McLean: Managing Online Learning and Information Environments

Managing online learning and information environments

by Neil McLean, IMS Australia

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Introduction

As Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) observed at a recent IMS forum:

"Institutions are in a state of organisational and technical turmoil as they struggle to manage the emerging online learning and information environments."

He went on to say that libraries in particular are under considerable pressure to reposition services as a means of capitalising on the large institutional investment in libraries and in terms of responding to the demands of online learning environments that move the centre of gravity for service to a distributed mode.

This brief paper aims to identify and explore the main organisational and technical issues facing institutions with particular reference to the need for services to be realigned within a managed online learning environment.

Whilst it is important to understand the pedagogical issues associated with online learning, they are not the principal focus of this particular paper.

Business drivers

In most institutions online learning has developed in a fairly adhoc fashion. Individual lecturers with an enthusiasm for technology and online delivery converted units or courses of studies to online mode with varying levels of interactivity. This "cottage-industry" phase of development has produced a significant amount of activity with varying degrees of success. In most cases lecturers have a fairly tightly bound set of information resources and learning activities lodged in the learning management system, with references to reading material held in the library on remote websites. The degree to which teaching units are completely online varies greatly, with few offering a total virtual learning experience. 

Institutions are now trying to harness these ad hoc developments into more coherent strategic directions for the institution as a whole. In most cases, however, there is a vast discrepancy between the declared strategic statements and the ability of the technological infrastructure and the practitioners to delivery. There are at least four main business drivers underpinning these strategic statements namely:

• to exploit new markets
• to provide more flexibility and convenience for offering existing products and services
• to improve the quality of the learning experience
• to provide more cost effective teaching and learning programs

These business drivers are often implicit in the declared strategies and there are generally high levels of dysfunction between strategies and actual practice.

From the faculty viewpoint, tensions emerge because of the difficulty of interpreting the strategic directions adopted by the institution and because online learning activities are often seen as an additional burden over-and-above traditional teaching activities.

Symptoms of dysfunction

The symptoms of dysfunction include:

• A gulf in the dialogue between the technologists and those responsible for pedagogy.
• Inadequate technological infrastructure.
• A chronic shortage of IT expertise.
• Confusion over responsibilities for digital assets management.
• A lack of any agreed upon framework for interoperability.
• A gap between the quality of service offered to students on campus as against off campus.
• Constant power struggles to maintain control of systems "silos".
• Little understanding of, or commitment to, transformational strategies.

Digital assets management: a functional view

Digital assets management is a relatively new term which refers to the total range of digital information and learning activities which have been historically contained within traditional service domains of the organisation. It is also referred to, in the literature, as institutional repository management.

Faculty and students now demand more seamless access to information and services and there is now a growing belief that effective digital assets management is a key to meeting such demands. 

It is however, a highly contested space in most institutions and libraries in particular often find themselves over-promising and under-delivering as they seek to hold on to a wider role in the digital assets management arena.

There are at least seven different forms of digital assets being generated or managed in most institutions namely:

• Web generated material often ephemeral in nature.
• Institutional policy and committee documents.
• "Learning objects" mostly held in learning management systems.
• Library e-reserve material.
• Library digital special collections.
• Commercial licensed information service.
• Research publications of various types.

The challenge is to identify and develop common service and technical architectures to support all these categories realising, of course, that they will all need their own metadata schemas etc. to be managed effectively. There are, as yet, no agreed conceptual or practical frameworks for addressing the complexities of digital asset management through institutional repositories and it presents an interesting opportunity for library communities to take the lead. 

Digital asset management: a systems view

There are a number of different types of systems struggling to assert supremacy in the digital asset management arena. They are presented in no particular order of importance. Further information will be provided on the functional characteristics of these different types of systems.

• Content management systems (sometimes known as document management systems)
  There are now hundreds of content management systems on the market purporting to manage a range of digital assets. The most common application of these content management systems has been for Web resources and/or institutional policy and committee documents. The quality and versatility of these content management systems vary greatly as they have very often grown out of very proprietary environments.

• Learning management systems (LMS's)
  Learning management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT have been the success stories of the past five years. While limited in functionality they provided a springboard for lecturers to mount online courses in varying levels of complexity. Until recently LMS's have been relatively closed systems and the content and activities were tightly bound within the system. There was also little capacity to interface with enterprise systems or library systems but there are encouraging signs of more open systems architectures emerging.
• Learning Content Management Systems
  A new generation of systems has emerged primarily in the commercial training world aimed at managing and delivery learning objects in constrained training environments. In principal they provide a strategic key to the vexing question of how to manage more effectively the dynamic learning object environment. A likely scenario is that multiple learning content management systems will interface with learning management systems to enrich particular learning activities.

