Many of you may have heard of a company called Lala, recently acquired by Apple, an online music application which allows users to easily play, buy and share music on the web. The online application not only allows you to play any of their, over 8 million, songs for free the first time but it also allows you to upload your own music collection and play it where ever you are internet connected. In addition, each user has the ability to easily share their own music collections online by embedding playlists on their websites, blogs, etc. For example, here is an album I have uploaded.
As for the educational implications… In our College, we have any number of online music courses ranging from an Introduction to Jazz to Elvis. As we move forward in the creation of online music courses, should we not be tapping into these types of applications so we can integrate music seamlessly into courses as well as empower students to listen to the music the way they wish. While faculty would have the ability to, legally, share their, educationally focused, playlists to their class in a way that would empower their students to listen to the music the way they wish. For example, if they wish to listen to a song once, for free, they have that option so long as they have never listened to the song before on Lala. If they wish to purchase a song and listen to it online as many times as they want, they can do so as at price of 10 cents a song. Furthermore, if they want to purchase the song as an mp3 for download to their mobile device, they can do that as well. Below is an Elvis album I have shared as an example of what one that may be viewed in an online music course.
So what is the future of sharing and distributing online digital media? Will Apple extend the business model used by Lala by doing the same with video? The technology is obviously there. I can say from an educational standpoint, it could potentially eliminate the copyright headaches we face.
Over the past several years, I have been thinking about ways for the e-Learning Institute to work more closely with the College of Arts and Architecture’s Palmer Museum of Art. My most recent thought has been to take advantage of the numerous exhibitions displayed at the Palmer and expanding the viewable audience, to students and the community, by developing them into online instructional modules.
The purpose of this posting is to announce the that the idea is coming to fruition as Jan Muhlert, the Director of the Palmer Museum of Art, and I have agreed to explore the concept by developing a proof of concept module based on one of the current exhibitions. To help support this effort, I have agreed to fund an Art Education graduate assistant to work with Palmer of Art curators as well as the instructional designers within the Institute to develop the module.
The module is to be fully developed by the end of summer, 2010. If all works out, the long-term plan would be to build on the relationship with the Palmer by continuing to convert future exhibitions utilizing the pilot module as a framework for future development. In addition, my goal would be to prove an ongoing assistantship to fund the develop the future modules.
As the Director of the e-Learning Institute within the College of Arts and Architecture at The Pennsylvania State University, I have been given the opportunity to experience the many challenges in trying to encourage faculty to not only adopt online learning but also contribute to an open education philosophy. An unfortunate reality in our college is that we continue to face challenges in bolstering the faculty’s willingness to openly share their intellectual property without having a royalty associated with their efforts. In addition, we continue to struggle with legal issues associated with integrating copyrighted media within an open e-learning environment. These challenges present us with limitations to the delivery of media critical to the instruction.
Recognizing these challenges required us to think differently about how we can participate in the open education world while working within the constraints of our system. The result was e-Learning Management System (ELMS). ELMS is a series of modules and themes customized for integration within the open-source content management system, Drupal. It was designed specifically to improve and support the e-learning efforts for our Institute (http://elearning.psu.edu/projects) while giving back to the community by providing an open infrastructure for other institutions with similar interests. Since the inception of ELMS, we have found that it has allowed faculty without a technical background to easily create and edit their own course materials. In addition, it has provided a technical infrastructure for open educational resources by allowing faculty to easily keep certain resources “open” or “closed.”
I am optimistic that over the next several years, we will make significant strides toward providing open content. If all plays out correctly, our investment in ELMS, as an open content platform, will pay us dividends, enabling us to meet our College’s goals with regard to both open and closed courses.
Drupal is an open source project like many other content management systems (CMS). We chose Drupal for a number of reasons. Most importantly, Drupal has a strong track record and has grown in reputation and in community participation since its inception in 2001. It has become so popular that the Drupal community has developed a bi-annual, international, conference, which is run by the Drupal community, for the Drupal community.
Moreover, several units within our College have already migrated their sites into Drupal. In addition, the e-Learning Institute has adopted Drupal as the content management tool for all of their e-learning materials used for the college. Finally, our College has already invested in two programmers with extensive programming experience with Drupal’s core language. A move to another system would require us to transition these programmers to areas with which they have less familiarity.
