|
What is the Distributed Learning Workshop?
What is the "CAHSEE Conductor"?
What are "Web-Based CMI Materials"?
Define "High Quality Comprehensive and Pedagogically Sophisticated Web-Based CMI Materials?"
In What Formats are The Workshop's Web-Based CMI Materials Being Developed?
In What disciplinary areas is the Workshop currently developing topic modules?
What are the Workshop's major objectives?
How will the Workshop's web-based cmi materials enhance faculty pedagogical effectiveness?
Why is the Workshop stressing open, nonproprietary and extensible enabling technologies?
What is the architecture of the Workshop's enabling technologies?
Will the Workshop's topic modules run on the platforms provided by private sector firms, like blackboard and webct?
What is the Distributed Learning Workshop?
The Distributed Learning Workshop is a pioneering collaborative effort to support Higher Education institutions in developing and integrating high quality, comprehensive and pedagogically sophisticated Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials into their regular courses and academic programs. These new genres of instructional materials will support instructors and their students regardless of their respective physical locations, or their availability to work jointly on the same instructional activity at the same time.
The Workshop was founded by the Midwest Higher Education Commission (MHEC)1 and chartered as a not-for-profit educational collaborative in the state of Minnesota in July 1999. It began full-time operations in July 2000.
The Workshop is not intended to operate as a separate virtual Higher Education institution like the not-for-profit Western Governors University, or the for-profit University of Phoenix. It will not provide direct instruction to students, or grant college credit, issue credentials or award degrees. Instead, its instructional materials, enabling technologies, faculty support structures and other capabilities and expertise will be made available to students through its Founding Partners and other collaborators.
Back to Top
What are "web-based cmi materials"?
The decision to use the expression "Web-based computer-mediated instructional materials," rather than Web-based instructional materials or CMI materials is deliberate. This hybrid expression communicates The Workshop's intention to produce high quality instructional materials that are embedded within a Web browser. Traditionally, one would find the most pedagogically effective educational software (characterized by a highly interactive, highly synchronized, media-rich learning environment) delivered via CD-ROM for use on multimedia-capable personal computers. The Workshop's learning environment achieves pedagogical effectiveness by integrating highly interactive, media-rich CMI materials with Web-based delivery and Internet-based communication and collaboration tools.
The primary challenge to this approach is attaining the required level of interactivity and multimedia synchronization within the web browser environment. The current generation of Web-based instructional materials is built with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which specifies the static formatting of text. While HTML is suitable for page layout, it does not have the capability of controlling user interactivity, media integration, and sequencing and synchronization of media elements. The Workshop's learning environment draws upon the strengths of several web-based technologies to achieve the necessary level of integration and timing of instructional events. HTML is used for page formatting and layout; SMIL-compliant XML conducts the sequencing of events via Java applets and servlets; Shockwave and Flash elements provide precise integration of audio and visual interactions; and Java is used for data manipulation and dynamic student assessment.
An important advantage to using Macromedia's Shockwave and Flash to create the most highly interactive and media-rich content is that they provide easy-to-use multimedia-authoring environments. These development environments allow The Workshop's instructional designers to easily and quickly create sophisticated CMI materials with seamless event synchronization.
An additional consideration is the high cost of maintaining persistent connections between personal computers and broadband networks. While this may not be a difficulty for resident students attending major universities, it is an important issue for students attending colleges without widespread broadband connectivity, students who reside off campus, and students who cannot afford high-speed, broadband connectivity.
These issues present a challenge to delivering Web-based instructional materials with the same characteristics and features as CD-ROM instructional materials. Accordingly, The Workshop's approach represents a hybrid delivery model that will provide the Web-based CMI materials via CD-ROM and brief internet connections to support those students without persistent broadband connections. In the presence of a broadband network, such as an in-lab setting, the hybrid nature of the instructional materials allows them to be delivered over the network.
Back to Top
Define "high quality, comprehensive and
pedagogically sophisticated web-based cmi materials?"
One of the tasks of The Workshop is to create Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials that are high quality, comprehensive and pedagogically sophisticated. These descriptions are more than slogans.
