Tom Caswell

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  • Why every college alumni association should care about their school’s LMS

    A comment left by Andy Duckworth on my last post got me thinking about how a more open, persistent LMS might be as beneficial to institutions as it is to students. Andy’s favorite feature of the Instructure’s Canvas LMS is “the ability for students to create groups that can persist outside of a specific class.” Canvas does a lot of clever things (integrating collaborative goodies such as Google Docs and DimDim), but persistent groups is my favorite feature too.

    As an instructor at Utah State University I hated getting the emails from the Blackboard administrator telling me that all courses before X date were being deleted to create room on the server for new courses. Not that those courses were open anyway, but it reminded me of the ephemeral nature of those courses. Here today, gone tomorrow.

    I think most folks would agree that there is value to making a course available to students beyond the semester/quarter in which they enrolled. It could be a good reference for them in higher level courses, etc. But could there actually be value for institution?

    I get calls each year from the alumni associations of the various schools I attended. They usually want me to donate to something. I find it ironic that those same institutions have effectively LOCKED THE DOORS to the online learning I once enjoyed. If they want me to stay involved as an alumni, why not do something to keep me interested. I’m not talking about a tailgate party. If I could come back to the lectures, notes, groups I once participated in I would come back to (some of) them year after year. YOU ARE A SCHOOL. Your best marketing tool is (hopefully) the LEARNING you provide. STOP THROWING IT ALL AWAY.

    The next time I get hit up for a donation by an alumni association, I will refer them here. Bottom line: Open your learning and I’ll open my wallet.

  • Why Google will *never* buy Blackboard

    I recently read a blog post about why Google should buy Blackboard (instead of paying $6 billion for Groupon). Buying Blackboard seems like a really bad idea to me, and here’s why: Google tends to buy companies with (1) GREAT software and (2) a large and growing user base. The “great software” requirement probably explains why Google hasn’t made a bid for Blackboard. In fact, the *only* reason for anyone to buy Blackboard is for the user base. But these are not happy users, so really you are just buying a (very expensive) problem.

    Some folks may want a Google to buy Blackboard because they think that somehow being owned by Google will make everything easy (like Google Docs) and cost nothing (like Gmail). But think about it: If Google bought Bb they would then have the nightmarish task of changing/improving *almost everything* about the software while trying to keep existing customers happy. Doesn’t exactly sound like “low-hanging fruit” that someone should quickly snatch up, does it?

    If you want to see an example of great GDocs-LMS integration, have a look at Canvas, by a company called Instructure. It’s a great, new LMS that integrates tightly with Google Docs and other great apps (like DimDim for videoconferencing). Google could buy Instructure instead, make it totally free and open, and then pull customers away from Bb. Five years later you’ll have the same result (lots of folks switched over to Google’s LMS), without the nightmare transition for Google… and without spending $1.5 billion. And we’ll all live happily ever after (as long as you don’t mind a few Google Ads for Viagra during your Human Anatomy course). 😉

  • Setting the Default to “Open”

    I just started a new job as Open Education Program Manager for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). My main challenge is getting up to speed with a major project that has been under way for several months. The Open Course Library is taking the top 81 highest enrolling college courses in the state and to creating high quality, openly licensed curriculum for each course. There are dozens of people involved: course developers, designers, librarians, and many other experts. All the challenges of course development come into play, plus some additional things that come with creating a course in the open: content licensing, copyright clearance, and designing for reuse. It’s all there, and it’s a little like trying to grab on to a moving train. But I love it, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.

    It’s kind of hard to leave off each day. I kind of want to skip Thanksgiving and keep working. Reminds me of when I taught Computer Science at Redlands High School and let my students create a video game as a class one semester. I had to kick them out of my classroom each day because they didn’t want to stop what they were doing. Some of the other teachers were frustrated at me because my students were so focused on my class. I even found one student hiding in the corner of my room, two hours after class, working on creating his part of the game. That’s how I feel here.

    But it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and everyone else has gone home, so I’ll leave with my favorite quotes/ideas of the week from a recent OCW Consortium webinar on open access in education and policy given by Reuven Carlyle, State Representative from the 36th District of Seattle, Washington:

    1. If the public taxpayers fund something, it should be open and accessible.
    2. “If we are successful at nothing else in the next year or two, let’s set a goal to fundamentally change the dynamic so that the expectation is one of complete openness … as opposed to openness being the exception. We have to change the social dynamic to one of openness.”
    3. Position open access as a cost savings and one of the most disruptive new approaches, to say nothing of the increased learning that comes of this.
    4. Have a clear, simple message about this. This is not a techno-gadget.  Be clear on the value drivers.
    5. Make the financial case for openness in how it avoids duplication and lack of coordination. We’ll pay for open content once, but we aren’t going to pay for it a thousand times.

    Education and Policy (Webinar Nov 2010) from OpenCourseWare Consortium on Vimeo.

  • Making friends in Barcelona with Floyd the inflatable flamingo

    This week I tested a new hypothesis: I learned that it’s significantly easier to make friends in a foreign country when you bring a giant, inflatable pink flamingo along for the ride. You don’t even have to speak the language.

    I met Floyd at the AECT conference last week in Long Beach, and we hit it right off so I asked for permission to bring my new friend to Barcelona to attend the Open Ed 2010 conference as well as Mozilla’s Drumbeat Festival. Even the airport security guards smiled a little. Several TSA agents gathered and talked quietly, looking over at Floyd from time to time. Mostly, they just couldn’t decide what to do.

    I took lots of pictures. Here are some favorites of me and my favorite pink friend meeting lots of nice people in Barcelona. Floyd will be in Jacksonville, Florida next year for AECT 2011. He wanted you to know.

    For those of you who are wondering, yes, I built my own battery pack from parts at Radio Shack so Floyd could go wireless. I wanted him to have the full beach experience.

  • An opportunity for TwHistory

    A few months ago I helped a friend win the Pepsi Refresh Challenge, which gave $25,000 to one of my favorite music associations, the Associate of Redlands Bowl. The following month he did it again, this time at the $50K level. The basic idea is that there is strength in numbers. So TwHistory has teamed up with other groups to form an alliance by supporting each others’ projects.

    We are competing for a $25K grant for TwHistory and we have a month to collect all the daily votes we can. It’s simple: if we are in the top 10 with the most votes at the $25K level at the end of the month, we get the funding. We are currently ranked #16 out of over a thousand entries, so we are definitely in the running. Here are our deliverables:

    • 10 lesson plans built around historical documents
    • 1 example of a virtual historical reenactment (Sinking of the Titanic)
    • 1 ‘how to’ video posted on our site for educators to learn the TwHistory process

    Vote early and often

    Vote for TwHistory and its partners here.  You can sign in using your Facebook account, so it’s really easy. You are allowed to vote for up to 10 projects each day, so please vote for our partners as well.