Janet May, associate director for World Campus evaluation, and I visited the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT, which is part of SUNY), last month. We met with Stephen Marshall and a number of e-learning managers from SUNY schools, including FIT, Mohawk Valley Community College, SUNY Delhi, Hudson Valley Community College, and the SUNY Learning Network (SLN). I know that this is sort of “old news,” but I am finding that this visit is becoming increasingly relevant for Penn State World Campus and for a lot of other e-learning types who are running online programs or contemplating starting programs.

Stephen Marshall is a senior lecturer in educational technology support, strategy, and policy development at Victoria University of Wellington. He is a prime mover in the development of the e-learning Maturity Model (eMM), a capacity model helping institutions evaluate their processes that support e-learning programs and activities. When a group of institutions participate in an eMM study, it can also be used for benchmarking across participating institutions. Recently I have found that the eMM is also an excellent tool for guiding discussions with institutions that are just starting e-learning programs. The eMM can be used to help frame discussions in terms of organizational investment on an operational level to achieve certain outcomes and focuses on sustained success. In addition, it helps to bridge high-level conceptual treatment of “how to do e-learning” with examples of successful classes and programs.

A few years ago the E-Learning Office at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand participated, along with eight other higher educational providers in New Zealand, in the first iteration of the eMM. When we agreed to participate in the project, it was as much out of professional courtesy and respect for Stephen as it was out of conviction that participation was going to be terribly useful. To our surprise, we found the cross-institutional report and the institution-specific reports provided by the project team to be incredibly valuable. Not only did the reports help us understand what we were doing relative to other providers, but we used the Open Polytechnic report to inform our annual planning process and to allocate resources to improve some of our critical processes.

On December 5, 2006, Janet May will be leading a presentation at Penn State in which we will talk about the meeting at FIT, introduce the eMM, and discuss potential involvement in an the eMM group project. If you are interested, let us know. We will post our presentation materials for general distribution. In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about the eMM, check out the NZ E-Learning Capability Determination resource and eLiterate, where Stephen is serving as an excellent guest blogger. He has not only provided some descriptive information about the eMM in his “So what is the eMM anyway?” post, but he has also been digging well below the surface in subsequent postings, making it well worth a visit to eLiterate.

Once again, if you are interested in the eMM, please let us know. If you have experiences with the eMM or other similar capacity-evaluation and benchmarking projects, feel free to post here and tell us about them.

I’ve had the pleasure this week to attend the 2006 Council for Adult & Experiential Learning (CAEL) International Conference in Boston. CAEL is a national, nonprofit organization whose mission is to expand learning opportunities for adults by working to remove policy and organizational barriers. I enjoy attending the annual CAEL conference because there are so many colleges and universities around the world doing exciting work with adult learners, and the folks I met this year were no exception.

One particular session really resonated with me. The presenter for “Narrating Lives: From Silence to Civic Engagement” was Dr. Barbara Vacarr, associate professor and director of the Learning Community Bachelor’s Program at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Vacarr also interviews Holocaust survivors and collects their stories on video for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

Vacarr is an avid proponent of transformative learning theory, which was pioneered by Dr. Jack Mezirow and essentially refers to the learning that takes place when an adult becomes aware of the life events that have shaped who they are and what assumptions they make (both consciously and unconsciously). These life events are our “stories”; transformative theory suggests that true learning can only happen when we assess and reflect on the consequences of our lifelong assumptions and investigate alternative ways of thinking.

Adult learners bring their stories to the classroom—there are some they might share (e.g., marital status, number of kids, profession), but it’s the “silent” stories that are often the ones that fuel adults creatively and shape who they are. The inequities we have experienced in life—whether economic, political, generational, historical, etc.—as well as the privileges—will impact the way we learn.

