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C
Group on Architacture issues
After sharing their thoughts and impressions of several initiatives, participants in the
architecture working group developed a proposal for assembling a national
laboratory to help individuals and groups develop interoperable systems. The
laboratory would also raise awareness of TT-enabled educational tools and promote
their adoption.
Other thoughts that emerged from the discussions are listed below:
Assemble (not "build") a laboratory modeled after the FermiLab or CERN. The
new lab should be a too} for doing science and engineering, not a sandbox.
The lab and plans for its activities should be based on current projects and
available tools, that are making existing tools and content work. In the beginning,
the lab should not be for technology creation.
As new tools are developed, they should be demonstrated in the lab with other
tools to ensure interoperability, etc. The lab may be modified as necessary.
Exemplary learning activities involving TT tools and content should be discovered
or developed in the lab. These could demonstrate applied pedagogy (e.g., a case-
based learning activity in a subject such as law, medicine, business, or
· ~
engineering.
The objectives of the lab should be:
· Open everything.
Push the limits of interoperability.
Promote adoption through examples and demonstrations.
Although everyone agreed that the lab, or something like it, will be important to
begin integrating innovations, the state of readiness for a lab wall depend on several
things:
the availability of lab components, tools, and content (including people and
"documentation")
the level of investment and commitment of resources
. the level of participation by institutions and individuals
The group identified several critical issues related to the creation of a lab of this kind:
(~) offering different kinds of incentives; and, (~) lowering the barriers to
participation. The lab should be a nonproprietary effort, but commercial
participation in the lab's activities will be important.
39
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4o
IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report
Participants in the technology and tools working group developed several
recommendations regarding TT-enabled educational materials:
· Open and content-oriented formats are preferable to proprietary formats for
source documents. (Source documents are the primary storage and archive forms
of documents; other formats can be derived from these by translation and
aggregation.)
Some domains have well developed, open-content mark-up formats e.g., MathML
and OpenMath for mathematics and ChemML for chemistry.) Some disciplines
do not have open-content formats, (e.g., computer science has no language-
independent code markup format). The missing formats and a general
knowledge/context representation format should be developed.
Define the relationship between object/domain/context/metadata. Determine
the level at which metadata are useful and in which contexts various levels of
granularity of metadata annotation are needed.
Develop tools to author and translate materials in source and target formats,
including all four categories of data.
identify the user communities and develop adoption plans for whatever tools and
formats are ready. Get institutional commitments. (An analogy for this: AMS and
ATE endorsed TeX very early on, considerably easing the adoption path).
Adapt techniques that (also) deal with administrative nuisances like
accreditation.
Develop and fund demonstration projects for exemplary value-added educational
services.
Concentrate on enabling technologies and building communities rather than
large-scale systems.
Participants agreed that issues related to tools and technology in TT-enabled
education could not be adequately addressed without also considering architecture,
content, pedagogy, and the cultural environment.
Discussions in the content and pedagogy working group were organized around three
issues:
I. What factors in the current state of practice impede the reuse of TT-enabled
learning resources?
a. What environment do we need to do things right?
3. What steps should we take to achieve the environment that supports our
needs?
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Notes from Breakout Sessions
~ ~~ 7W~ ~ ~ ~ ~
'~ Qume ~m"
"~ #~# Ace
41
The learning resources developed by faculty are usually created for their use in
their classrooms. The team described them as "lacking training wheels". They
provide no instructor guide and no embedded advice describing how these
resources should be used to meet instructional objectives.
Modifying or adapting materials may require a level of effort that exceeds the
perceived benefit to another faculty member.
Faculty organize their coverage of material in different ways. Changing the
modularity or guided sequencing of the learning process may change underlying
learning pedagogy.
If a faculty member finds an interesting learning resource on the web, he or she
rarely finds user evaluations. As someone in the group put it, "It would be great if
my colleagues indicated that this is so effective that T conclude, ~ can't afford not
to use this resource!" We need filtering mechanisms to describe the instructional
context of the resource and its effectiveness in that context.
There is scant use of metadata to describe shared learning resources. When it
exists, the vocabulary used by the author may not conform to emerging
standards. The Learning Object Mode} (LOM) defined in the standards
documents is so complex that most faculty won't even begin to use these
important descriptors. What are the essential fields that all sharable learning
resources must include? There is no centralized service (clearing house) to
support the effective use of metadata.
Achieving interoperability is a multidimensional task that extends beyond
technical issues. If we do not express objectives in concise, performance-based
terms, and if we do not have a common framework for documenting assessment
data, we cannot achieve interoperability for users of sharable learning resources.
,, . a, - -- - - - - - - --of
-O—-—O
.
We wall make no progress unless the academic community encourages faculty to
work cooperatively and selflessly. This would mean a radical change in the
existing academic culture! It would recognize the value of building on work by
others and adapting and adopting would be encouraged. Institutions would
commit resources to support teaching.
Faculty would be rewarded for creating innovative teaching/learning materials,
which would be treated as the "scholarship of learning" and would be of equal
value with traditional research.
The university must create a sustainable organization that provides the technical
support necessary to use/create learning objects.
Materials will be developed in such a way that they can be easily repackaged and
reconfigured for a new academic context or for reuse to support training and
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42
lifelong learning in industry.
