Doctor in the House

Whilst at ota09, one of the sessions I joined was hosted by the NHS and discussed how they wanted developers to create web apps/widgets that use NHS data. Examples that were thrown around included suggest a medication, in conjunction with a major pharmacy or store, so far so good.

But following on from my discussions yesterday of how to make a VLE more relevant to Students, could we reposition the VLE as not just a learning tool but one to help in general?

We've already started with the creation of seeSpace onto our VLE, which gives Students access to Forums, personal blogs, Notepads, Twitter Style communications tools that give Students the ability to comment and a whole lot more.

But lets take it a step further, what if we could enhance our VLE by creating an application/service that could help Students find answers to questions they'd rather not ask someone face to face?

It may be slightly pie in the sky at the moment but if we could create an application such as that, it would really change how we view VLEs.

I'm hoping to meet with the session leaders in the next month to discuss what we can do, my first, my first idea is a postcode search based 'Find my GP/NHS Clinic'.

Exciting times.

Don't believe the hype?

So many questions and so few answers....

How indispensable is the VLE? Or more the point, how can we make VLE the defacto tool for education? Do we really need to, will it happen organically or will another platform march in and change the game? Are we reinventing the wheel once again?

What's the solution?

In all honsety there is not a silver bullet that will make a VLE essential for everyone as by its very name it's a learning tool and we all learn differently. Which leads me to 'Personalisation', this is the latest buzz word in education and I'm a big fan.

I should say I'm a fan of the concept and not the name, in that as it is a current ICT buzz word, it will be forever be perceived as another in a long line of fads within education and thus enthused, rubbished and abandoned in fairly short order.

But if we ignore the hype surrounding personalisation and look at what it wants to achieve:

• Moulding the tool or the environment around the user,
• Making the users experience unique
• Giving users the ability to share and comment

We can see that it is something to get excited about

Catch 22 then? we can't get excited about something, without damaging it? (Perhaps an e-learning observer effect?

Well, not quite what we can do is work damn hard to ensure that we under promise and over deliver. Whilst observing current trends, but at the same time not being restricted by them.

Over the Air

I went along to Over The Air on Friday at Imperial College London. For those unfamiliar, OTA is an on going mobile development conference/hackathon that invites all developers regardless of platform to come together to discuss the state of the mobile platform.

It was also my first ever mobile development conference and it was certainly a relaxed one. For example for the keynote addresses instead of chairs we sat on multi coloured bean bags!

Combined with the free coffee, it made for a very pleasant experience!

The keynote speakers were:

• Rick Fant, head of Internet Discovery at Vodaphone,
• Caroline Lewko, mobile entrepreneur
• And someone from the BBC, whose name escapes me at the moment.

The main theme running through the keynotes was how we as developers should be creating platform independant applications called widgets. Widgets are typically written in Javascript, although you can utilise most languages, the benefit is that with one code set you can run your app/widget on multiple devices, increasing your userbase exponentially.

Aside from widgets, App stores, Monetising your product, Cloud computing and a large debate on Platform independence vs native code.

A natty OTA bingo card was also created:

There were a range of different sessions throughout the day, one of the more interesting ones was led by Henny Swan from Opera on the accessibility features of the upcoming HTML 5 and how we as developers can better code our web/mobile applications to support users with an impairment.

The final session I was able to attend (although I had to leave mid way to catch the tube), was run by the NHS and featured discussion on their API and getting access to their data. I mentioned to the session leaders that the College would be interested in creating web apps to support our students.

More than one way to joint a chicken

The BBC visited the College yesterday to look at the increased enrolment in education and how we're using award winning technology to really enhance the Student experience:

The BBC were particularly impressed with our innovative Kitchen Recording System developed in conjunction with Impact that creates video resources to aid Catering Students. Ron Wyatt-Goodwin (the chef featured in the video), Head of Commercial Catering & Operations Division said that the new system helped Students who are reluctant to ask the lecturer to repeat parts of lesson, allowing them to work through the technique at their own pace.

The other major benefit Ron identified for the system is that the resources produced are videos, meaning that they can be replayed and reused as many times as the Student or Lecturer needs, ensuring that learners get more out of a session and Lecturers can spend more time supporting Students in class.

Ron also said that giving the Students the option of watching and reviewing videos before, during and after a session gives them the ability to visualise and practice techniques, leading to a demonstrable increase in first time pass rates.

It also saves quite a lot of chickens.

Leading from the front

Most VLE's aren't what you'd call aesthetically pleasing, I suppose the best way to describe them would be.... functional.

I believe that this is mostly due to the way that the VLE has developed, incrementally and with a great focus on keeping it the same. I feel that a lot of VLE developers stick the mantra that 'Big change causes big problems', in that making radical shifts in design or functionality can alienate users and make the transition period hellish, forever tarnishing the reputation product.

And whilst that is true, we must remember that the first bite is with the eye or to modify an another cliché, all users judge a book by its cover, Students are even more design focussed than ever before.

So how do we respond as developers? With Varying shades of grey.

If the aim of ICT is to engage the user, why is it that most educational software looks so bad?

Of course the function of the software is paramount but we also need to realise that our user has changed and that their expectations of what software should look like have radically altered.

I'm not advocating BOLD FLASHING COLOUR SETS THAT MAKE YOUR EYES BLEED, instead we should focus clean looking, intelligently designed layouts that enhance the content.

Are we missing a trick by designing the way VLE's look?