Vacarr shared with us the story of one of her students. Beth (not her real name), who came from a privileged upbringing, registered for one of Vacarr’s Holocaust studies courses, which included a weekend trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Vacarr informed all of her students that they should dress casually, in jeans and sneakers, to ensure comfort on the trip. Which everyone did—except Beth. Beth arrived at the bus freshly manicured and pedicured, looking (as Vacarr described it) as if she had just walked out of a top fashion magazine. Other students kept their distance. At the end of the weekend, Vacarr wasn’t sure the experience had any impact on Beth. Everyone parted ways.

Some months later, Beth stopped by Vacarr’s office with a story to tell. She had been in a local grocery store when she overheard a woman asking the store manager where the baby formula was kept. “I’ll get it for you,” the manager said. “We keep it locked up.” If it had happened a year prior, Beth said, she would have gone about her business thinking nothing of the exchange. But something about the woman’s question snapped Beth back to Vacarr’s class—back to the Holocaust Museum and her role as bystander to unthinkable oppression. She found herself walking over to the store manager and asking why the baby formula was kept locked away.

“Because there are indigent people who come in and steal it,” he replied.

Beth was stunned. “There are people in Cambridge who steal?” she thought. Then she thought, “there are people who actually steal baby formula?” And finally she realized, if there are people stealing baby formula, people must really need it. Therein laid Beth’s “disorienting dilemma”—a situation that didn’t fit the assumptions created by her life of privilege and was the necessary catalyst for transformative learning.

Beth left the store, went home, contacted the Enfamil company, and a few months later was running a successful baby formula program out of the basement of her church.

“My personal environment had prevented me from understanding there were people in real need,” Beth explained.

What are the silent stories you’re carrying with you? How can World Campus help you examine them and, perhaps, transform them into new ways of thinking?

Continued from the first introduction… This is how I was introduced to online education. I was a facilitator, lived in Europe, and saw ways for online learning to meet my travel reduction needs, create a more coherent learning experience, and to meet the needs of a highly mobile and motivated group of adult learners. What could be more perfect? I’ll tell you …

Well, these were pretty early days for online learning. Our learning environment was a program called Majordomo, which was designed to automate the management of Internet mailing lists. It is a list server. So, for my first semester, it was all about communicating through group email. There was no point in pretending that we were in a virtual “classroom” because there was no physical space metaphor, it was all Greenfield. At first, until I managed to negotiate a little server space at a local research center to set up a web site, there was no graphical interface or persistent bulletin board. It was all about quasi-structured dialog. This was incredibly empowering. While I used to lose learners for weeks at a time because they were deployed into the “field” or for whole terms when they were deployed to combat sites, I would now be hearing from them every night.

I soon found that I was increasingly extending my face-to-face classes, posting materials, accepting electronic submissions, and leveraging email. It was all pretty primitive, it was mostly about learners downloading content, and me pushing email, but still it allowed learners to get access to resources more or less conveniently. While I was teaching for the University of Maryland European Division, I was also teaching on the Faculty of Management at Comenius University in Bratislava Slovakia.

Comenius University had a 6% admission rate. For incoming freshmen, admission was based on the combined scores on a mathematics and English test. The students who scored the highest were admitted until the class was filled. Of course, whenever high stakes are involved, some favors were granted, but still on the whole, the top 20% of the learners admitted to this programme were among the brightest young men and women I have ever met. I was there in the mid-90’s around 5 years after the Velvet Revolution. The Faculty of Management was founded on the idea of providing a western “business” education, but still operated in a largely Soviet style university system. As I was teaching a mandatory capstone MIS course, I was constantly being asked to negotiate an educational system that wanted students to all take courses together onsite in orderly fashion, and with learners who had opportunities to participate in study abroad programmes and internships across the globe.

I was of course very supportive of expanding learner’s experiences, so I would create a sub-section of my course and have the learners who were studying abroad or involved with an internship, take the course as a group online, once again, using very simple technologies. Students liked it, I felt good about enabling learners to do something important, and compared with their class-bound colleagues, they seemed to produce better work, and at the end of the term, when they were called home, they also performed on average better on a traditional final examination than their counterparts.

