Management of eLearning environments: some

Download PDF
0 downloads 0 Views 952KB Size Report
Comment
project aimed at studying management of eLearning environments ... KEY WORDS: eLearning; eLearning platforms; ... and the best processes to reach them.
Management of eLearning environments: some issues and research clues Fernando Ramos1,2 [email protected]

Angelo Conde2 [email protected]

Luís Neves2 [email protected]

António Moreira3 [email protected]

1

Department of Communication and Art, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal 2 UnICA-Research Unit on Communication and Art, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal 3 Department of Didactics and Educational Technology, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal

ABSTRACT The increasing importance of distance learning has been a boosting element for the emergence of Internet based education services. This area of activity imposes new challenges to the participants, and experience shows that management of the dynamics of activities is a key factor for the success of Internet based educational actions. This paper reports some results achieved on a project aimed at studying management of eLearning environments, and presents and discusses the role of workflow tools and metadata definitions in the future implementation of management tools based on the approach and results from that research project.

KEY WORDS: eLearning; eLearning platforms; eLearning metadata.

management;

workflow;

educational

1. eLEARNING: A SOURCE OF JOY AND PROBLEMS eLearning is a valuable extension of the distance education paraphernalia, enabled by the new information and communication technologies. Distance education normally occurs in a different place from teaching and as a result requires special techniques of course design, special instructional techniques, special methods of communication, as well as special organizational and administrative arrangements [1]. eLearning is the use of network technology, namely the Internet, to design, deliver, select, administer and extend learning [2]. In fact, eLearning is one buzzword in the world of Internet and distance education. For many specialists it

351-609

has the potential to be a killer application of the Internet along with eCommerce. In the European Union, eLearning is being seen as a major opportunity to move Europe forward to a knowledge society. Supporting this view, the European Commission recently launched the eLearning initiative aiming the mobilization of the educational and cultural communities, as well as the economic and social players in Europe, in order to speed up changes in the education and training systems fostering Europe's move to a knowledge-based society [3]. Many European market players are in line with the view about the potential of eLearning. According to IDC forecasts the corporate eLearning market in Europe will grow by 96% in the next four years [4]. Although still embryonic, and according to the same source, eLearning could represent a market of more than 400 thousand millions Euros in 2005. This is a massive market that is attracting new but also many traditional education providers, public or private institutions with a large background of conventional education that are trying to understand how eLearning will affect and transform their existence. Due to the flexibility provided to students and teachers/tutors, both in space and time, eLearning may be a source of great joy to its users and, as shown before, an important source of financial resources for many organizations. However, eLearning is based on the cooperation of geographically distributed participants, and many of the activities the participants are supposed to perform do not have strict time schedules, but do have time constraints that must be respected. If these constraints are not fulfilled, severe problems may occur and the success of a specific task or action may be in jeopardy. These kinds of problems are very difficult to handle and

solve, because of the distributed nature of the resources and participants of an eLearning environment. One key issue in eLearning is communication between participants, for which there are two basic types of technological solutions: asynchronous and synchronous. In the asynchronous approach, the interaction between parties does not require them to be engaged at the same point in time. In synchronous communications the interaction between participants requires simultaneous engagement of the participants. Examples of technologies for asynchronous communications are hypertext publication (namely www), e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups/bulletin boards and file download (ftp). For synchronous communications the more often used technologies are: chat/IRC, whiteboard, audiovideo streaming and videoconference. These existing eLearning platforms, such as WebCT, Lotus Learning Space, Blackboard, Centra, etc, incorporate both models, and corresponding services, in different ways. However, none of these platforms include support to help manage the dynamics of eLearning activities. Thus, although being a potential source of joy for participants and a profitable activity, eLearning may also be a source of many, and difficult to solve, problems for the providers of educational services.

an eLearning action. It includes many different tasks, ranging from the scheduling of the delivery of the pedagogical materials to the planning of the students’ activities and the preparation of the inquiries that will be used at the end of the eLearning action to get feedback from the participants. The execution phase is the most visible part of an eLearning action, and includes the period of time during which the students are active in the learning process. This is also the phase where all the interactions among students and tutors occur. Finally, the procedural evaluation phase, the last but not the least important phase, deals with the analysis of how the eLearning fulfilled its aims, and includes the distribution of questionnaires to all the participants, and the corresponding collection and analysis of gathered data. As briefly explained above, each phase is composed of different activities, in which participants engage taking specific roles and aiming at specific goals. The appropriate and timely execution of each activity is critical in the overall eLearning process and therefore appropriate management is required. Management in this context is, thus, understood as keeping track of weather planned activities are timely executed and taking appropriate corrective actions if that is not the case.

2. THE ODL TOOLBOX PROJECT1 3. CLUES FOR CURRENT WORK The ODL Toolbox project [5] aims at studying management issues in eLearning environments. The project started in October 2000 and, during the first year, the work has focused on the identification and characterization of the activities typical of eLearning actions. One of the first decisions was to consider an eLearning environment as being composed, on a time scale, by four different phases: conception, planning, execution and procedural evaluation. In the conception phase the conceptual aspects of a course, namely its subject, target audience, contents, budget organization, etc., are defined. These activities must be executed according to a certain time plan to prevent future problems. The quality of the course begins exactly at this point: the clarification of the goals and the best processes to reach them. Planning, the second phase, is also an extremely important phase, because it deals with the details for the establishment and preparation of a specific instance of 1

Research grant Ref. COM/33057/99-00 from FCT (the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology).