By high quality , we mean instructional materials informed by two sources of knowledge on teaching and learning. The first is the cumulative wisdom of practice of expert instructors. These are individuals who have thought deeply about the material, social and organizational underpinnings of productive learning and who have succeeded in translating their knowledge and understanding of these instructional factors into effective teaching practices. Expert instructors are deliberately mindful of the many different ways different students in the same learning group might encounter identical lesson activities. They are also mindful of the need for teaching practices that take into account the roles that societal tools and artifacts, situational factors and collaborative meaning making play in individual learning and development.
The second source of information that goes into the development of high quality CMI materials is research on the genres of group and individual learning activities most likely to lead to deep student understanding of the fundamental ideas, principles and concepts these activities are intended to advance. The type of research most likely to be helpful in this area is more likely than not to be discipline-based and carried out in authentic instructional settings mirroring the complex nature of the teaching and learning enterprise.
By comprehensive , we mean instructional materials that incorporate the full array of disciplinary ideas, concepts, principles, problem-solving strategies, heuristics and examples one would expect to find included in the best-organized college courses, and covered in the best-written college textbooks. The value added by using powerful computer-based tools to mediate these elements can be measured in terms of how well the instructional settings afforded by these computer-mediated elements make the connections and relationships between and among them more apparent to the student. This is much more likely to happen if the computer is employed to make these elements both learner-controlled and dynamically interactive. Elements designed with these features are much more likely to be effective in helping learners to examine the underlying derivational structure of the disciplinary lesson activities that make up a particular lesson. These computer-mediated elements should also help students to better understand the connections between individual lessons and lesson activities and among groups of lessons and the larger discipline that these lessons intend to make more accessible and comprehensible.
By pedagogically sophisticated , we mean materials that incorporate the variety of learner-controlled inscriptions and multimedia objects made possible by the emerging generation of CMI materials' authoring languages. These programming resources allow instructional designers to create Web-based CMI materials featuring the precise manipulation and synchronization of highly complex inscriptional and multimedia objects. These inscriptional objects include dynamically interactive diagrams, figures, maps, charts, tables, equations, specialized symbols and the like. These multimedia objects include easily searchable digital video accounts of pedagogically significant phenomena, including accounts reflecting the perspectives of typical instructors and their students. The Workshop's plans are to embed these objects within an instructional lattice containing a full array of Web-based communication and collaboration capabilities. With respect to the former, these include e-inquires, discussion management, bulletin boards and links to relevant Web sites. With respect to the latter, these capabilities include real-time discussions, joint access to shared whiteboards and the ability to share strategies for navigating through lessons and activities.
Back to Top
In what formats are the workshop's web-based cmi materials being developed?
The Workshop's Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials are being developed in the form of individual discipline-based (or subject-area) topic modules. Each topic module will consist of a collection of interrelated lessons, homework assignments and dynamically generated instructional text. Thus, a topic module on statistical displays, intended for use in pre-calculus, economics, or political science courses might include lessons on "Graphical depictions and measures of central tendency," "Graphical depictions and measures of variance and standard deviation," "Interactive box plots" and "Interactive histograms." Similarly, a topic module on "Techniques for doing research on the Internet," intended for use in a course in Computers and Information Systems (for undergraduate students who are not majoring in engineering, mathematics or the physical sciences), might include lessons in "Database structures", "Algorithms" and "Binary search techniques." In some cases topical modules will also include topical notes authored by the instructor or other students.
The advantage of this strategy for parsing instructional materials development is threefold. First, it will enable individual instructors and academic departments to construct their own courses by assembling the topic modules that best meet their requirements. Second, it allows instructors who have chosen not to build their entire courses around The Workshop's Web-based CMI materials to supplement their existing courses with a single or small group of topic modules. Third, it allows instructors to select multiple modules addressing the same topic, as a means for encouraging their students to recognize the existence and importance of multiple perspectives.
Back to Top
In what disciplinary areas is the workshop currently developing topic modules
The Workshop is currently developing topic modules in two disciplinary areas: College Mathematics for Entry-level College Students and Language, Literacy and Critical Analysis for Entry-level College Students. Each of these efforts is described more fully below.
