digital lifeboat

Results are in from the EELIP unit and the high standard of all was mentioned in dispatches so well done to all.

Having had a few weeks off study I am itching to get back down to it and move forward again. Work is incredibly busy and saps my mental energy with the number of different areas I am trying to resource.

Since I last posted I have been trying to negotiate myself a path through next year. Had some good meetings where I was able to present the case for implementing my report. However the response to this is still unknown and I am prompted to begin to muse on what if…I am not able to pursue the project I outlined in the strategy report? What other question would I address as my research project for next year?

It’s hard to think where to focus my energy in the abstract. I do see a rich supply of questions arising from the blogs I follow in educspaces and elsewhere. Perhaps something will hit a spark.  I am going to start reading back over the past two years entries of this blog as well to try and collate some ideas about questions I have asked.

 The final course activity for this unit is to

“Write short summary on “project management in an eLearning environment”

Lots to sum up and I am going to come at this subject from different angles.

Strategic thinking and planning.

It is clear that there is a lot of work in formulating a strategy for an E-learning project. I think that Don Morrison’s book did an excellent job of laying out all the issues. It was also a very readable and inspiring book, destined I hope to be a guide for the future.  I used his structure to form the basis of my report. 

Project Management

This must be a very challenging issue when managing a large team working on different aspects of the development. It is difficult to reflect accurately on this from the micro level. As I stated at the outset I am used to managing a very small team of three. I think I have learned from the experiences of others in the group the difficulties of drawing information out of a large organisation. This has been rather sobering in comparison with my organisation who seem much more transparent by comparison.

One of the things which I have discovered in this process, though looking at effort estimation, is how expensive good learning materials are to generate. I did a costing exercise for delivering my strategy and found that that it would pretty much take me the equivalent of my current part time job to deliver the project in a year. I knew it would be costly but not how much. This sets more of a context to the impetus to re use content, and to accurately catalogue resources.

 Another aspect, the effort estimation and planning for the report writing. I gained time by writing long posts on the weekly topics, which then formed the body of the report. This spread the effort evenly across the semester much more successfully than in the previous three units. It is clear that time spent planning effort and sheduling is well invested.

 I learned a lot about managing change particularly aspects of communication. It seems to me from my understanding of projects we have studied, that delivering a project in increments is a good way of building confidence within an organisation where cultural change is required

I think I have mentioned elsewhere my new found addiction to SWOT and TOWS analysis as a form of mental relaxation rather like doing crosswords! Rather like my discovery of enjoying blogging and reflective writing in previous semesters.

In truth I found that I was already able to think in a strategic manner without using the matrices, and comparing my thoughts with a later structured analysis arrive at virtually the same conclusion.

I have enjoyed this semester. The emphasis on strategy, planning and report writing was relatively easy for me by comparison with the previous large website projects.

So that as they say is a wrap. The report is written and will be delivered during week 12.

I am working on a summary to be delivered to school. That is quite a challenge in itself and will take some time, fortunately I have a couple of weeks in hand to work on this.

Feeling past the peak of activity last week and a bit jaded. Have a long weekend to re charge as well as get the final activities sorted.

 The report needs to loose a further 280 words. It’s a big challenge to get the word count down a tough ask to cover the ground in 6,000 words.  I have moved large chunks of content into the appendices.

My report majors on the drivers, and vision for the project.  My aim was to make this project as real as possible, and I felt the case needed to be made to engage all the stakeholders as my organisation is totally new to E-learning. At the time I started I did not really anticipate that the school would take up the challenge. Now I know at least it will be read so that’s an achievement.

I think I have thought through the issues enough to put the project into action in reality if necessary. I still need to make some effort estimations,  and calculate budgets, but that will have to go into the appendix while I hack away at the Vision section.

 One aspect which has emerged in the research side is that there is evidence that the E-strategy as applied to schools stands at a crossroads with regard to funding. The baton is being firmly placed into the hands of schools for them to take the decisions at local level, where a number of conflicting priorities mean difficult decisions ahead.

 The scrapping of the ring fenced e-learning credits could not have come at a worse time. We need to populate our VLE with effective learning resources, and we cannot afford the time to generate them ourselves. Subscriptions to online content, and renewals of contracts for software support are under threat. A huge industry has grown up on the back of the e-learning credits system providing software for school. I would like to see suppliers responding to the challenge that school now face by reducing their subscription costs, and facing the reality that schools will not be able to afford to sustain their prior investment in software from now on.

A the local level, in a year when the school is focused on a new building project we are gambling on a bid for additional funding coming in to cover the cost, and therefore sustain the school budget. I have had to plan for a cut of  20% in the IT budget compared with last year. If the bid fails, it will be a very difficult year.

At the same time as funding is dropping, the level of coercion to demonstrate a return on the ICT investment is being increased with parents being encouraged to challenge schools on what they have achieved. Becta have been charged with leading this “campaign” to force schools to evaluate the effectiveness of their use of ICT.

http://www.nextgenerationlearning.org.uk/

Two presentaions for group work this week. Working in a pair to lead a group is very challenging as I found last week. The pair presenting this week lost the ability to communicate privately in the chat room. This was an almost impossible hurdle to overcome as mind reading is not yet a function of the human being. Still it was handled with flair by the leaders, and not a little amusement buy the rest of the group.

