Sakai

Dec 06 17:28

Outcomes Based Assessment BOF - Atlanta

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

We had a small, but highly productive, Outcomes Based Assessment BOF meeting today at the Sakai conference. In attendance was: Janice Smith (rSmart), Wende Morgaine (Portland State), Noah Bottimer (Saginaw Valley State University), Melissa Peet (UMich) and Jim Pease, Joe Shedd and myself (Syarcuse University).

We began the discussion with the diagram I posted yesterday to frame up the discussion. What we turned to really quickly was what new Goal Aware tools are needed. In other words, what new ways do students need to be engaged in the learning process that leverage the ability of student work to be tagged and evaluated based on learning outcomes?

Dec 06 12:58

Agile Education Methodologies?

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

I am not a teacher. I am a Systems Analyst/Project Manager for a technical research group in the School of Education. Admittedly, I am new to Project Management and am receiving formal education through Syracuse University's School of Information Studies which was recently voted as not too shabby. I can't help but let ideas from my job and continuing education bleed into the domain that I am trying to support: that of educating students.

Professors in the classes I have taken seem rather biased toward the waterfall model of the software development lifecycle. This methodology involves a series of phases that pretty much fall one after the other. Plan, analysis, design, implement and maintain. A Project Manager's job is to oversee the process. A lot of this involves ensuring that monitoring and measurement practices are in place so that the project manager is able to identify areas where the project is starting to fall behind schedule. In this view of project management, the schedule is king. Time is money and slipping schedules are high stakes problems. The PM's job is to get the project back on schedule...on time, under budget and high quality. If you fail at that, you fail as a PM.

Dec 05 16:28

The Goal Aware Process - Data Flow

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

The Goal Aware Process is a simple pedagogical idea that seems very basic to Instructional Design. A teacher should lay out your objectives, design activities, engage students in those activities and monitor progress toward objectives. Isn't it odd that this basic pedagogical principle isn't supported in courseware?

The Goal Aware Process is a simple pedagogical idea that seems very basic to Instructional Design. A teacher should lay out your objectives, design activities, engage students in those activities and monitor progress toward objectives. Isn't it oddthat this basic pedagogical principle isn't supported in courseware?

I attended the Usability Camp at the Sakai conference today. There was a lot of talk about modeling scenarios and use cases, developing personas and usability of tools. A common theme that came up in the conversation was the difficulty to create consistent workflows that involved multiple tools. For the Goal Aware process, this would mean that faculty could consistently "markup" their activities and "rate" student performance towards them in any "Goal Aware" tool.

Nov 23 08:48

Types of metadata tags for learning activities

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

As I mentioned in previous posts, our initial use case for the "Goal Management" tool was to be able to create reusable, institution-wide metadata tags for learning objectives that faculty could use to describe the work they were assigning students in locally meaningful terms. The school had developed its own ontology from its shared meaning of what they thought a Syracuse School of Education grad should be learning. Broadly, this ontology of learning objectives stats that our grads should learn:

Critical reflection and explanation of practice
Content Knowledge
Inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy
Assessment of Student Learning
Professional conduct and collaboration

Probably every School of Education would come up with a similar list. However, our list took at least a year to develop. It was as long as 22 objectives, shrunk to 7 and now is 5 broad proficiencies each with 4 or 5 sub-proficiencies. The list has changed and as the faculty and ideas change the list will change as well. Its a living document that will change as faculty reflect on their practice, what is and isn't working, the curriculum and trends in education. Any system meant to support this has to be able to change as well. I can imagine a yearly deprecation of old sets of goals and publication of the new, slightly revised plan for the new year. Looking back over time, an analyst could not only see the change in student performance but also see how the institution has evolved and changed.

Nov 16 14:56

Caddywampus communication in Sakai

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

There was an OSP 2.4 planning session in Phoenix this week. Representatives from the University of Michigan, IUPUI (by phone), Virginia Tech, the University of Amsterdam, Portland State University, IBM, rSmart, ASU and Syracuse University attended the meeting where we spent two days looking at what would be in the scope of the OSP 2.4 release, due out in May 2007.

