The following was sparked by this blog post from Col Beer titled: "Is it time to reignite the argument around shadow systems?"...more...
A new day dawns. The planned technology migration of my blog is complete. Goodbye to "big tech" Wordpress and its (IMHO) horrid authoring environment and bloated performance. ...more...
2024 passed without a post to this blog. Many reasons, but largely because I moved on from higher education. Suddenly digital education - the old focus of this blog - wasn't a big part of my thinking. Raising the question, what now?...more...
Finally, a reasonable version of Canvas Collections and associated support materials is ready to announce. Following will eventually form the content of a blog post posted to the Canvas community space....more...
Contemporary higher education appears to have a scale problem....more...
Henry Cook, Steven Booten and I gave the following presentation at the THETA conference in Brisbane in April 2023....more...
This work arose from the depths of an institutional LMS migration (Blackboard Learn to Canvas). In particular, the observation that the default migration processes required an awful lot of low level manual labour. Methods that appeared to reduce the quality of the migration process and increase the cost. Hence we started developing different methods. As the migration project unfolded we kept developing and refining. Building on what we'd done before and further decreasing the cost of migration, increasing the quality of the end result, and increasing the scale and diversity of what we could migrate....more...
All university strategies for learning and teaching seek to maximise: accessibility (as many people as possible can participate - feel the scale - in as many ways as possible); quality (it's good); and, cost effectiveness (it's cheap to produce and offer). Ryan et al (2021) argue that this is a "key issue for contemporary higher education" (p. 1383) due to inevitable cost constraints, the benefits of increased access to higher education, and requirements to maintain quality standards. However, the literature on the "iron triangle" in higher education (e.g. Daniel et al, 2009; Mulder, 2013; Ryan et al, 2021) suggests that maximising all three is difficult, if not impossible. As illustrated in Figure 1 (adapted from Mulder, 2013, p. 100) the iron triangle suggests that changes in one (e.g. changing accessibility from on-campus to online due to COVID) will have negatively impact at least one, but probably both, of the other qualities (e.g. the COVID response involving increase in workload for staff and resulting in less than happy participants)....more...
The following illustrates how the game Number Scrabble and Herb Simon's thoughts on the importance of design representation appears likely to help with migration of 1000s of course sites from Blackboard Learn (aka Blackboard Original) to another LMS. Not to mention becoming useful post-migration....more...
Pre-COVID the role of technology in learning and teaching in higher education was important. However, in 2020 it became core as part of the COVID response. Given the circumstances it is no surprise that chunks of that response were not that great. There was some good work. There was a lot of a "good enough for the situation" work. There was quite a bit that really sucked. For example,...more...