UNC TLT Conference, Day Three

And here are my notes from the third and last day of the conference.

Staying Ahead of the Curve: The Open Croquet Consortium
Presenters: Marilyn Lombardi

The presentation started an overview of the involvement by young people in "Web 3.0", which could basically be summed up as interactive virtual spaces. Croquet, which includes involvement by computer scientist Alan Kay, is a virtual spaces application, similar to Second Life, that is open source and built from the "ground up" as a tool for use in teaching. The presenter outlined the issues with using Second Life in a academic context. Since it's a commercial application, there are FERPA issues as student work is stored on servers outside the university; users are anonymous and SL includes inappropriate content, so you don't know who might drop in to a class or who students might interact with; questions about stability and viability as the application becomes more popular. Croquet uses peer to peer model - user's computers connect with each other to update the environment, rather than talking to "the mothership" like Second Life. It's designed to be platform neutral and there are plans to offer it through PDAs and mobile phones.

Croquet users can create virtual "worlds within worlds" and bring multimedia and other objects there; the software includes authentication issues to limit where users can go and the kinds of roles they have.

The presenter showed some movies of the environment. It's very much a beta and looks rather crude compared to Second Life and other applications. There was a demonstration of tagging objects in the world and creating an object "on the fly" by drawing a fish, then having the fish render in 3d and having behaviors attached to it. Users can create a "frame" to show/hide objects (ie, showing students some objects if they perform certain tasks or instructor can have objects they can only see.) Integrated with Jabber and VOIP in a basic way (ie, doesn't seem to allow for real time "talk" between characters, but you can have static pictures with VOIP.

Croquet is current a development environment, not a software package that can actually be used right now. It seems to be a framework for creating applications that operate in a virtual environment, rather than a virtual environment that users can drop in and use. They're releasing a SDK version 1.0 next week.

The speaker noted that Duke is creating an orientation environment in Croquet so that new students can get an idea of what attending Duke is like.

Development of the Course Training Design Development Package
Presenters: Forrest McFeeters, Antionette Moore, Irene Chief

Staff from Winston-Salem State University described a program they've put in place to help faculty put together online courses. The process takes about six months to one year and starts with the faculty member using course design principles to come up with goals and activities for their courses, similar to what the Duke CIT has used for our recent course design grants. There are specific deadlines that faculty meet for content for the course and they have put in place a system where a faculty peer does a quality control check on the course content and others do checks on the course design. They're looking at how to involve students in the quality control process.

They noted that they've tried the same process during an intensive summer workshop, with faculty putting the course together over a 20 day period. Faculty seem to like this better than the longer process, since they can concentrate on the process without being distracted by other duties, but assembling the components for the courses in such a compressed time period is difficult for the small staff. Overall, the process is quite similar to what is used in a corporate environment or by commercial design firms when putting together an online training course for an internal or external client. At any one time, they're working with 20-30 faculty on courses.

It was noted during the Q&A for the session that the new head of WSSU has set a policy that all faculty must create at least one online course in order to be eligible for promotion or tenure.


Facilitating Faculty Connections: The Technology Practices Directory
Track: Other
Presenters: Kevin Oliver, Geetanjali Soni

Staff of NCSU's LITRE office ("Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment") created a web-based mechanism for faculty to enter ways they use instructional technology in their courses. The effort emerged from NCSU's quality enhancement plan to gather information on a broad base of faculty on the campus.

http://litre.ncsu.edu/

A demonstration of the web database was part of the presentation; faculty enter information about themselves and, for each class they teach, entered technologies they used and then how those were used for instructional purposes. The form was designed in this way because faculty generally had difficulty reporting how they used technology in a pedagogical way, but could more easily describe technologies they used. The group formed a specific taxonomy that covered most types of tools and instructional uses on campus. The form is about five pages long and was quite lengthy - the group's board of advisors was made up of individuals from several campus units and each was wanting to gather specific information through this effort.

The software includes a search function so that faculty can connect with others who have similar interests. It also included the ability to export material about a department to an Excel spreadsheet so that Deans and department heads could get an overview of faculty in their area. The group also hoped to use the information to target calls for proposals for grants, training and other program offerings.

The database was advertised in a letter from the Provost and Deans, through a postcard and a newsletter over a period four months. Only 89 faculty out of 2,000 entered some form of information in the database. The main problem they found was in the length of the form and the fact that many tended to report only innovative or high-end technologies they were using.

The group thinks that the effort might make more sense taking a form that's similar to MySpace that faculty can use as a social networking tool over the entire UNC system. They're also looking at ways to give access to the database to administrative assistants or others that could contribute information about faculty activities, but they're concerned that these individuals might not know enough about the specifics of what the faculty are using to teach and how the faculty use the tools in classes.