Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Building Content– Faster with better quality


With new eLearning technologies course coordinators can build more effective learning experiences for students. For example they can build short videos followed by quizzes, to pre-load students for a high value active learning experience on campus. Increasingly universities add more advanced technologies to allow course coordinators to improve the student’s learning experience. Is that sustainable for busy coordinators? How do we keep pace with content quality improvements? Perhaps some of the principles applied in research can help us move at a faster pace and build better quality.
There is no doubt more advanced tools will help with learning. Consider adaptive learning quizzes versus dumb quizzes. A dumb quiz does not know about past attempts by the student and may not even give feedback on mistakes. An adaptive quiz can remember past attempts by students to identify weak spots for individual students, then provide formative feedback and personalised sequences of questions during retesting to enhance missing competencies. Personalised adaptive learning provides a faster and much effective learning experience. Why isn’t this common in higher education when these tools have been common practice in the IT industry for decades with industry training and certifications such as CISCO and Novell in the 1990s. I coordinator told me one how it tool three years to build up a quiz question bank of 3000 questions. This was clearly
In academia research papers begin with a thorough review of past work, in an effort to focus on building genuinely new knowledge, and avoid duplication. These reviews are based on the full global market of research. Shouldn’t we apply the same principle to higher education content and technology? Under what circumstances should any one of 20,000 universities need to write their own learning tool, and do all 20,000 universities really have to assemble their own learning content?

Bespoke Tools?
To provide more advanced learning tools, the tendency in the past has been for universities to write their own, and while this can still make sense in some cases, its increasingly faster to adopt off the shelf tools. The idea that every one of the 20,000 universities can and should keep pace writing bespoke tools makes less and less sense in a globalized market. A single vendor will be able to deliver more functionality faster and at a lower cost. Yes you can get ahead for a short time with a big investment but the majority of these efforts fall by the wayside. If you want an app on your iPhone how often does it make sense to write it yourself before even looking on the app store? So to acquire more advanced content generation tools with a lower cost, perhaps we should start to moving away from custom development towards COTS tools that plugin using standards such as LTI.

Bespoke Content?
Having better tools is one thing, but they still require time to generate the content. Adaptive quizzes require large question banks that can take an instructor a few years to accumulate. When you consider there might be up to 20,000 coordinators around the world slaving away to build the same learning materials for a similar course you start to wonder if there might be a better way. In fact you might even wonder if efforts to generate bespoke content might be a futile waste of time, doomed to be overtaken before they are even complete. Consider if a publisher has already gathered the top 1% of those coordinators together, with a team of learning and multimedia specialists to create learning materials for that course, funded by global economies of scale. The production quality advantage would be quite dramatic. Already somewhere in the world students are being exposed to and addicted to blockbuster quality learning materials. Home grown content will look like home movies by comparison. Highly respected schools are already have already engaged with publishers to incorporate their material on the basis of it being cheaper and better quality than they can achieve.. You can see how at some point it would be prudent for many universities to start adding mixes of high production quality off-the-shelf content from publishers and other commercial vendors where possible. If universities can get together and collaboratively develop high quality content all the better, but the ideas that each of 20,000 universities should continue assembling primitive text content on their own, with no adaptive feedback is probably dead.

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