I could see all sorts of opportunities and benefits with using the communication technologies to extend the learning space. Learners could be more mobile, I could travel more freely, learners could communicate with each other more easily, and content could be more current. In Slovakia at the time, it was very difficult to get modern western text books that were affordable. I tried to respect copyright by not photocopying textbooks, but instead work within fair use policy. Use of selected web sites and other electronic resources made access to some quality materials economically feasible. These were the halcyon days of online education for me. There were no approvals, or administrative overhead; I was the instructional designer, course developer, and teacher/facilitator; nobody really knew what I was doing, so I did not have
to ask permission. There was immediate gratification.

This post is getting a bit long, so I will break it up into another. In the meantime, if you want to share your formal or informal online, open, distance, or flexible education experiences, please feel free to comment or post your own submission. In addition, if you have any comments or insights about working in Slovakia or Central and Eastern Europe in general, it would be great to read about them.

… as we celebrate with our first Certificate of Achievement in Weather Forecasting graduates

This past weekend I had the opportunity to contribute in a very small way to an event celebrating the graduation of the first class receiving the Certificate of Achievement in Weather Forecasting. My role in the day long celebration was to provide a brief address during the Commencement program following lunch, where I joined the visionaries who really made the program a notable success. The list includes Department of Meteorology faculty members Lee Grenci, David Babb, and Steve Seman, academic leaders in the College of Earth and Mineral Science, leaders from the John E. Dutton e-Education Institute, and the World Campus program team. Commencement addresses were provided by international Penn State luminaries in online learning and meteorology, Dr. John Dutton, Dean Emeritus of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, David DiBiase, Director of the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute, and Dr. William Brune, Head of the Department of Meteorology.

Although the addresses were great, the real grounding experience was listening to the graduates address their classmates and faculty as they received their certificates. First, it is important to recognize that 6 of the 7 graduates attended the event and traveled from locations as far as Montreal, Quebec and Peculiar (no kidding), Missouri to participate in the celebration. This in itself indicates the level of connection this group feels with each other, their teachers, and the program. This sense of community was reinforced as each graduate received their certificate and expressed their sincere gratitude to their peers and teachers for their support, encouragement, and dedication to the program. It was this event, more than anything that I have done recently, that reminded me why I have chosen a career in adult education.

On another note, leading up to the event I wondered what type of person pursues an online certificate in Weather Forecasting. As expected, all of the graduates have a certain passion for the weather, some because they have to be “weather aware” to race sailboats or chase “severe weather” (tornados!) in the Central Plains recreationally. For others, it simply captures the imagination. Kudos to the faculty, leaders of the College and John A. Dutton e-Education Institute, the World Campus program team, and the graduates for realizing the vision.

In mid-October the World Campus had the pleasure of hosting a visit from James Dalziel of Macquarie University E-Learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) in Sydney, Australia. James treated us to a demo of LAMS (Learning Activity Management System), a tool used for designing, managing, and delivering online collaborative learning activities. James spent the better part of October 12 providing us with a great interactive demonstration of LAMS, talking a bit about the benefits of open source software, learning design, and open standards, while strutting the new LAMS 2.0 release.

Although the presentation materials can be downloaded from the LAMS Community site, the real impact was in James’s demonstration. Twenty-three participants from across Penn State had the chance to participate in an interactive LAMS-generated learning sequence that was created in less than a half-hour during the demonstration. The hands-on activity sparked spirited conversation and a number of great participant questions ranging from LAMS scalability, support, content portability, and standards adherence, to learning management system (LMS) integration, and, after the meeting, some questions about next steps for Penn State.

It was clear that LAMS sparked some interest among the faculty members and instructional designers in the audience. Comments like, “This is so much easier than what we currently do,” is pretty typical when people are first introduced to the LAMS environment, and is frequently followed by “How does this play with our current LMS?” From my experience, this has been the sticking point with LAMS. How does an institution take advantage of LAMS while also taking advantage of the tool set included in their existing learning management system? The answer is the LAMS Tool Contract, which allows tools to “talk” with the LAMS core application through a set of expected behaviors, registered URLs, and application program interface (API) calls, all of which are open and transparent.

