review of Books

Henry Siegman is the director of the US/Middle East Project, served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, ans was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994. I do not know how long the whole of Siegman's scathing and depressing attack on current US and Israeli policy in relation to the siege of Gaza in the 7/2/2008 London Review of Books will be visible to non-subscribers, but I hope LRB will include it amongst the articles that it does not password protect. Here is the start:

"The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

Olmert’s statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza’s residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan residents had indeed been allowed to live ‘normal’ lives before the most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that Gaza’s civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of the missiles.

As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres."

Continue reading Siegman's article.