College Mathematics for Entry-level College Students
These topic modules are being designed to support students enrolled in mathematics courses intended for entry-level students who do not intend to pursue baccalaureate degrees in mathematics, the sciences, or in engineering studies. The topic modules will correspond to the subjects and problem areas one would expect to find in most conventional entry-level mathematics courses, including Introductory, Intermediate and College Algebra, Introductory Probability and Statistics, Introductory Discrete Mathematics and Pre-Calculus. In deciding what subjects and problem areas these topic modules should address, The Workshop's staff will be guided by three sources of information and expertise.
The first is the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), principally the suggestions outlined in Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (April 2000). Within the year, it is expected that the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS), the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC), the American Mathematical Association (AMA) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) will issue their own reports commenting on NCTM's efforts. We will also consult these reports for advice on how best to create Web-based CMI materials, aligned with Principles and Standards for School Mathematics.
The second and ultimately the most significant source of information The Workshop intends to draw upon is the curriculum standards in pre-collegiate mathematics, issued by statewide educational agencies in the states of Illionois and Ohio. Since this development effort is being supported by the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) and the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR), these two coordinating agencies will jointly select a small team of college and high school mathematics instructors to work directly with The Workshop's staff.
The Workshop will also consult the curriculum standards in pre-collegiate mathematics issued by statewide educational agencies in the other eight member states of MHEC. These remaining states include Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wisconsin. The Workshop is reviewing these standards for guidance as a means to assure itself that its Web-based CMI mathematics materials will meet the needs of the entire MHEC community. There is also the possibility that statewide education agencies in some of these states may elect to join the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) and the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR) as sponsors of this effort.
The Workshop completed the first robust prototype of a mathematics topic module (in Statistics) in November 2000. The first release of a full mathematics topic module to IBHE and OBR will be completed by August 31, 2001. Thereinafter, The Workshop will release topic modules on a regular basis.
Language, Literacy and Critical Analysis for Entry-level College Students
These topic modules will focus on assessing and strengthening the study, interpretative, analytical, synthesis and writing skills of students who enter college without having adequately mastered their pre-collegiate courses in English and the language arts. Non-native speakers of English and students who have been away from academic settings for extended periods will also benefit from these topic modules. As in the case of mathematics, in deciding what subjects and problem areas these topic modules should address, The Workshop's staff will be guided by three sources of information and expertise.
The first source that will be consulted is the published recommendations of national scholarly and professional organizations, like the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA). Three recent NCTE publications are expected to be particularly useful. These include Guidelines for the preparation of teachers of English language arts (1996), Standards for the English language arts (1996) and Assessing student performance (1996).
The second and ultimately the most significant source of information The Workshop intends to draw upon is the curriculum standards in English and Language Arts, issued by statewide educational agencies in the states of Illionois and Ohio. This effort is also being supported by the IBHE and the OBR. Accordingly, these two coordinating agencies will jointly select a small team of college and high school English instructors and specialists in student study skills to work directly with The Workshop's staff.
The Workshop will also look to the curriculum standards in pre-collegiate English and Language Arts issued by statewide educational agencies in the other eight member states of MHEC. These remaining states include Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wisconsin. The Workshop is looking to these standards for guidance as a means to assure itself that its Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials in Language, Literacy and Critical Analysis for Entry-level College Students will meet the needs of the entire MHEC community. There is also the possibility that statewide education agencies in some of these states may elect to join IBHE and OBR as sponsors of this effort.
Planning work on topic modules for language, literacy, and critical analysis will commence in the first quarter of 2001. The prototype release will be in the fourth quarter of 2001.
Back to Top
What are the workshop's major objectives?
The Workshop's Web-based CMI materials will be
designed to advance the following seven objectives.
- Enhance faculty pedagogical effectiveness
- Increase student learning productivity
- Foster more interactive, adaptive and engaging instructional settings
- Foster more flexibly organized courses and academic calendars
- Strengthen partnerships with K-12 Education and other Education-minded agencies and community-based organizations
- Champion open, nonproprietary and extensible enabling technologies, capable of supporting the creation of the Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials described in this document
- Achieve economic self-sufficiency
Back to Top
How will the workshop's web-based cmi materials enhance faculty pedagogical effectiveness?
