Beyond the Norm on Learning Units, the Reporter goes live, KS Track for Kuali Days moves forward, the Board meets with redLantern, and much, much more. Note: Links may require login to KS Confluence.
Project News
The Kuali Student Reporter
The Kuali Student Reporter is now online. The blog is dedicated to providing external audiences with information about the development of a Kuali Student. In addition to general updates, the Reporter will also provide updates on available documentation on the project Web site, upcoming conference presentations, and – down the road - opportunities to provide feedback. Please direct interested external parties to the blog and the project Web site. Also, if you have any contributions or recommendations, please contact Scott Shepherd (UMCP).
KS Track for KD8
The Kuali Student track schedule for Kuali Days VIII had been completed. The schedule can be viewed at Kuali Days VIII Planning on the wiki. Presenters will soon be designated, and abstracts will be completed by Sept. 4. We are still in the planning stages of determine team meetings to be schedule to coincide with Kuali Days.
Wiki System Error
Note that there is a system error occasional happening in Confluence when attempting to save a page following edits.
The error reads that standard notification: “A system error has occurred — our apologies!” The error code in the confluence.log file will be ER_LOCK_WAIT_TIMEOUT 41000, which means a database lock has occurred.
While the issue should clear up after a short period of time, please notify Scott Shepherd of any occurrences as we are attempting to track the error in order to find a resolution.
Board Meets with redLantern, Clarifies Voting
Jason Elwood, president of redLantern, met with KS Board this week to discuss opportunities to work with the project and the integration of redLantern’s Degree Audit Reporting System (DARS), a program to help institutions of higher learning track student progress. The Board is interested in developing the relationship and will continue to explore.
Additionally, the Board decided that all boards and committees will follow a voting structure of two votes for Founder institutions and one vote for Partner institutions. A simple majority is needed for approval of any measures.
Beyond the Norm: A Course is a Course, of Course, of Course
And everything can be modeled as a Course, of course
Unless of course, it's not a course
It's a research project or experiential learning, or community service, or co-op, or thesis, or field study, or module, or seminar, or... if you study at the University of Cambridge
Sung to the tune of the "Mr. Ed" theme song except the last line where it all breaks down
In the Kuali Student project today, we are finally seeing the tangible embodiment of Richard Spencer's vision of Learning Units. Three years ago on a hot July day I sat in the third floor of MIT's Student Center listening to Richard Spencer (UBC) speak.
A “learning unit number” is like a SKU... It can be a course; single lecture in a course; 15 minute student presentation in a course, participation in community service, any activity that the student wants to include on a formal or co-curricular transcript. We can also have: learning results, learning plans, learning resources. (from Richard Spencer’s presentation)
At the time, I didn't really care about learning units. I was at the SOA workshop because of its open-source vision. As I listened I realized just how hamstrung our current infrastructure has been. We have had to model everything as variations of the fixed entities that were hard wired into the structure of our systems. My kids were in a Montessori school. They didn't have “courses” but they certainly were learning. More and more, I realized that most of the problems we’d been facing in maintaining our student systems were because of this hard-wired nature. Learning is more fluid and dynamic and professors at MIT wanted to push the boundaries not just of science, but of teaching as well. I was hooked. I had drunk Richard Spencer's Kool-Aid.
Fast forward three years and that vision has had some real birthing pains. From the inside though, I can now see a tangible proving out of that gestalt. The basic structure of the dictionary was laid out last July by the Kuali Student service and technical architects. It was designed to allow us to configure objects by both type and state. My most recent work has been to take that abstract structure and use it to flesh out the dictionary with requirements for R1 Kuali Reference University (KRU) credit courses. Richard's idea was that learning units could slide up and down a scale from the most general type, such as degree programs to the more specific types such as courses and their activities.
The first iterations of the dictionary that Seth Winerman (MIT) and I produced show that we can successfully model a credit course and link it to its various formats and activities using a single reusable Canonical Learning Unit as the basic building block. I can now see how we can probably extend this to non-credit courses as well. It remains to be seen if we can model other types such as degree programs, general education requirements, experiential learning and projects the same way, but so far so good.
At a recent presentation to the Kuali Student Functional Council, I showed how the dictionary can be configured for each institution. I showed how fields can be turned on or off, shortened or lengthened. What I didn’t really stress was that this ability that allows schools to customize Kuali Student to meet their own individual needs is the exact same ability that we need to allow us to customize the core building blocks to create new learning unit types. If you think about it many of the differences between a UBC course and an MIT course and a Delta Course is really due to the fact that although they are all "courses," they actually lie at slightly different points on that sliding scale of Learning Units. Put another way, just as the word "bird" refers to both sparrows and hawks, the term "course" refers to similar but not exactly the same thing at each of our various schools.
OK, so what about the Ostrich? Well, this is where Kuali Student partner, the University of Cambridge, comes in. If these same reusable components can be used to successfully model Cambridge's 800-year-old teaching structure of Triposes with their Michaelmas, Lent, Easter terms then my gut is that they can be used to model any new fangled structure that our MIT professors can come up with. Leo Fernig (UBC) recently traveled to the UK to begin exploring this area. While not conclusive, initial results are promising.
- By Norm Wright (MIT)
Calendar
August
10-14 UI/UX Workshop, Seattle (UW)
17-21 UX Workshop, Vancouver (UBC)
Labels: News; Kuali Days; Wiki; Learning Units; Beyond the Norm.
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