Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Creating Sustainable E-Learning Infrastructures – Moving Beyond the Course as the Unit of Instruction

an eLearning 2005 keynote presentation by David Porter
Executive Director
BCcampus.ca
dporter at bccampus.ca

Presentation is available as both:

PDF: www.sfu.ca/~davidp/ecosystem.pdf
Breeze preso: present.bccampus.ca/ecosystem

(I GOT STARTED TAKING NOTES LATE, ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE PRESO)

Harnessing community effectively

BC Campus has put together a tool that integrates a variety of tools: all the tools are in the environment, point and click
- notion of promoting and supporting collaborative program development models

Key to moving forward: establishing intellectual property models
- if you give developers the IP rights, you stimulate innovation
- we want to request a resuse license
- Lessig’s group came up with Creative Commons: this is a great model
- so we created our own model BC Commons because our faculty would NOT go with the idea of sharing it with the world
- right now there are about 50% that have gone with CC, 50% that have gone with BC Commons
– as soon as we put geographic boundaries on it, we had much more faculty buy in (basically everyone)

Providing a resource repository for everyone
- works with all commonly available systems: WebCT, Moodle, etc
- makes it easy for the faculty developer to not have to make any choices
- open source ethic: give back as good as you get or better

have emphasized value in this approach
- exemplary public policy: optimizes utilization of public funds
- a model for collaboration among public post-secondary institutions
- we have told faculty: if 10 institutions reuse your content, isn’t that a great reputation building activity that can be leveraged with commercial publishers
- differentiation is based on bundled services rather than content
- builds reputation of developers
- middle ground between free and commercial

Identifying sustainability factors
- identify, communicate, implement, and ensure value propositions for all members of the learning ecosystem
- involve key reference groups to set goals for the system development, evaluation, and implementation
- conduct active, small-scale pilots with all systems and processes
- evaluate and acknowledge all successes and shortcomings, and quickly move successful implementations into wide-scale production
- acknowledge that members of the ecosystem will ultimately be responsible for sustainability

Overall online learning trends in BC are very positive
- technical support and instructional support tend to be positive
- all forms of online learning except videoconferncing are up

We are learning to work in new ways
- following developments in the open source community closely
- Community Source: uPortal, Creative Commmons, BC Commons, OKI, OSPI (Open Source Portfolio Initiative), SAKAI

Sectors in community: financial, K-12, post-secondary education, health, manufacturing, government

In Europe and developing world, governments are mandating open source licensing
- in North America, most IT professionals are scared of open source

Building an agenda for sustainability
- balance the needs of learners and educators
- and administrators

LESSON OF THE WEB: build on a foundation of community and communication
Adopt open source and open access technologies
- give back as good as you get
- Pay attention to techno culture and the context of learning
- Support the innovators in your community

Another lesson of the web: students to technologies and services THAT WORK
- (for dating, students go to lavalife.com, they won’t go to our site for something like that)

On this day..

• When Night Falls 2007: Plan to Participate! - 2007
• Podcast92: Planning for 1:1 Project Success - 2006
• Podcast91: Week1 Fireside Chat for K12Online06 - 2006
• Podcast16: eLearn 2005 - Podcasting as Disruptive Transmediation - 2005
• Linking in online presentations - 2005
• You expect me to remember what? - 2005
• Technology for Advanced e-Learning - 2005
• Wales' principles for eLearning Design, 1:1 Failure in Cobb County - 2005
• Next-gen Content Management - 2005
• Evolution of the Role of Faculty in Higher Education - 2005

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 7:49 pm and is filed under edtech, intellectualproperty, open source, workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.