Everyday new products are released, both commercially and in the form of shareware, that promise to simplify modern life. They promise to save us time, to remember things for us, to organize things for us, to correct things for us and leave us more time for leisure activities.
There are many ‘out of the box’ or ‘off the shelf’ products that meet a number of our general needs here as a business such as finance systems, but in terms of customization, it often requires that our business staff have to train and redevelop their procedures to tie in with the software provided. And when our needs as a business, or the rules dictated to us by external authorities, change it more often than not means working around and against the software system until the situation eventually becomes untenable and an entirely new product is sought.
Then of course, retraining and fine tuning our business procedures begins all over again. Because of the cost of such systems, and the dependence on them, this cycle has largely been accepted as just ‘the way it is’.
But when it comes down to personalized teaching and learning – we cannot expect our learners, or our teachers, to reshape themselves to fit the mould, especially when their needs change so frequently.
The education sector is saturated with products that claim to be the ultimate solution for enabling teaching and learning. Some providers are so eager not to exclude anyone from their target market that they include just about every feature imaginable. Although this means it is likely to tick nearly every box on the ‘Can it do…?’ check list, the end result is often that the software system is usable only by people who have undertaken significant training, and who have enough IT literacy to fill in the inevitable gaps that this training glosses over.
Support and updates often don’t continue much beyond the point of sale and people’s needs change. How well can a commercial company really understand your teaching and learning needs? And how long for?
Here at SEEC a great deal of the online systems that we use are developed and built in-house by our own development teams. Many of the staff in these teams previously worked elsewhere in the college and brought with them valuable experience in supporting teaching and learning, and insight from the end-users point of view.
What better way to personalize their learning experience, than to have in place in-house development teams to constantly monitor their requirements for resources, support and enabling technologies? Keeping abreast of the constant flood of new and emerging technologies and programming techniques is time consuming and, at times, can be overwhelming. But the benefit is that we get to pick and choose exactly what fits our teachers’ and learners’ needs. By coding software ourselves, we have the luxury of employing only the techniques and practices that enhance their experience. Incompatibility is rarely a problem, since all our code can be customized and updated at short notice, without needing to wait for tardy, bulky, and sometimes costly, product updates. The technology neither paves the way, nor drags behind, but instead evolves alongside its users.
There are many ‘out of the box’ or ‘off the shelf’ products that meet a number of our general needs here as a business such as finance systems, but in terms of customization, it often requires that our business staff have to train and redevelop their procedures to tie in with the software provided. And when our needs as a business, or the rules dictated to us by external authorities, change it more often than not means working around and against the software system until the situation eventually becomes untenable and an entirely new product is sought.
Then of course, retraining and fine tuning our business procedures begins all over again. Because of the cost of such systems, and the dependence on them, this cycle has largely been accepted as just ‘the way it is’.
But when it comes down to personalized teaching and learning – we cannot expect our learners, or our teachers, to reshape themselves to fit the mould, especially when their needs change so frequently.
The education sector is saturated with products that claim to be the ultimate solution for enabling teaching and learning. Some providers are so eager not to exclude anyone from their target market that they include just about every feature imaginable. Although this means it is likely to tick nearly every box on the ‘Can it do…?’ check list, the end result is often that the software system is usable only by people who have undertaken significant training, and who have enough IT literacy to fill in the inevitable gaps that this training glosses over.
Support and updates often don’t continue much beyond the point of sale and people’s needs change. How well can a commercial company really understand your teaching and learning needs? And how long for?
Here at SEEC a great deal of the online systems that we use are developed and built in-house by our own development teams. Many of the staff in these teams previously worked elsewhere in the college and brought with them valuable experience in supporting teaching and learning, and insight from the end-users point of view.
What better way to personalize their learning experience, than to have in place in-house development teams to constantly monitor their requirements for resources, support and enabling technologies? Keeping abreast of the constant flood of new and emerging technologies and programming techniques is time consuming and, at times, can be overwhelming. But the benefit is that we get to pick and choose exactly what fits our teachers’ and learners’ needs. By coding software ourselves, we have the luxury of employing only the techniques and practices that enhance their experience. Incompatibility is rarely a problem, since all our code can be customized and updated at short notice, without needing to wait for tardy, bulky, and sometimes costly, product updates. The technology neither paves the way, nor drags behind, but instead evolves alongside its users.
I find the colleges approach to creating it's own software quite interesting, is there any reason why they don't take part in or extend and develop for themselves some of the really well developed open source environments like http://moodle.org/ or http://sakaiproject.org/portal ?
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