Who are we developing for? Students

Who develop the VLE? Staff

Who provides feedback? Staff

Seeing a pattern here? If VLE's are for students why are staff designing them? I'm not talking about a simple student consultation process, I think we should get students designing the look of our intranet.

Where else but in education can you have access to hundreds of developers, graphic artists and designers chomping at the bit for industry experience?

Students get a VLE that looks good, the designers get experience and accreditation and we as developers can ensure that we have the best VLE possible as it led not just by students ideas but by their actual hard work.

Now this isn't just a flowery idea, I'm actually putting this into practice. A games development student has come forward wanting to work on our new version of seeNet and so he is going to design the look and feel for seeSpace.

That's how we at South East Essex College aren't just talking about changing ICT, we're pioneering the use of student led design over large scale projects.

VLE's for Students, By Students.

Guest blog

I'm posting this on behalf of Chris Woodford one of our library advisors:

These days in this part of the world people are increasingly used to information technology in one form or another, whichever generation they belong to. Computers are used almost everywhere, not least in the College. However, while members of staff might be comfortable with their use, the same might not be said of our students – and there will even be times when we ourselves are tripped up by bad software design.

The College Library uses OCLC’s OLIB to support our catalogue, and up until recently the Library catalogue’s front-end for customers, OLIB Webview, was set up to search for items in a different way to the staff front-end. From our side, it was possible to bring back different results owing to the set defaults on Webview. When a customer attempted a search by keyword, the search options were set to ‘Exact phrase’ and ‘All exact or similar words’. These defaults made sure that only minimal results were returned and worked against the point of a keyword search…

It was always possible to change those settings for each search – taking the ticks out of the boxes each time – but this change would have to be made each and every time someone wanted to search. This might not be such a problem the first time, but having to repeat the procedure every time challenges people’s memory and works against the intuitive meaning of a keyword search – especially as the staff front-end had no such settings by default.

The problem came to our attention when a student had been assisted by a member of staff at a counter, and was asked to repeat a search on their own to see for themselves how useful the results were. Fortunately we have an Information Services team who are able to tweak our catalogue settings, and a quick e-mail to them had the default settings changed to ‘Any word of similar word’, returning the keyword search to a more useful tool. One result was replaced by a lot more!

One thing we can learn from this is that small changes can have big results – in this case making the useless useful. Part of designing front-ends – whether web-sites or software – is making sure they work for the users rather then against them, and if it is in our power to help make our services as intuitive as we can, we should. Another thing is that non-specialist staff (my own job being Library Advisor) have a role to play in helping to keep our own systems working as our own customers would wish.

Now we're cooking with gas....

Excuse the pun, I'm in a good mood.

Our kitchen recording system has received special recognition from Creston (the maker of the touch panels used to interact with the system)

"The judges felt that Impact’s work on the South East Essex College was an example of a highly innovative solution in an education environment. Students at the Student Skills Kitchen and professional Ora Kitchen are able to access practical lessons on cookery and hospitality techniques, thanks to an advanced recording system controlled by a Crestron system.

Julian Phillips said: ‘We constantly aim to provide innovative solutions for our customers. In Higher Education, we are helping universities to deliver new methods of teaching and learning by using a range of interactive technologies that offer more flexibility to the students."

Impact have also featured the system on their website.

Following the culinary theme I've been working with Head of Hospitality Ron Wyatt-Goodwin to develop a series of videos demonstrating techniques.

In the above clip from Ron's technique series he demonstrates how to prepare a Chicken for saute.

Research Projects

One of our students recently made a suggestion for our online services.

They suggested that we advertise information about current research projects on the student intranet pages. This would encourage participation of other students, and provide a great way of sharing ideas and good practice amongst the students themselves.

It sounds like a great idea to us, and its likely we'll be implementing it soon.

Simple is best!

We’ve been using Microsoft SharePoint for some time now, largely for creating e-Portfolios for our HE students. The SharePoint system is quick, fairly intuitive and allows you to customise content and add web parts as required.

After a recent discussion with one of our Business tutors another application for the SharePoint Blog template suddenly sprung to mind.

The tutor wanted a way to capture his students’ ideas on a particular topic, display them anonymously in real time on a screen in front of the group and then be able to comment on each as a way to stimulate debate and discussion with the class as a whole. The inspiration for this had sprung from a session the tutor had attending at the University of Essex iLab, a costly, high tech, purpose built environment for electronically facilitating creative thinking and problem solving online.

How would we create this in the class room using nothing more than the student PCs, the tutor’s laptop and a large LCD screen? Easy, we set up a blog in SharePoint!

The tutor connected his laptop to the LCD screen and accessed the blog I had created for him through SharePoint. He posted his first topic to the blog and then asked his group, sitting in front of their PCs to access the same page. The group was then encouraged to post their responses/comments to the topic the tutor had posted. All comments were set to be anonymous so that no one felt anxious that their response might be ‘wrong’ or their ideas judged unfairly. The tutor could then refresh the screen at the front of the class as the ideas ‘rained’ in and comment on them.

Essentially, we had created a simple way to electronically capture the students’ thought showering process.

Indeed, the tutor had found that by using traditional question and answer techniques it would generally be the same students answering his questions while other less vocal students or those of a shyer disposition rarely participated. Using the blog as a way to anonymously capture the students’ ideas gave the whole group the confidence to express themselves without the fear of speaking in front of the whole group or feeling the anxiety of saying the ‘right’ thing.

Simple…but effective and at a fraction of the cost of the iLab!