• Integrated library management systems
  Integrated library management systems have been well established for at least two decades. During that time their functionality was relatively unchanged and therefore predictable. Like other enterprise systems they have mostly provided an effective Web front end to their traditional suite of services. Over the past couple of years they have moved into more uncharted waters with portal technology implementations, e-reserve modules and various forms of access management for commercial information services. More recently they have turned their attention to interoperability issues in the e-learning space, particularly the interfaces with learning management systems.

All of these systems have the capacity to manage various parts of the digital assets management spectrum but none have the capacity for total digital asset management. Finding organisational and technical solutions to support effective digital asset management remains a key challenge in most institutions.

Understanding learning objects

The creation and use of learning objects has become a "boom" topic in the evolution of online learning environments. As with all emerging fields, there are significant definitional problems surrounding the term learning objects. It is not the intention in this brief summary to enter the intricacies of the learning object definitional debate. It may be sufficient to observe that the term learning object has been derived from a technologically oriented world, which has a fairly contracted view of any object.

Learning objects refer to digital content which can be used as part of a learning activity. It is clear that they are conceptually and practically more dynamic than so-called information objects because they can be integrated and repurposed as part of a learning activity. There are therefore huge challenges in understanding how to manage repositories of dynamic digital content that many be combined and recombined in many forms.

It is gradually becoming accepted that the learning object debate will remain rather sterile until it is properly informed by instructional design theory. Taxonomies are required that include functional representations of different types of learning objects and their associated characteristics. This looks likely to be a slow process because it has been difficult to engage the respective communities in constructive intellectual discourse.

Meanwhile the management of learning objects will remain a pragmatic little understood activity; it is incumbent on librarians to engage in the debate and to offer potential solutions for managing learning objects in the institutional setting.

Metadata maps

Given the conceptual and semantic confusion surrounding the term learning objects it is no surprise that the metadata debate is equally challenging.

Because learning objects have been mostly seen as blocks of content a lot of metadata development reflects this viewpoint.

The one recognised standard for learning objects (IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Standard) however, lists a range of elements that are meant to refer to learning objectives and learning context.  Without further work it is, therefore, an unworkable standard.

The metadata agenda includes the following issues, all of which need to be addressed:

• The conceptual decanting of instructional context, learning objects and content in learning object metadata.
• The development of taxonomies for learning object types and their associated characteristics.
• Description and characteristics of different types of digital assets commonly found in educational institutions.
• Methodologies for developing application profiles.
• Further development of semantic interoperability as well as syntax/systems interoperability.
• Understanding the multiple issues surrounding the concept of granularity.
• Assessing the deployment of RDF as against XML particularly for providing contextual metadata.
• Developing federated searching across information and learning object repositories.

Most learning object metadata is presently "hardwired" and the underlying challenge is to deconstruct the present metadata edifices to reflect the complexities inherent in supporting online learning experiences.

It is imperative that the library communities engage in this conceptual debate because of their long established involvement with metadata and because they are potential custodians of learning object repositories.

Access management

Most institutions are struggling with the technical infrastructure required to provide effective access management over a wide range of internal and external digital assets and services. At the heart of this struggle is a tension between IT managers who see the issue as one of control and security and the librarians who wish to optimise access to resources, often held in relatively unsecured environments.

Authentication and authorisation are the two terms most commonly used to label this problem of access management. The dream of a common authentication and authorisation scheme is illusory: there will be multiple approaches to the problem of access management and the challenge will be to find meta access management tools that allow movement between the various systems.

A related problem is that of portal technology development. Many of the more ambitious library portal projects have come to grief because the window of opportunity is ill conceived, too little attention is paid to access management issues. It is highly likely that users will require multiple portal entries depending on their activity context. This conceptual matter needs some attention.

Digital Rights Management

Online learning and information communities around the world are aware that digital rights management will become an issue if learning objects do become reusable items. The standards world is deeply divided on how to deal with digital rights management and there is a need in education communities to construct a high level view of the potential management requirements relating to the various categories of digital assets present in most institutions.

Conclusion

The aim of this briefing paper is to provide some context for the forthcoming OCLC Taskforce deliberations. The fluidity and uncertainty reflected in this paper presents considerable opportunities for leadership and service provision.

The challenge for the Taskforce is to understand the organisational, technical and pedagogical dynamics and to identify key service strategies that will allow libraries to enhance the interactions between information repositories and learning environments.

11 March 2003
Revised 20 March 2003

• OCLC Elearning Taskforce
• Members
• Schedule
• Background