The Workshop's Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials will advance this objective by providing instructors the opportunity to employ a broader range of instructional materials and teaching practices than is possible within the canonically organized college classroom. Recall that within these canonical settings, the major form of instructional materials currently employed is the one-size-fits-all textbook and the teaching practices instructors most frequently employ revolve around the lock-step syllabus and the whole-class lecture-presentation. The complaint most frequently lodged against this mode of instruction is that it promotes passive learning, a bits-and-pieces approach to understanding disciplinary knowledge, and no real understanding of the underlying structure of the discipline being taught. The new materials and practices of The Workshop will enable instructors to more closely monitor the ongoing learning progress of their students, to provide students more timely feedback on their learning progress and to build a climate where high learner engagement is the norm.
The Workshop will also enhance faculty pedagogical effectiveness through four
faculty professional development cooperatives:
1) New Instructional Practices;
2) Research and Continuous Improvement;
3) Technology Transfer and
4) Instructional Partnerships.
Collaboratives will be established for each discipline for which The Workshop is developing instructional materials, in recognition of the fact that every discipline has its unique way of characterizing and depicting the phenomena the discipline was created to study.
The first two collaboratives are discussed below. The Technology Transfer Collaborative is outlined in the question that deals with how The Workshop's materials will foster more flexibly organized courses and academic calendars (p.22). The Instructional Partnerships Collaborative is dealt with when addressing the question of how The Workshop's materials will strengthen partnerships with K-12 education, and other education-minded agencies and community-based organizations (p.23).
New Instructional Practices
This Collaborative will assist faculty in making the transition from the whole-class teaching practices favored in conventional classroom settings, to the more interactive and collaborative practices afforded within the instructional settings made possible by The Workshop's CMI materials. In these settings, the instructor will be freer to employ teaching practices that require students to collaborate more with their classmates, and to actively monitor and to assume greater responsibility for their own learning progress. The forums in which these practices will be discussed include demonstrations conducted by faculty with experience in using The Workshop's materials, hands-on workshops and formal seminars. A refereed on-line newsletter will be launched as a means for helping the faculty who participate in these collaboratives to share their doubts, their triumphs, and their suggestions for improvements. Undoubtedly, some of these commentaries will contain reviews and links to discipline-relevant Web sites. An easily searched archive of digital video segments of effective instructors commenting upon their own teaching practices will be made available to members of the collaboratives. The archive will include video segments of students working with particularly difficult lessons during various stages of the learning cycle. Over time, the accumulated wisdom of practice represented in these observations and resources will form the core curriculum for instructors making their first foray into location-independent, computer-mediated, collaborative learning.
Research and Continuous Improvement
The purpose of this Faculty Collaborative is to encourage and support information sharing among faculty interested in conducting systematic research on the teaching practices and learning activities encouraged by The Workshop's Web-based CMI materials. The expectation is that this collaborative will focus on identifying the instructional practices most beneficial to specific groups of students within specific topic modules within specific disciplines. Standard protocols will be developed to support the efforts of faculty in sharing their findings, interpretations and recommendations with others. These protocols will be designed to accommodate both quantitative and qualitative research traditions. The research findings generated by the faculty who participate in these collaboratives will be presented in seminars, workshops, formal academic presentations and articles in refereed journals. This collaborative will also sponsor a Web-based refereed newsletter, specialized bulletin boards and links to other relevant Web sites, as well as incorporating specialized, disciplinary databases. These databases will include an indexed, easily searched archive of digital video segments of research methodologists explaining the rationale, derivation and application of the data analyses protocols guiding this particular Faculty Collaborative. These archives will include video vignettes of leading researchers explaining their research methods, an electronic bulletin board for these research leaders to post answers to inquiries sent to them by faculty participants, as well as video vignettes of other faculty researchers explaining their research findings and methods. The expectation is that over time a large number of faculty participants will begin to post to this database a broad range of ethnographic observations of student learning practices in the instructional settings The Workshop's materials will make possible.
