assessments

I laughed at reading this one.

Dear Blackboard: If you include icons in your interface, they should f’ing well be clickable. Everyone but you knows this. jazzmodeus

I thought this might refer to the new item icons. Jason works for Emory (doing instructional design) and taking classes at Florida State. Both use Academic Suite. So its probably not what I thought….

In Blackboard CE/Vista, the “course list” [1] can show icons to alert about new things to do. These can be about waiting assessments, discussion, mail, etc. If users click on the icon, then they can see the items causing the notice. At least, when left at the defaults.

One of the schools we host discovered when students entered a tool by clicking on these icon, the subsequent activity would not be tracked. The work around was to turn off the link rather than the icons entirely.

We agreed with the school and labored to convince Blackboard this was a major security problem. Unfortunately, the people who post the support bulletins have yet to post something about this problem. Its not a major item unless you are the student being accused of cheating because your activity doesn’t show appropriately.

[1] course list - This name bugs me….

• The name is a hold over from when instruction took place in courses. In this system they take place in sections. So why not section list?
• MyWebCT is dumb. MyBlackboard is dumber. “My” is 2004-ish portal cutesy, personalization name buzzword. Similarly, “e” and “i” are similarly dumb.

Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the queries to create the reports. We favor deleting tracking data (data preserved outside of Vista) to resolve the performance issues.

We developed SQL reports to look at the tracking data where the user in question was not a student. Yes, the data is limited, but in determining when and where a user was active, can help determine where to look in logs. When we hit the performance issues we started using these reports where the user interface reports failed to generate.

My understanding was the user interface and SQL reports on tracking were the same. Both looked at the same data. The user interface reports were just sexier wrapped in HTML and using icons. I compared a user interface report to a SQL report. Just prior to doing this, I was thinking, WebCT was stupid for not tracking when students look at the list of assessments. Turns out “Assessment list viewed” was tracked in the user interface all along but was missing in our sqlplus queries. WTF?

The data has to be there. The problem has to be our approach in sqlplus is inadvertently excluding the information from the reports. Because these reports must be accurate, I’ll crack this nut… Or become nuts myself.

CRACKED THE NUT: So, part of the data WebCT collected was the name of pages. There is a page name table which was inner joined to the user action table. So pages without a name were not reported. George suggested an outer join. I placed it on the page name table which now lets us see the formerly missing tracked actions. For the specific case where I found this, I now get all the missing actions.

Considering a Blackboard (it’s their problem now) feature request to ensure every page in the application has a title. I consider it developer laziness (someone else said worthlessness) that some pages might not have something so core and simple.

ANOTHER TRICK: Oracle’s NVL function displays a piece of text instead of a null value. Awesome for the above.

This is intended to be a more thoughtful response to Laura regarding Course Management Systems and the need for innovation.

Currently, Course Management Systems are bloatware. They got this way by trying to provide everything to everyone. One instructor wants a feature, the university presses for this feature, the CMS programmers put in the feature. Okay, maybe not even 1/2 the time, but given that we have about 15,000 instructors, even a tenth getting a tenth of what they want adds up very quickly. Where they overlap is where companies feel the pressure to add these features.

In my experience, people have found CE and Vista clunky and difficult to use since 2001ish. Basically, that was when the shiny newness wore off at Valdosta State. If anything, then its gotten worse over time. Personally, I think this is the case because its not easy to use. Part of this lack of ease is because of the sheer number of possible actions required to accomplish frequent tasks. Another part is the overwhelming possible branches one might take [1] in the decision tree. Part of what makes us intelligent is visualizing the goal and taking the steps necessary to get is there. When software is not easy to use, the users feel stupid because they cannot figure out how to get to the goal.

Think about the complaints we have been seeing about CE6 from people using CE4. They are griping about features they are used to using disappearing. No one wants to lose the features or options they frequently use. They also wish the features or options they never use would disappear.

From what I’ve seen, instructors will make use of what the university
provides. When universities don’t provide what instructors want, then
these instructors will find what they want elsewhere and make use of
it. Large companies take a long time to integrate new features. By the
time they figure out the user base wants something, incorporate it,
release it, and customers implement it, the users have become used to
using it elsewhere are not attracted to a feature they’ve been using
for years elsewhere. So then we invoke FERPA and whatever to move them
to the CMS which is more clunky than what they were using already.

So enough with my griping… What is the solution? Well, maybe we should think about what a Course Management System should do?

1. Course management: This means it provides the university administration means by which they can control access to classes. Its not for the faculty so much as provosts, vice presidents, and registrars to be comfortable the university is not allowing students to take something without paying the institution.
2. Learning: Specifically, these are communication of concepts and evaluation of concept comprehension.

In a nutshell, #1 is the course list and administration screens while #2 is the course internals. If our focus is recreating the university in an online environment, then the CMS is the right approach. By importing the data from the student information system, we build a hierarchy just like the course catalog and put students into virtual representations of these classes. This mindset is where instructors want to build classes that consist of their lectures, the assignments, and the assessments. Its the face-to-face class online. Thankfully, online classes are moving to using tools to better utilize the advantages of the WWW. However, the focus is more towards improving peer discussion.

Maybe this approach isn’t the best one for learning? Last month I read a few articles off a web site advocating a different model: students gathering and creating information themselves (Personal Learning Environment). The instructor in this model becomes more of a mentor like independent study or how universities functioned at the time of our Founding Fathers. I’ve been hearing this is the direction education ought to take for over a decade now. However, I think its unlikely as its easier on the instructor to use the bird shot approach.

My Approach: The CMS is only an integration framework to provide access to tools. It doesn’t try to provide these tools at all. There are hundreds of wiki products who are better at some things depending on how its used. Why should the CMS think it can do it better than all of them? Same thing applies to blogs, social bookmarking, file sharing, etc. This means universities will provide a number of these tools and support dozens of different applications and integrate them all. We will have to better understand data flow, security, how all these pedagogically work well together. It’ll be a nightmare.

[1] One of things I unfortunately still do is recreate the user’s actions by figuring out what they clicked on in the recorded session. Much of the problems we see are user error, probably through not understanding the ramifications of the action.

So, you are a teaching an online class. Students cheating naturally is a concern. How does one prevent them from stealing answers?

• Code in the online class system? Unfortunately, the makers of the learning management systems lag behind the creativity of cheaters. Plus, they can only control their systems. How do they enforce security in the web browser, desktop / laptop, cell phone, classroom, or any other environment?
• JavaScript? This is the most laughable solution. I’ve known how to disable JavaScript in browsers I use since 1999. I’ve never met a JS security solution I could not beat by simply turning off JavaScript. With Firefox and the Web Developer toolbar it literally takes two clicks. People like it because its cheap. I guess you get what you pay for in this case.
• Code in the operating system? Dozens of software applications are designed to prevent cheating by controlling what can be done with the desktop or laptop. Certainly this appears to be the most comprehensive solution. However, it often means students go to a proctored environment. What’s the point of taking a class online if I have to go to a classroom?
• Cameras? The only solution that deals with the possibility of face-to-face or cell phone type collusions. These operate by the students exhibiting suspicious behavior. Students will have to figure out how to act naturally.

The better the solution, the more expensive and less likely to be purchased. Instead, we’ll use cheesy JavaScripts because students are dumb. They’ll never figure it out. Unless by never you mean with a simple Google search.