I was doing my daily bloglines run this morning and came across a post on one of my newer entries about a new site called, RSS Calendar … quick little bit from the About link:

RSSCalendar is an exciting new way for individuals and organizations to share their calendars with family, friends, and co-workers – utilizing the latest in “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) technology, including RSS channel creation and aggregation. Not only is RSSCalendar easy to use but it is also easy to administer, and setup is a snap. RSSCalendar is well-suited for a variety of uses …

Not an earth changing tool, but it got me really thinking about the Edison Services Syllabus Tool and our overall philosophy behind it. When we set out to create it, we wanted to give faculty and students a central location that all their teaching and learning materials were available. The hub to your digital teaching and learning life concept … read more about that from an earlier post. We wanted to kill the “folder tab” look and feel of all the current LMS tools out there that are used in the higher education space and we did a nice job.

One thing that has always bothered us has been the assignment table … we’ve been building these crappy tables that list things in a week to week format. Just doesn’t make any sense. Let’s face it, the calendar is a relatively accepted format for displaying dates … why try to change something that just works? What I started thinking this morning that instead of building all the pieces to Edison Services, why not try to incorporate more of the available technology and build better hooks to take advantage of it. With the RSS Calendar example, we could simply build the hooks into the Edison Syllabus and allow it to “subscribe” to a given faculty member’s calendar. Just makes total sense to me.

Now, to take it a step further, the entire syllabus experience could be changed by simply allowing it to subscribe to multiple feeds … it could create an amazing customization opportunity, but it would also make the syllabus much more of a destination — if you can believe that. The goal is to give students and faculty a reason to show up everyday — sort of like a living blog space that has pointers to your learning environment. Could be cool. Our next steps are to take a bunch of open source tools we’ve identified and start seeing how we can make them talk to each other and to Edison. I’ll be posting more about it as time goes by.

I just finished reading an article over at Learning Circuits about growth in Rapid eLearning (REL) tools and methodologies … it is a good read and is worth the time. It has been clear to me for some time that the overall process for producing top quality eLearning materials is way too bloated and ends up costing everyone way too much. I have been a proponent of alternatives to the traditional instructional systems design philosophies as they relate to the creation of learning materials — especially in the technology-heavy landscape of eLearning. Back when I came to Penn State I honestly thought the days of working hand in hand with a SME to collect, design, and develop materials was over. I was building a toolset that I thought would allow SMEs (at that time faculty) to create their own materials much more quickly and much more easily.

Of course I was wrong — and a little right. You see, my team of designers/developers adopted several of my ideas and helped shape them into a solid, replicable model that allows us to do things much quicker, a little cheaper, and with much higher quality standards. But, we have never taken the next step, put our tools in the hands of our SMEs, and let them really build the learning experience. Our toolsets are easy, but the new bread of tools I am envisioning now will make design and development very transparent and simple.

That’s what REL is talking about — let’s streamline the process, give SMEs simple tools to work with, and reduce the long drawn out process of materials development and delivery. I have been looking into so many open source tools to take the place of the off-the-shelf products we all know about and I think there are some that will finally allow faculty or other SMEs the ability to design, develop, and deliver on their own. Everyone can argue that SMEs should focus on content, that quality will be undermined, or objectives won’t be met without the full on involvement of the instructional design team. I think, with a little training, some solid support, and the availablity of designers SMEs can create very solid instructional content that can be developed in the matter of days instead of weeks and months.

At any rate, just an interesting article that got me thinking that eLearning design really could stand to take some ques from rapid prototyping methodologies and get with the program … I think our community could really benefit from some new methodologies that put the SME/faculty back in the driver’s seat and allow them to take more ownership of the process. I think that day is coming and will get here very quickly if the toolsets to empower them become available. Just my two cents.

A colleague of mine, Bart Pursel, has an interesting blog site that he has been working on related to what he calls, “Virtual Learning Worlds.” His concept is that the same engines that power today’s most popular games can be essentially re-skinned for education and training purposes. He is clearly onto something. If you have some time, jump over and take a look at some of his postings.

He has been pushing us to add principles of game theory to our courses and tools over the last couple of years and we’ve finally started doing just that. This Fall we’ll be rolling out a new eLearning course that is supported heavily be small interactive exercises that take game theory into consideration. Our hope is that students not only use the materials to acquire knowledge, but then spend a larger amount of time interacting with the material because it is designed as a game. When its all said and done, I think we’ll find that student retention goes up and that their overall levels of satisfaction and motivation will rise as well. We’ll be looking at it in a couple of classes to see what its really all about.

When you take the syllabus as the hub to your digital teaching and learning life concept and extend it with the ability to send students directly into engaging simulations and other game-based interactions you can start to do some very interesting things. For example, let’s say there is a simple game-based simulation that students must interact with to solidify a certain set of skills we hope they acquire … the idea would be to allow them to “play” the game over and over to practice and ultimately assess their learning. If all the students are using this same interaction on a regular basis, you can begin to pull the high scores out and list the top five students every week on the syllabus. I know for a fact it would motivate students to strive for higher scores and ultimately greater mastery of the skill set. There is so much work to be done in this space and when you start to pull it all together you begin to see how powerful a mix of all these ideas can have–>