Back to Top
Why is the workshop stressing open, nonproprietary and extensible enabling technologies?
The success of The Workshop depends upon its ability to create an organizational framework and structures within which its Founding Partners can work cooperatively and collaboratively to build and sustain open "communities of practice." The success of these communities will depend upon their capacity to foster open discussions among Founding Partner representatives. These discussions must be sufficiently honest, robust and extensible to enable these representatives to negotiate around, through, under and over the complex lattice of routines, rituals, conventions, stories and histories that characterize their institutions. One test of these discussions is how well they do in yielding shared assumptions, shared definitions and shared understandings of the challenges facing Higher Education, vis-à-vis teaching, learning and technology in the post-Internet age.
These discussions must also lead to concrete, joint actions designed to translate the promise of the Internet and the Web into transformational improvements and changes in the collegiate teaching and learning enterprise. The one true measure of these joint actions is how well they lead to the design, development and continuous improvement of high quality, comprehensive and pedagogically sophisticated Web-based computer-mediated instructional (CMI) materials.
It is difficult to conceive of such communities of practice succeeding in a setting where the enabling technologies used to develop these Web-based CMI materials are closed, proprietary and nonextensible. This is why The Workshop's partnership model demands that it freely share the source code with its Founding Partners. This is why The Workshop will also strive to make the source code to its enabling technologies available to other Higher Education institutions on a minimum cost basis. This source code sharing arrangement will make it possible for academic technologists, distributed across the Higher Education community to leverage each other's unique technical strengths.
There are other reasons why it is absolutely essential that The Workshop share its source code with its Founding Partners. The nascent state of the art of Web-based CMI materials development argues powerfully against the notion that the source code underlying the enabling technologies required to build these materials should be closed. Common sense would seem to require that the individuals involved in the development of Web-based instructional materials and settings play an active role in specifying the requirements of the enabling technologies used to construct these materials and settings, and visa versa.
Back to Top
What is the architecture of the workshop's enabling technologies?
The Workshop employs a hybrid model of technologies, the Learning Conductor Suite, to create its instructional environment. The landscape of these technologies is diverse in scope, but meets The Workshop's overall goals of using open-source software wherever possible and the best tools available to deliver the highest quality instructional environment and content. The prototype of these technologies was completed in November 2000, less than six months after The Workshop commenced operations. The planned review release date of these technologies along with their source code release to our Founding Partners is the third quarter of 2001. Additionally, a light version of these technologies will be developed for course content authoring.
Back to Top
Will the workshop's topic modules run on the platforms
provided by private sector firms, like blackboard and webct?
It depends. The Workshop is building linkages into its topic modules to run on any Learning Management System (LMS) that fully complies with ADL's Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard. To the degree that the course management technologies and associated databases being marketed by Blackboard and WebCT are compliant with the SCORM API, they should be able to accommodate The Workshop's topic modules. However, there are two issues that could make this accommodation process extremely difficult for The Workshop.
First, the topic modules being developed by The Workshop are much more interactive than those that Blackboard and WebCT course management technologies are designed to handle. For example, the topic modules incorporate highly interactive embedded assessment capabilities, as well as provisions for dynamically generating instructional text in response to the student's performance on these assessment exercises.
Second, the license requirements of these firms may make it impossible for The Workshop to work with them. For example, the license agreement that Blackboard requires specifies that:
Any content that you upload or otherwise make available ("User Content") in Blackboard.com, including any CourseSite or Community, is and remains your sole property or the property of your licensors. By uploading or otherwise making available any User Content, you automatically grant and/or warrant that the owner has granted Blackboard, the perpetual royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, perform, display, and transmit the User Content through Blackboard.com. You also permit any other user of Blackboard, subject to your restrictions, to access, view, store and reproduce the User Content to the same extent permitted herein.
It is unlikely that The Workshop's Founding Partners will agree to these terms since they, in effect, would constitute a massive transfer of property rights from Higher Education to a for-profit entity.
Back to Top |
