For those of us who saw Blackboard’s aggressive acquisition of commercial competitors WebCT and Angel, and have seen the patent litigation they unleashed against Desire 2 Learn, the idea of Blackboard pledging to be a good open source citizen may seem a bit … unsettling, if not 1984ish.

But it has been clear for a while that Blackboard’s old strategy of ‘owning the market’ just wasn’t going to work. Whatever the unique features are that Blackboard has over Moodle and Sakai, they aren’t enough to convince every institution to pay for the license. Choosing between VLEs is largely about price and service, not functionality. Even for those Blackboard institutions where price and service are not an issue, many departments persist with some other VLE, for all sorts of not entirely functional reasons .

In other words, the VLE had become a commodity. Everyone needs one, they are fairly predictable in their functionality, and there is not that much between them, much as I’ve outlined in the past.

So it seems Blackboard have wisely decided to switch focus from charging for IP to becoming a provider of learning tool services. As Blackboard’s George Kroner noted, “It does kinda feel like @Blackboard is becoming a services company a la IBM under Gerstner.”

And just as IBM has become quite a champion of Open Source Software, there is no reason to believe that Blackboard will be any different. If only because the projects will not go away, whatever Blackboard does with the support companies they have just taken over. Besides, ‘open’ matters to the education sector.

Interoperability

Blackboard had already abandoned extreme lock-in by investing quite a bit in open interoperability standards, mostly through the IMS specifications. That is, users of the latest versions of Blackboard can get their data, content and external tool connections out more easily than in the past- it’s no longer as much of a reason to stick with them.

Providing services across the vast majority of VLEs (outside of continental Europe at least) means that Blackboard has even more of an incentive to make interoperability work across them all. Dr Chuck Severance’s appointment also strongly hints at that.

This might need a bit of watching. Even though the very different codebases, and a vested interest in openness, means that Blackboard sponsored interoperability solutions – whether arrived at through IMS or not – are likely to be applicable to other tools, this is not guaranteed. There might be a temptation to cut corners to make things work quickly between just Blackboard Learn, Angel, Moodle 1.9/2.x and Sakai 2.x.

On the other hand, the more pressing interoperability problems are not so much between the commodified VLEs anymore, they are between VLEs and external learning tools and administrative systems. And making that work may just have become much easier.

This post originally appeared on the JISC CETIS website

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

In short, the University of Lincoln undertook a four month project for JISC called ‘Linking You’, which surveyed 40 different websites across the .ac.uk domain – ten from each university group – and compared the similarities between the URLs (location addresses) of those websites. The project found there was a lot of inconsistency in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates. However, there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector and out of all this, the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional websites:

http://lncn.eu/toolkit/model

Before you get upset and think that we are suggesting you change your current URL structures, you should know that we are NOT suggesting anything of the sort! Rather we are suggesting that via a transparent mapping exercise (using 303 or 301 redirects) you can mint all the suggested URLs that the ‘Linking You’ project proposes and then link them to the actual URLs that have grown up as part of your organic system. For example,

If you use: http://foo.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses

You could follow the ‘linking you’ recommendations and mint a new URL that points to the above URL using HTTP code 303 or 301 to:

http://foo.ac.uk/courses/

In short, you’re just mapping what we hope will become a common URI structure (the compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource) to your current link architecture, which means you can continue to change and add more links to your architecture as the organisation changes and you would just continue to redirect the ‘common’ link as recommend by ‘linking you’ to the underlying link. This process need not affect the design or apparent structure of your website.

So why should you mint the suggested set of ‘linking you’ URLs for your institution? We recognise this work of minting and maintaining the redirects would be ‘yet another thing to deal with’ across your complex and growing .ac.uk websites, however we think there is potential value both in time savings and value add we could all communally benefit from in considering these URL conventions.

Below we list ten reasons that we think will result if we can get multiple institutions to start adopting this syntax and vocabulary:

1. Better search engine optimisation: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs when people are searching for things like courses.”

2. robot.txt: If a group of Universities started adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all .ac.uk websites.

3. A simple mapping tool: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc. equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be written once and support many!

4. Improve discovery: Clear human-readable URLs are now integral to browser search and lookup technology and becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing your website.

5. Predictable, consistent, aggregations: It will be easier to build tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to go for the data. See the below reasons (no. 6, 7, 8 ) for immediate experimentation JISC is already undertaking and just think what else could be leveraged if we could bring our data together:

6. A course catalogue: As many of you know JISC is actively encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses. If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL foo.ac.uk/courses/xcri we’d lay the groundwork for persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we could all benefit from.

7. A news feed: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a University News App where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.

8. A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and higher education institution data geeks.

9. Know your assets: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your ‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help web managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.

10. Cool URLs: Simple, stable, manageable URLs make sense. They are recommended by the worldwide web consortium or W3C, to make web managers’ lives easier and keep users happy, too.

Those are some of the reasons we can think of and we think there are many more if even a little imagination is implied. We’re convinced that if we all worked together as university web managers we could achieve more than the sum of our parts by producing this URL structure for each institution.

What kind of idea do you think you could achieve by adopting the ‘Linking You’ toolkit? We’re thinking of funding a several short projects to review and standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up your case study for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of this?

In an example from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity, a virtual learning environment-based blogging tool has been used to enhance the dynamics of tutorials and seminars and to improve the consistency of students’ engagement with more challenging elements of the curriculum. Following successful trials commencing in 2005, the School of Divinity has used blogging as part of a wider blended learning strategy to develop student skills of critical thinking and reflection.

The detailed case study is a word doc you can download: Engaging learners in critical reflection – University of Edinburgh

What are the advantages?  In my experience, group blogging helps to unite a diverse body of students and makes it easier to identify individuals’ difficulties. The quality of discussion on the blogs is often high, with more competent students raising the performance of weaker students, and contributions made as part of these discussions can later become aids for revision. The time involved in monitoring blogs has not proved excessive – in fact the blogging activity may have reduced the time spent supporting students experiencing difficulties.

What’s your experience of using blogs with students? I would welcome your comments.

Find out more about JISC’s work in online learning