While Syracuse has meager resources to contribute to OSP’s next release, we will be doing some documentation and some XML development to create example forms and templates to ship with the software. I was pleased to see the value that many schools are finding in the Goal Aware Tools and that there was sufficient interest in them to get that tool set integrated into OSP. We have been happy to let them sit in the contrib area of confluence and subversion up until now, but as this round of grants wind down, it is a great to find a place for that to land. What a great way to disseminate!

Nov 10 01:15

Who is the community again?

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

I called into a conference call to get into the details of next week's OSP 2.4 requirements group meeting in Phoenix, AZ. The big players in OSP are going to be there...and us. We had just completed voting on what we thought were the big issues that really needed to be addressed in the next release. Goal Aware wasn't last, so that made my day...

The results of that vote live over here, in the Sakai wiki.

The point I was trying to make was that I had a hard time with that vote. I've spent the past year up to my nose in OSP and Sakai trying to make it work for us. As a result, I have learned a lot. While watching the Sakai-user and Sakai-dev lists I see a lot of people struggling to get their head around OSP. Its just not obvious how to use the tools. When you learn that you need a small army of developers to run the thing, it is so easy to get discouraged.

Oct 12 09:49

Defensive patents for open source?

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

At Syracuse University we are using the Sakai platform as a means to jump start an idea. As a research group within the School of Education, we are focused on developing innovative approaches to engaging teachers and learners. The particular effort we have been involved in over the last three years has required us to analyze the gap between the courseware and portfolio-ware toolsets and how we might better reconcile those differences. We needed a platform on which to develop new tools that bridged that gap. It should be no surprise that OSP/Sakai provided us with that opportunity.

Not only was it a compelling research question, but one solution to the problem, which flies under the flag of the "Goal Management"/"Goal Aware tools" flag in Sakai's contrib area, seemed to have broad application as K12 schools struggle to gather data to demonstrate that they are meeting NCLB and higher education accrediting bodies are beginning to focus on outcomes-based assessments of institutions as part of their accreditation process. One of the truly amazing benefits of engaging the Sakai community was that it gave our small group people to talk and wrestle with as we developed the idea. We believe this is a community idea.

Sep 28 06:08

Goal Management API = Metadata tagging API

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

Of course a "Goal Aware" Tool can tag an assignment with learning outcomes.

Tags, Items, Activities and Ratings - let's get generic

If I start to think about the tool in a more generic sense, I can see how we will be able to apply many different types of metadata to activities.

Lately I have been thinking about some different uses for the "Goal Aware" tools idea which has led me to the conclusion that the tool is named wrong. It should be characterized as a "Activity Metadata Tag" tool. Branding is funny though. Names suggest use and I was afraid that "Metadata tool" would elicit blank stares from my main audience of higher education faculty.

Sep 13 22:25

I don't like heirarchies

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

At Syracuse we are doing something a little crazy with Sakai. At least I think so.

A look at most of the courseware packages that I have had exposure to has made it plain that that tools deployed in courseware are typically configured with roles for the teacher and students. The scope of the activity is usually limited to those in the “course” or “worksite”. The dean or program chair usually isn’t included in these closed door communities and thus is not privy to what is going on in there. That has made a lot of sense in the past because teachers like to close their doors and do their own thing. Courseware imitates life.

Sep 06 11:13

Requirement for Goal Management Tools 0.7 release

By: Sean Keesler Tags:

Sakai

The 0.6 release of the Goal Management tools allowed a user to link an activity to one or more goals. This provided the opportunity/necessity to rate each student's performance for each link.

A requirement for the 0.7 release will be to allow a user to allow multiple links to goals to share one rating. In this example, the same rating would apply to both the SOE Proficiencies' "Content Knowledge" goal and the Mathematical Education Specialty Association's "Knowledge of Mathematical Problem Solving".