Thoughts on graduate level distance education, part 2: the software
In part one I talked about the general format of my graduate education experience through distance education. This part will talk about the technology that was used to conduct the course.
The software that ‘did it all’ from running the courses to interacting with fellow students was from managed by Embanet, FirstClass, and is from OpenText. My first impression of it was along the lines of disbelief. It seemed like a really bad newsgroup manager with a clunky interface and slow beyond belief. After a few settings changes and things got better. Once I learned about some of the more useful features like ‘unsend’ messages I was less annoyed by it. It has a clunky UI but it works. Just this spring the program switched to blackboard, not sure what I think about that but I am glad I didn’t have to make the switch.
How we used the software was very similar to a newsgroup with a managed space for shared files. The courses had their own ‘group’ that was broken down to sub-groups that were based on each week. All assignments, group work, and correspondence with the instructor was done in that style. A shared folder for each week that was essentially just another newsgroup that gave only posting access is where assignments were handed in. The software did allow for live chats with classmates, audio chats, and a really useful set of collaboration features.
However, there was nothing in the software that I could not do in MSN, facebook, a newsgroup, blog, forum, etc. I am pretty sure the experience would have been better if they had a process that utilized tools that are more flexible than the software they gave us. I am not sure how you can manage distance education without a centralized ‘kitchen sink’ system to control access to content though. With on campus courses where students use online tools to compliment lab and/or classroom experiences I don’t know why you force students to use ‘kitchen sink’ software like blackboard if only to enforce control on access to content. Sadly if students try to do something in an environment they find useful academics can re-act in bizarre ways.
My grades, course information, and handbook was all handled in a web based solution that was just a .NET application with some simple tables displaying information. An odd management of documents had HTML files located on the web app but anything that was in Word documents or other templates was found over in the embanet software.
In courses themselves any software used was generally Open Source and/or platform independant. I only had one course that was VB.NET focused and it was XML Web Applications that focused largely on SOAP and XSLT, no the irony still isn’t lost. The IT Project Management course required MS Project but supplied a licence for it but not much for this OS X user. Thankfully I had an Intel Mac with Boot Camp so I managed the course.
Part three will talk about the time requirements and what I see as the benefits of this style of graduate education.