As in every research project, the work done during the first year of the ODL Toolbox project provided several interesting clues for future work. From these, two are currently being explored, and will be the main concern of two MSc dissertations under preparation: usage of workflow tools to help management of the activities of an eLearning action and description of eLearning activities using a standard metadata approach enabling future interpretation by eLearning software.

3.1. USAGE OF WORKFLOW TOOLS FOR eLEARNING MANAGEMENT Workflow may be defined as “The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules” [6]. In this definition the expression “participant” refers to a resource, either human or machine. Thus, a workflow tool provides an automated way to control, in whole or part, the progress of the execution

of a set of tasks according to well-known and predefined rules. The key benefits of using workflow techniques and tools [6] include several important issues in eLearning, namely improved efficiency (elimination of many unnecessary steps), better process control (through the standardization of working methods), improved users service (greater predictability in levels of response to users), flexibility (ease of re-design in line with changing needs) and, finally, business process improvement (streamlining and simplification of processes). Having identified a set of commonalities in eLearning actions, and having organized them as a set of phases and activities, it is very appealing to try to understand how the workflow concepts, techniques and tools may be used to help manage eLearning. Workflow software tools, such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and others, will be considered for this purpose.

3.2. METADATA DESCRIPTION OF eLEARNING ACTIVITIES Many different organizations and research groups are currently working in the development and standardization of models for technology based educational systems. This work is being lead by international organizations such as the IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers [7], the IMSInstructional Management Systems consortium [8] and the ADL-Advanced Distributed Learning initiative [9]. The main objective of their work is the development of a framework of reference models and implementation techniques aiming at the deployment of re-usable contents for eLearning. One of the building blocks of the concepts and standards under development is the concept of learning object. A learning object is a container of information encapsulating a specific learning topic, and includes both the learning materials and the description of the object according to a set of predefined and standardized rules. The reusable nature of a learning object results from the fact that its description and presentation is done according to those standard rules, using pre-define metadata elements. For the description of a learning object XML language is used. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is an open standard for describing data developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) [10]. XML uses a similar tag structure as to the one used in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). However, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain. HTML uses predefined tags, but XML allows tags to be defined by

the developer of the page. Thus, virtually any data items, such as courses, contents, and elements, can be described. Metadata provides descriptions, properties, information about objects to characterize them in order to simplify the use in management. The idea we are currently working on is that the description in XML of the management elements used in eLearning may be a good basis for the future standardization of those management elements, leading the way to the possible definition of what we may designate as management objects, subsuming in the designation the conceptual parallel already used, concerning the concept, with learning objects. One exciting possibility opened by this approach, although requiring further research, is the setup of a framework enabling the definition of self-contained management objects, incorporating target management elements (such as activities), metric definitions and the different procedures to be executed in the different specific scenarios. If presented in a well-known language, such as XML, these management objects could be imported by eLearning platforms and used according to specific needs, in a similar way as learning objects are supposed to be incorporated and used.

4. CONCLUSIONS eLearning is driving the attention of many organizations, because it is recognized to have a huge potential as an educational tool. Along with the rapid development of the eLearning market, there is a lot of effort going on in the standardization arena, aiming at the development of universally accepted reference models and implementation details for reusable and sharable eLearning contents. However, experience shows that management of eLearning environments, including monitoring of the actions and the interactions of the participants in order to control if the expected levels of participation is achieved, is a key success factor. The systematization and generalization of the activities (actions and interactions) that may happen in an eLearning environment provide the ground for research about the potential of using workflow tools to help manage eLearning environments, and also for the study of the possibility of applying to management elements a similar approach to the one that led to the proposal of the concept of learning object. These two research directions are currently under progress, and will be the focus of two MSc dissertations under preparation and expected to be concluded before the end of 2002.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to acknowledge Arnaldo Santos and Filipe Peixinho, from PT Inovação SA, company partner in the ODL Toolbox project, for their important contributions to the development and discussion of many of the ideas reported in this paper. This acknowledgement also extends to Carlos Sousa Pinto, for the useful discussions about these topics.

forecast, October 2000, http://www.itresearch.com/alfatst4.nsf/unitabsx/WTT16 G?openDocument&q=tt16g++++ [last access 26 October 2001]. [5] Ramos, Fernando, Moreira, Antonio and Santos, Arnaldo “Towards a Reference Framework for eLearning Management”, Proceedings of DLA’2001Distance Learning Administration Conference, University of West Georgia, GA, USA, 6-8 June 2001.

REFERENCES

[6] e-workflow - the workflow portal, http://www.eworkflow.org/ [last access 23 November 2001].

[1] Moore, Michael “Distance Education: A Systems View”, Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996. http://www.cde.psu.edu/de/what_is_de.html#definition [last access 12 November 2001].

[7] IEEE - LTSC, Learning Technology Standardization Committee, http://ltsc.ieee.org [last access 21 November 2001].

[2] Masie, Elliott, a presentation on e-Learning Europe 2001 Dublin, Ireland, http://www.techlearn.com/dublin/followup2001/SLIDE S_files/frame.htm [last access 18 November 2001]. [3] “eLearning, Design tomorrow’s Education. A European Commission initiative to an eEurope”, http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/elearning/index.ht ml [last access 21 November 2001]. [4] McGovern, Sheila and Sarraf, Beatrice “Corporate eLearning: Market Forecast and Analysis 2000”, IDC

[8] IMS Global Learning Consortium, http://www.imsproject.org [last access 21 November 2001]. [9] ADL, Advanced Distributed Learning, Department of Defense, http://www.adlnet.org [last access 21 November 2001]. [10] World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XML specifications, http://www.w3.org/XML/ [last access 19 November 2001].