Our decision was also affected by the adoption of Drupal by other units around campus. For instance, the e-Education Institute at EMS uses it for their website as well as many of their e-learning courses. ITS’s, ETS uses Drupal to manage not only their web presence but also all of the blogs and the annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium. We collaborate heavily with both of these areas, and the common platform facilitates this collaboration.
In short, we have decided to migrate the College’s website to a Drupal solution due to the investments we have already made in this application. Drupal also makes strong financial sense for us. We have no costs in obtaining the application. But more importantly, we must make no ongoing financial investment in order to become part of the community, as is the case with certain other content management solutions offered at the University.
I had a meeting earlier this afternoon to talk about what to do with an 1,800 sq. ft. space locate in a new building that is actively being renovated for our College. As ideas were being passed around, I started to think about one of the problems our College is facing and that is the fact that there is a shortage of classroom space for all of the courses taught in our College.
As the Director of the e-Learning Institute, I started thinking about creative ways in which this space could be best used to serve our College, student’s, and faculty while producing the greatest ROI for our investment from an e-Learning standpoint. The first idea that came to mind was one that would utilize and dedicate the space to those faculty teaching hybrid learning courses for the arts and design. Unlike most traditional classes, a hybrid learning course requires 1/2 or even a 1/3 less time in the classroom but in most cases the classroom has to be scheduled like it were a standard face-to-face course, leaving the room empty a a majority of the time. A huge waist of resources, if you ask me.
By following the type of an approach I am discussing, this new space would be scheduled with the intent of it only being used by a class once or twice a week at most freeing up the remainder of its time for other courses to use, making more efficient use of University space. In addition, the room would need to be equipped to handle the special needs of arts and design courses such as making the space appropriate for music, dance, digital studio arts, or even having providing an Internet2 feed with high-end video equipment for events such as virtual master classes, virtual dance classes, etc……
Of course my thinking behind this is still in the early stages and not totally thought out, but with help from our Dean’s, University’s Instructional Technology Services unit, and our Unit Heads, I feel this could be a solution that would put our College on the map as creating a new innovative approache to teaching and learning. To date, I have not heard of any other colleges or university’s doing anything like this. If anyone has, please let me know? I love to hear about it.
Over the past month, I have been working with several of the Unit heads in the College of Arts and Architecture to make a strategic change in how we offer our summer online courses. In short, we plan to take a number of our online courses and offer them through the World Campus (the outreach arm of Penn State) instead of through University Park offering. The primary advantage of this shift is a financial one. Just changing the location from which we offer our courses will make make a significant difference in the amount of revenue generated per student enrollment. The primary risk of making this move is that students will see the courses listed under the World Campus instead of University Park, the location they are used to seeing them. To overcome this potential risk, we are developing a small marketing plan to get the word out to students.
Below is a listing of all of the courses we plan to offer through the World Campus starting in the Summer of 2008.
Landscape Architecture
Larch 60: one 12 week offering of 100 students Larch 65: one 12 week offering of 100 students
Integrative Arts
GD 100: one 6 week offering of 100. 50 through the World Campus and 50 through University Park Photo 100: two 6 week offering of 100. 1st offering of 50 through the World Campus and 50 through University Park. 2nd offering of 50 through through the World Campus Inart 115: one 12 week offering of 100 students Inart 116: one 12 week offering of 100 students
Visual Arts
Art 10: two 6 week offerings of 100. One offering in each of the 6 week summer sessions Art 20: two 6 week offerings of 100. One offering in each of the 6 week summer sessions
Music
Music 8: one 6 week offerings of 40. Music 9: one 6 week offerings of 40.
The statements posted on this site are my interpretation of the issues and innovations as I see them and may or may not be the same as those of Penn State.
Site Introduction
My name is Keith Bailey and I am the Director of the e-Learning Institute at the College of Arts and Architecture within The Pennsylvania State University. The purpose of this site is for me to share the challenges and instructional technology innovations I encounter as they relate to e-learning in higher education.
