Open Source E learning Stack

E-Learning the Open Source Stack.

E-learning has been around for a long time. Every College, every Local Authority and many schools have an E-learning department. It's a fine title since one can easily deduce from it that e-learning is something to do with learning and that the 'e' stands for something to do with computers.You can even get a Masters degree in e-learning.

Most of the specialised software in the e-learning pantheon is proprietary software. Most products compete with each other and are pretty much incompatible. If you are in education you will know one or two of these (invariably expensive) products but probably not the rest.

Many teachers (especially those not in e-learning posts) can be a little sceptical about e-learning. This is most evident when considering the infamous VLE (virtual learning environment). Infamous because most schools have one but most schools have very empty ones. Teachers it seems, don't upload their materials to VLE's.

And in any case, e-learning is generally espoused by the trendy ambitious types and dearly beloved by the sophist e- vendors. That doesn't help.

This article aims to make the concept of e-learning look as simple as it really is and to show that it can all be achieved using free open source software

The stack:

See blog image at top of article

On the left we have the teaching model from 100 years ago and on the right we have the modern take on it. In the centre we have the four-layer model of pedagogy. The layers remain unchanged with time but the digital age has changed what can be delivered and where it is delivered.

On the right hand side, representing the Brave New Digital World, you will notice the two wedge shapes inserted above the Resource layer and the Course Layer. These 'wedges' represent the software required to handle an increasingly diverse range of potential resources and to organise them into some kind of sensible framework.

These interpolating wedges are respectively: Document Management software and Course Management software. You may have heard of Sharepoint, Blackboard, Moodle, Alfresco and Nuxeo? Well, they are 'wedgies'.

The Open Source E-learning Stack

We will start at the bottom and work our way up:

Resources:

Format and Size: FOSS Alfresco

Digital resources are very varied indeed. Text, images, sound and video are all handled in a multiplicity of formats. Despite Microsoft's near miss in achieving .doc and .xls as de-facto standards there are now lots and lots of formats out there in the wild... and you can forget getting your users to sort it out for themselves.

So be prepared for:

.pdf, .rtf, .doc, .docx, .epub, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx, .txt, .wmv, ,fls, .mpg, .avi .mp3, .odp, ,odf, .ods, .ogg, .jp, .png, .gif, .bmp, .tiff, just to get you started with format.

Then there is the issue of file size: Raw Video anyone? or did you convert it to Flash? That picture from your digital camera, did you 'size' it by clicking on the little boxes around the image?

Organising modern digital content into courses is a non-trivial issue for those who manage Course Management Software like Blackboard and Moodle.

The answer is to manage raw resources using the features of a Document Management package such as the Open Source product Alfresco. Alfresco's Smart Space concept allows rules to be set on shared folders (say a public folder allocated for the VLE 'drop off' point) which in effect converts most of the mess into some kind of order.

The subject can get fairly complex (ppt to flash for example) but how about simply setting a rule to make all the images a sane size and all the documents pdf ? Wouldn't that be helpful?

Intellectual Property Creative Commons

Another barrier to e-learning occurs at the resource level which is a result of unclear guidelines as to who owns what. Those who submit material electronically to a Course Management system need to know that they retain rights to that property. They may issue permission for a school and others to use it as they wish but when they move from the school or college they themselves must be able to retrieve it.

For electronic course management software to succeed the school must understand and help teachers to issue their work under the correct Creative Commons license. At the time of writing we are some way from this.

Courses Moodle

Content needs to be organised and structured into a course. Courses need students and tutors and a means to access and upload materials (hand your homework in) just like a classroom of old.

Course Management software allows this to be achieved over the Web via a Browser. Naturally all CMS's gain many more features over time especially if they are Open Source.

The central thrust of these features center's around collaborative work achieved through forums, wikis, and social networking extras (talking in class). A second drift is the addition of assessment and marking features (the test at the end of the lesson).

The debate in this area is whether or not one CMS package should contain all the features or whether individual packages with plugin's do it better.

Pre-eminent amongst the CMS is the Free, Open Source package Moodle which goes from strength to strength and as it does it gains more features. Some like this; some do not.

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Contact Skype Gizmo-Google Pidgin

In any teaching context, whatever pedagogical model has been adopted since time immemorial, human to human contact has been utterly essential for learning to be effective, or even to occur at all. Some adults can learn from books or on-line tutorials, fewer adolescents can and even fewer younger children.

To pretend that the contact layer can be supplanted by a computer is plain foolish though some still think this is the case. Contact should be when it is needed, if at all possible (put your hand up in class).

The two most appropriate technologies in this category are Instant Messaging and VOIP.

Open Source I.M. 'Pidgin' has a great advantage in that it supports all the protocols of the popular proprietary IM software such as MSN Messenger. The VOIP and Video-VOIP world is a little trickier but I am confident that it too will be fully Open Source really quite soon.

To digress slightly, Gizmo, a fully FOSS Video VOIP system has just been snapped up by Google and the market leader and pioneer Skype is to release versions of its client as open source this year.

IM/VOIP and Video-VOIP allows the kind of contact required to happen outside of classroom.

Monitoring Layer Mahara

As we get on with the second decade in the 21st Century we note that the final layer is dominated by a rather over elaborated and bloated examination system. It became like this to meet the commercial needs of the privatised exam vendors and the bureaucratic needs of Government statisticians, neither much met the needs of the students.

Fortunately, despite massive efforts to do so, digitising exams has got nowhere at all. What has emerged into this digital space are newer approaches to monitoring and recording. Chief amongst these is the student-initiated e-portfolio and here we find the excellent FOSS package Mahara.

Summary

That's it. Nothing has really changed in teaching and learning with the advent of e-learning. The challenge is to deliver such services to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The message is 'don't be seduced by all singing all dancing e-learning packages'. Just look at the diagram above, decide what you are trying to do and which layer you are in.

Then choose the most cost effective way of achieving this. There will be no single right answer.
There are lots of paths and lots of packages that have overlapping features. It is true to say that no single super package does everything well (sorry Sharepoint) or even does everything but what can be said is that in combination Free, Open Source Software packages will do everything well.

Give e-learning a try, but do it your way.