Email eLearning– Using Email as a Course Management System

For dis­tance edu­ca­tion, online course mange­ment sys­tems are often appro­pri­ately used to facil­i­tate dis­cus­sions and other activ­i­ties asso­ci­ated with the instruc­tional process. Course man­age­ment sys­tems are also often used to add an online com­po­nent to face-to-face instruc­tional expe­ri­ences. Some of the oft-used fea­tures in this type of a blended/hybrid learn­ing set­ting include dis­cus­sion board, file sharing/storage and the send­ing out of announcements.

Often, a sim­ple email dis­cus­sion list could just as well pro­vide at least the same func­tion­al­ity of the fea­tures men­tioned above with­out requir­ing the learner to become famil­iar with a new a course man­age­ment sys­tem. Here are some ideas on how to take full advan­tage of an exist­ing tech­nol­ogy (email) that every­one is famil­iar with to encour­age learn­ing, espe­cially blended learn­ing sit­u­a­tions. The term dis­cus­sion list is being used with the same mean­ing as a listserv.

1. Announce­ments This one is obvi­ous, if an instruc­tor needs to let stu­dents know about some­thing he or she sim­ply send out an email to the list­serv and it auto­mat­i­cally goes to everyone’s inbox. (Hope­fully there isn’t any­one out there using a CMS sim­ply for the pur­pose of emails other students).
2. Dis­cus­sions This seems to be a com­mon fea­ture for instruc­tors who desire to add an online com­po­nent to their face-to-face teach­ing sit­u­a­tion. Using a CMS you log in, browse to the dis­cus­sion sec­tion, find what­ever thread you are look­ing for and then read and post. Using a list­serv the dis­cus­sion arrives in your inbox and you click reply when you want to respond to a dis­cus­sion thread– easy. Small group dis­cus­sions would also be pos­si­ble although it would require a sec­ond dis­cus­sion list to be set up.
3. File stor­age and shar­ing As long as the nature of an assign­ment allows it to be shared by the group then it can be sent as an attach­ment where oth­ers in the group can read and com­ment (and grade) and the attach­ment is then auto­mat­i­cally archived. Dis­cus­sion list archives can be pub­lic or private.

Another advan­tage of using a dis­cus­sion list where pos­si­ble is that under­stand­ing and being able to use such lists effec­tively is a great way to pro­mote future pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment in rel­e­vant dis­cus­sion lists.

More Read­ing…

Syl­labus of an entire course on Using Email in Instruc­tion
Email games from Thiagi.com

WebCT Accessibility Learning Module

A learn­ing mod­ule titled WebCT, Acces­si­bil­ity, Usabil­ity and the Dis­abled Stu­dent from Ever­green Val­ley Col­lege. Com­pre­hen­sive overview of bar­ri­ers, solu­tions and alter­na­tives avail­able to ensure your con­tent is acces­si­ble. Great resource. (via Teach­ing and Devel­op­ing Online)

Moodle and Accessibility

You may already be famil­iar with Moo­dle, an open source, mod­u­lar­ized, social con­struc­tion­ist course man­age­ment sys­tem started by lead devel­oper Mar­tin Dougia­mas in 1999.

It looks like the cur­rent ver­sion (1.1.1) has some basic acces­si­bil­ity fea­tures built in, but their road map for the next year is the really good part. By ver­sion 2.0, planned for early 2004, they are work­ing towards xhtml tran­si­tional com­pli­ance. Right now they are plan­ning on using some basic tables, but they will be eas­ily replaced with CSS posi­tion­ing. Then, ver­sion 2.1 is expected to bring basic sup­port for SCORM packages.

Moo­dle is already a full-featured, very usable CMS with an active devel­op­ers com­mu­nity and it looks like the next few months are going to bring lots of excit­ing changes. If any of you are inter­ested in being a part of the con­ver­sa­tions that are hap­pen­ing there, you can visit their forums (click login as guest). The devel­op­ers appear to be very open to suggestions.

Accessible Course Management Systems

I’ve been try­ing to get my fin­ger on the pulse of what is hap­pen­ing with course man­age­ment sys­tems and have been some­what over­whelmed. The options out there span the spec­trums of open source vs. pro­pri­etary, instructor-centric vs. learner-centric and of course from almost com­pletely inac­ces­si­ble to claims to be acces­si­ble to all users. Right now I’m try­ing to sort through some of those claims to inter­pret what dif­fer­ent devel­op­ers mean by accessible.

Start­ing with what I would con­sider to be the major com­mer­cial play­ers, Black­board has an acces­si­bil­ity page that describes some of their efforts and they have been a part­ner with WebAIM for a few years. I was able to dig up what appeared to be a token acces­si­bil­ity page on the WebCT web­site. How­ever, I don’t cur­rently have access to either of those sys­tems to really take them for a test drive so I’d love to hear from any of you who have.

Regard­ing open source sys­tems, there is a great list at EdTech­Post from Scott Leslie. There are a num­ber of projects, pri­mar­ily devel­oped at uni­ver­si­ties and then made avail­able to the edu­ca­tional com­mu­nity. One promis­ing sys­tem from the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto is ATu­tor, “designed with acces­si­bil­ity in mind.” I’ve just set up and ver­sion 1.3 (which has adopted the IMS Con­tent Pack­ag­ing Instruc­tions) and will be play­ing with it over the next cou­ple of weeks– I’ll be sure to report what I find out.

If you’re look­ing for a good place to start in find­ing out what some of your options are, Edu­Tools is a great place to start. They have a num­ber of reviews (includ­ing a brief blurb on “Acces­si­bil­ity Com­pli­ance”) and allow you to com­pare the prod­ucts that you are inter­ested in, includ­ing a group of what they con­sider “Acces­si­bil­ity Con­form­ing Prod­ucts”.

Any of you have an expe­ri­ence with a CMS that has (or hasn’t) worked for your needs?