I have been surfing around eLearning technology, scoping out the state of the industry as it pertains to K-12 education. Mostly what I found are sites targetting higher education.
Still waters.
I have done this too many times: begin surfing around SCOs and eLearning, only to become mired in a network of BigCo industry presentations and academic discussions. Joe and Jill Public Teacher do not have the funding to pursue these technologies. Nor do they have the time.
I started this post with a title that read “…and the K-12 Market”. Soon came around to the idea that public education is more “audience” than market. In my experience, most motivated educators are resourceful survivors, not as many are active as technology consumers. An application should start making things easier straight out of the box. There is an obvious need for educational tech-tools to be blatantly, absurdly user-friendly. In his recent article discussing “XERTE” (a Free Visual Editor for SCORM compliant Flash Learning Objects) Scott Leslie writes
…I truly do not think this is what I call an instructor-focused tool.
Seriously, what kind of time should we expect faculty to invest in these types of tools?
Sharable Content Objects, and Learning Management Systems (LMS) might smooth the process of developing and distributing high quality, interactive instructional materials. But the learning curve for any new application can be daunting. In this article, James Burke defines a SCO as “…the smallest piece of content that is both reusable and independent.” The item appears in a table of contents, can contain its own bookmark, score, and completion status, and may be tracked separately from other items.
In “SCORM for dummies”, Rustici Software explains that a LMS, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is
…responsible for directing the learner to relevant training, tracking the learner’s progress (things like score and current location) and maintaining the learner’s transcript. The essence of SCORM is that any content that conforms to the SCORM specifications will work with any SCORM conformant LMS. SCORM is the ’secret sauce’ that operates behind the scenes to make things compatible.
For a more thorough treatment, Burke directs his readers to a white paper titled “Got SCORM? A Brief Technical Overview That Answers the Question ‘What is SCORM?’” From the Introduction:
When I started researching SCORM in preparation for developing content and implementing an LMS, what I remember most was my frustration at the lack of any concise, hands-on information that was available about SCORM.
The bar of technological literacy has certainly been going up, and up. Still, the new web-based applications of Web 2.0 are promising. Mr. Leslie even seems hopeful by pointing out that “[web 2.0 tools] make it INCREDIBLY EASY to create new, polished looking content.”
So, I am dropping a breadcrumb at Rustici Software. Their offering of SCORM Test Track and Simple Content API represent a curious openness. Both are freely available, and a test of these tools is now on my list of things to do.
Paddling away now; surfing back, once again, to the uncharted water of open source education…finally, the wave breaks:
Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.
Sakai is a free and open source product that is built and maintained by the Sakai community. Sakai’s development model is called Community Source because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the ‘community’ of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai.
Surfs up, I’m going in.
Cheers.