When I was first introduced to LAMS while serving the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand in 2003, LAMS did not play with any other LMS–there was no real answer to the tool-integration problem. You either used LAMS as a standalone delivery system or passed through the LMS via a link, dealing with the issue of having different tools while working in LAMS from those tools deployed within the LMS. LAMS was not ready. Later in 2005, while I was serving The State University of New York (SUNY), LAMS was much closer to having implemented an architecture that supported tool integration. In fact, LAMS was being considered for integration into what we at the SUNY Learning Network were calling SLN2. Unfortunately, this time it was SUNY that was not ready. Now, LAMS is ready with its 2.0 release and is looking for an institution or LMS (vendor or OSS) to make it happen and in doing so make a lot of learning designers, faculty, and learners happy.

Now, if I were an LMS vendor and did not have the biggest footprint in the market, I would be looking at LAMS integration, on the Tool Contract level, as a way to meet real needs and distinguish my product from the standard offerings.

The LAMS software is freely distributed as open source software under the GNU general public license (GPL). LAMS development is led by MELCOE in Sydney and is managed by the nonprofit LAMS Foundation, with support services provided by LAMS International Pty Ltd. Both LAMS organizations are supported by Macquarie University.

For the first time ever I am registering for the Sloan-C conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks. Most of my colleagues here at Penn State have been involved actively in one way or the next with Sloan-C for many years. This was true also of my associates at the State University of New York. Although I have referenced Sloan resources in reports and have been tangentially involved with at least one Sloan supported project, I have not been a formal member of the community, which is interesting now that I think about it. I note that the 2006 ALN meeting is the 12^th, which means that when the 2^nd annual meeting was being planned, I was teaching my first online course with the University of Maryland, European Division. At that point UMUC had not yet administratively consolidated much of its international operation in Europe and Asia.

At the time I was living in Vienna, Austria and commuting to Bratislava, Slovakia to teach in the middle of the week. Then I would commute over the weekends to various sites in Germany to teach face-to-face courses on alternating weekends. On the map Vienna does not look all that far from many cities in Germany, but the trips would normally range from 8 to 10 hours each way, which was a significant time investment to spend 2 8-hour days in an education center.

In early 1996 I was asked if I would like to participate in the first effort to facilitate online classes for the U. Maryland in Europe. I enthusiastically agreed. Not only did I see this as a way to reduce a hefty 16-hour commute to work, but I saw it as a way to achieve more consistent contact with learners. The face-to-face courses were run on alternating weekends during an 8 week period, which meant getting together for 4 weekends over 2 months. The online classes would be offered over a 16-week period and my expectations were that we would be working together continuously rather than periodically.

This is how I was introduced to online education. I was a facilitator, lived in Europe, and saw ways for online learning to meet my travel reduction needs, create a more coherent learning experience, and to meet the needs of a highly mobile and motivated group of adult learners. What could be more perfect? I’ll tell you …

During the next few months I would like to share our experiences and together craft a collective story about online learning from multiple first perspectives. So, please feel free to provide comments, make your own contributions through this site, and make suggestions about how we might organize the story and what we learn. For me, the place to start is at the beginning, which, of course, is not the only tact. Since each of our stories has a beginning, even if it starts now, it seems to me that we have a common point of reference.

I would like to use this blog space to craft a collective story as indicated above, but to also comment on things of interest, share experiences and ideas and, when the mood takes you, to engage on those topics as well as we can. In addition, I intend on publishing a series of interviews with colleagues (most of whom I do not know yet) who are doing work at places that tend not to get a whole lot of attention. I would like to publish the interviews and then provide a day or two of discussion using techniques that are most appropriate. More on this later …