It’s been a very intense week with presentation chat session held on Wednesday and leading a training session after work on Thursday.

 From a “project management” point of view I think it went well. I had foreseen this pressure point and planned the training session and prepared materials about eight weeks ago. Moodle training was a project under my sole control and it was easiest to get it out of the way first, while communications on the group work were building slowly. This gave me clear time to devote to the group work as it gathered momentum in the last few weeks.

 Of course one of the things this highlights is that we did not “project manage” the group work in as much detail as we might have. If we had put together a calender at the start that would have been helpful and revealed a slight dislocation in our schedules. One of the group working in FE and one in school with different term times for example, did slightly delay the work on the presentation.

On the chat session. All the group worked very hard and supported us by making very full and thoughtful contributions. Maureen and I were messaging each other furiously during the session to adjust and maintain our carefully scripted plan. So much so that I confess I did not take in much of what was being said.  But I think that for a first time it was not a bad strategy and ensured not too much empty space. I will need go back and read the transcript !

Have completed all the sections of my strategy document. Into the editing phase now on schedule for what I hope will be an early submission. I need to deliver this project ahead of schedule to fit in with holiday plans at home.

Lots of work to do to study the two presentations for next week and prepare feedback forms. Have to write my reflective report for the group work as well this weekend.

Better get to it then!

Note all comments refer to a specific installation of Web CT Vista, known as Victory at the University of Portsmouth and should not be taken to indicate performance of any other Web CT Vista installation. Although none of the issues I mention are unfamiliar if you check out the discussion boards at web ct.  

Been pondering on our experience so far of Victory as you do when you should be doing something else.

 Prompted somewhat by Terry’s note to the effect that Victory was an improvement on Web CT. I am not sure it is from the students side of the fence, so attempting to arrange a visit to the ” other side” to see what I can see.

But time to jot down some sort of overview of the “issues” it occurred to me. I have been blogging and posting widely to the effect that Moodle is far and away easier to use, and  admin that I can’t see how Web CT and other such VLE’s can survive. Then I found I was not the only person to come to this conclusion and in the same words nearly.

Athabasca University
CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION
Online Software Evaluation Report
TITLE : WebCT: a major shift of emphasis
REPORT # : R41/0410
AUTHOR(S) : Barbara Morningstar, Jeremy Schubert & Kristine Thibeault
DATE : October 2004

available http://cde.athabascau.ca/softeval/reports/R4104102.pdf

Accessed 22nd April 2008

 From the abstract

The review compares the existing WebCT Campus Edition with the new WebCT Vista, and examines some of the problems associated with the migration to Vista at the institutional level. A

With so many comparable
open source softwares emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT,
one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive?

Postscript. I happen to know that they are now using Moodle as a work collegue is a student there and mentioned the fact to me this very day. She attended my last training day for Moodle, and had noticed Athabasca staff were about to attend a similar training day over in Canada.

Anyway to the issues in hand.

What are the usability issues that we had with the old Web CT? seems so long ago now I will go and retrieve them and make comparisons. A quick canter back to web ct reveals a catalogue of issues but not many with web ct itself. I recall we criticised it in comparison with other web 2.0 tools as lacking functionality, however it did seem to be a stable functional platform.

What are the issues that we are experiencing now in Vista?

 Who is online- a good idea in principle and one of the features I was most looking forward to trying out having been used to having multiple windows open to run MSN alongside other apps while working and chatting to other course members.

We found initially that on sending a chat invite to other course members who were on line they were not alerted in any visible way to the invitation so tended to log out before responding. Some students found it did not work at all, (possible issues with pop ups and Java versions which are affecting overall performance). When it did work, from time to time it shuts down and throws the occupants of that chat session out. This is  general issue in Victory, from time to time an attempt to upload a file or open a post will throw you out of the VLE.

Assignments area- I have documented the difficulties here in detail in previous posts.

Html editor- having worked almost the whole semester without this function. It has been a lot like watching black and white tv! Since I became a lurker on the web ct message boards picked up some solutions to test which worked. I posted  the following in technicolour following my first sucessful use of the html editor.

Tip 1 Make sure you only have one version of Java installed, go to control panel, add remove programs and check. It seems that Java does not remove old files when it updates, which is currently every few weeks, so you may find you have some old version accumulated since your last clear out, I found one.

Tip 2 go to control panel and look for an icon for Java. Click on the icon and look at the general tab, go to temporary Internet files and delete files.

I suspect this may have to be repeated from time to time for optimum performance. Well a bit late in the day but some progress for me, its been a very dull semester posting in boring type.

The whiteboard.- now this again looked like it had potential, but in practice does not work very well. Uploaded files come out very pixely and you can only use jpg, gif and some unique whiteboard format. Writing on the whiteboard seems easier now I have cleared out the Java cache but is still not easy.

Everything else seems pretty much the same as the old web ct, granted the look is a tad more modern.

Some benfits- editing of posts after posting. This is a real boon for many reasons, not the least my habit of rambling on, can go back and shorten posts!

I will add further benfits as I think of them!