IT-Based Educational Materials: Workshop Report
The breakout group agreed that we do not know how to create an ideal environment
that supports sharability. We must focus our research on the problems and
approaches to achieving the promise of TT-enabled learning. The breakout group
recommended the establishment of a test-bed, which would support scholarship on
TT-enabled learning in real-worId learning/teaching environments:
We must understand communities of learning (determining what do we know
now and what we need to know)?
The test-bed should include evaluations of content and pedagogy.
· Activities and results should be shared and coordinated with other activities
supporting TT-enabled learning (e.g. National Science Foundation Digital
Library).
We should adapt existing principles and approaches to software engineering,
portfolio management, and customer-driven design.
Rather than building a test-bed from scratch, we should build upon, and involve,
organizations currently involved in related efforts.
Our ultimate success wait depend on human and organizational issues. We must
create incentives/mandates for designing for share-ability. The entire community-
teachers, learners, and support personnel must be involved.
Or onQr n° t~on'CItr' ndL I'
cup ga Izal a, u ua, a ega ssues
Participants in the organizational, cultural, and legal issues working group agreed
that before a strategy to achieve our vision can be formulated, we must identify,
categorize, and articulate the perceived impediments. Another way to state this is to
ask what resources (financial, technical, cultural, theoretical, and legal) we would
need to realize our vision. These following impediments were identified
The absence of strong institutional and collegial commitment wait make it very
difficult to achieve the vision. This entire university community (e.g., board,
administration, faculty, staff, and students) must "buy in" to the idea and provide
the hardware, software, staff, time, and commitment to realize the potential of
TT-based education.
We do not currently have user-friendly tools for authoring, modifying,
maintaining, and using information content. These tonic must aIso sunnort
multi-authoring and sharing.
. ~ ~
The current projects often have incompatible formats and protocols that are too
"human"-oriented. Computers and communication systems, as well as humans,
must be able to "understand" the information.
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Notes from Breakout Sessions
.
.
.
43
We do not have a culture of community authorship. The software community has
developed the beginnings of such a culture with the open-source movement, but
the education community still has a single-author, single-instructor culture.
Few learning models are based on cognitive theory that incorporates modern IT.
Without good models and agreed-upon criteria, it is difficult to evaluate a
teaching or learning system of any kind.
Even if we had easy-to-use, effective, efficient systems and tools, we would still
have to convince instructors and students to use them. Adoption is often a
serious problem, partly because it is not always clear that there is a significant
benefit, and partly because of the traditional resistance to change. Students
expect to learn the way they have always learned and faculty expect to teach the
way they have always taught. A minority are "early adopters," but most are not
and must be convinced to use something new.
The cultural attitudes about ownership of, credit for, and compensation for
creating and using shared, technology-enhanced materials are based on the
traditional single-author model. Mechanisms for awarding tenure, assigning
salary increases, and giving recognition and rewards must be changed.
A very serious impediment to the implementation of shared material systems is
our traditional copyright laws and the way they are used by authors and
publishers. A system being developed by the Creative Commons organization will
be essential for progress.
The wide diversity of our institutions, faculty, and students present a great
challenge. We must involve research universities and community colleges, K-~2
schools, institutions of higher education, as well as continuing education and
industrial training programs. We must also begin to collaborate with other
nations, including other English-speaking countries. The systems we develop
must address different learning styles, backgrounds, and preparation levels of the
students, which we currently address by having a variety of schools. The global
nature of our vision will present a new challenge.
The current communities of authors, teachers, and students do not significantly
overlap. The new model will have much more overlap, with students involved in
both teaching and authoring, teachers involved in authoring, and authors
becoming more aware of teaching and learning.
.
.
Currently there is not nearly enough available content for most of the systems we
envisage. There are plenty of books and journal articles, but they are not in a
format for shared systems, and, under current copyright agreements, they cannot
be shared.
In trying to realize a vision or to convince a community to change, there is always a
danger of "overselling" or promising more than can be delivered. We must be very
careful that we have working systems before we start promising things we may only
be able to deliver sometime in the future. The artificial intelligence community
learned this lesson the hard way.
OCR for page 44
Invited Workshop Participants (can't)
Marietta Baba
Dean and Professor
College of Social Science
Michigan State University
John Bailey
Director of Technology
U.S. Department of Education
Richard G. Baraniuk
Professor
Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department
Rice University
Mariann D. Banfield
Wetmaster
Program and Policy Studies
Services
Office of the Under Secretary
U.S. Department of Education
Karen Billings
Vice President
Education Division
Software & Information :Industry
Association (STIA)
Robert Black
Deputy Director and
Publications and Marketing
Manager
American Society for Engineering
Education
Sheri Brodeur
University Programs Manager
HewletI-Packard Company
44
Ann Q. Gates
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas at El Paso
Kurt Gramoll
Robert Hughes Centennial
Professor of Engineering
Director of the Engineering Media
I~aboratory
University of Oklahoma
Joseph Hardin
Deputy Director of the Media
Union and
Director of Systems Development
and Operations
School of Information
University of Michigan
Frank Huband
Executive Director
American Society for Engineering
Education
Christopher Israel
Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Technology Policy
U.S. Department of Commerce
Bruce M. Kramer
Division Director
Division of Engineering Education
and Centers
National Science Foundation
Representative terms from entire chapter:
workshop report
