What’s In a Campus Edition?

Why do companies marketing to educators and students love to name their products campus edition? I suppose that the name is intended to make us see that they are creating something specifically for us. However, what exactly are they creating? The term does not seem to refer to the same set of things each time.

Most of my colleagues are familiar with the WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard Campus Edition learning management systems. These LMS versions are being steadily morphed into Blackboard 9. At some point there will be no online Blackboard campus using the term campus edition. However, based on how frequently the term is used, I do not think there will be any shortage of products or services that do use the term.

An example is Mozilla Firefox Campus Edition 2.0.0.6, a student-centered variant of the Firefox browser that added two components, an iTunes control called FoxyTunes and a research manager called Zotero.

Wimba’s Campus Edition product is called Genuine Genie. It is designed to allow presumably a teacher or college professor to convert easily Microsoft Word documents into web pages. Added features will also allow interactivity to be built into the web pages. The web pages can be loaded into LMS courses. This product is a somewhat schizophrenic and has several permutations of its name/brand: Genuine Genie, Course Genie 2.0, and a version contained in Lectora (another name of prevalence).

One of the latest campus editions to hit the streets is by PBworks, formerly PBwiki. The shift from wiki to works signals that PBworks is expanding its business model. Unlike its basic free account PBworks Campus Edition provides unlimited premium workspaces for $799/year. The premium version offers centralized control, centralized account creation, centralized monitoring of accounts, branding of the PBworks accounts, and easy site administration. A planned add-on will be plagiarism tools. In effect, PBworks is nudging more into the realm of the LMS.

Whether or not PBworks is successful remains to be seen. In the present economy, the low cost is certainly in their favor. If past trends continue, one sure thing is that Campus Edition will not be the final name of their product and they will not be the last to call their product campus edition.

Is Voice Better than Text?

I recently read about Nuance Communication’s Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Nuance has created this app version of its remarkable Dragon Naturally Speaking software which allows you to speak into a microphone while Dragon types the text for you. Distance learning professionals have loved Dragon Naturally Speaking and comparable software for years. Many distance learning professionals will also gravitate toward to Dragon Dictation app which adds greater mobility to their ability to work at a distance. (This app is currently free in the US and Canada but if it becomes popular the cost will undoubtedly rise.)

Other Voice to Text Technologies

Of course, Dragon Naturally Speaking has not been the only technology to transcribe voice to text. Microsoft has long built this capability into its operating systems. However, it has not been something that they have marketed as value added, perhaps because it has been woefully inferior to Dragon until recently. Although Dragon Naturally speaking is still in my opinion the best, Microsoft has recently put some pretty good speech recognition software in Windows 7. It starts up easily and works a million times better than their previous versions although Dragon is still better.

Problems

With the app and speech recognition, professionals have gained powerful new tools to help them conduct distance learning courses which are largely text-based. However, does the use of the tools translate into better courses or better service to the students? From my own experiences the answer seems mixed.

One problem is over-reliance on the software. Dragon boasts that it is 99% accurate—and it is amazingly accurate—but there are drawbacks. Dragon learns to recognize your individual speech patterns as you use it and that takes time for the accuracy to get really good. Even so it makes mistakes and herein is a significant difficulty. You need to proof-read your own text from Dragon which is tough for lengthy passages where Dragon got 99% of it right but there are hidden sections that Dragon bobbled but with real words.

Years ago when I first installed Dragon I felt liberated from my slow typing speed. Now I could “type” at the speed of thought. For my online students this meant that I could answer their questions with more detailed, more nuanced answers. In actuality, many of my answers became less succinct. The reading involved in an online class already takes a good deal of time. Long instructor passages take even more time. Lengthy answers from instructors can confuse those who are not strong readers.

It has been my experience and I have heard from others that there is a fair amount of mental processing while typing with the keyboard. For most people, speech may happen to rapidly for this to occur. Speech is also perceived as relatively informal, a fact which we easily tolerate when speaking to someone, but becomes written speech significantly increases the expectation that there will be a more formal structure to the content and that more thought will be embodied in the construction of the content.

Why transcribe at all?

Sometimes I wonder why we bother transcribing at all. Would it not be better if we are speaking anyway to simply record the lecture and post the audio? This would help to students who may have some kinds of learning disabilities. This could help students who have differences in learning styles. This would enable students to listen to the content while mobile such as on an iPod or other mp3 device, which fits with the busy way our world works now.

Some of my colleagues argue that making the text available to students is important still to promote textual literacy, that it is still important for students to master written communication. Yet the same colleagues do not know what to make of the current texting phenomenon, which has students producing more text-based communications than ever.

Perhaps programs like Dragon and the new Dragon app could make a huge impact if adopted for texting. In fact, it could help us solve some of the issues we are fighting in education such as sentences in all lower-case with no punctuation and myriad acronyms. Teens, and all of us, could type as fast as the thoughts occur. This would remove the need for large QWERTY keyboards on phones. The question is would it be adopted because again we do not understand why texting is so popular. When we do we will be able to address the educational problems and move more decisively toward changes in the way students learn and the way we provide them information online.

Central Falls Implications for Community Colleges

In February 74 teachers and 19 staff members were fired by the superintendent at an underperforming Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The decision has received a good deal of media attention and a significant amount of praise around the country. (Even President Obama has publically agreed with the measure as a move toward greater accountability in education.) While it is to true that the school has been a consistent underperformer, in the national media the story is mischaracterized. In reality it is, of course, not a story of callous teachers who do not bother to do their jobs or care about their students. The school was filled with professional teachers who worked very hard to help their students achieve. It was as not about a school that was making zero progress. The school’s test scores had improved over the last two years although to be fair the increases were slight. It was not that the teachers were unwilling to change the structure of the high school program. Structural changes such as moving from a comprehensive high school to one with upper and lower divisions had already been approved. In the end the unresolved issues that caused the superintendent to make the radical move seemed to be more about the requirement for teachers to work harder and longer for what their union regarded as inadequate extra pay.

This apparent national confusion about the reason the teachers were fired has implications for those of us in higher education. The problem is about the teachers accepting changes to their employment without what they believe to be fair pay. The perception is that they do not accept performance measures and are failing in their jobs

We, the community colleges, share a stronger bond with our high school educator colleagues than most traditional 4 year colleges. We must educate an increasingly greater percentage of the high school graduates and returning nontraditional students in order to keep the country globally competitive. Furthermore, we have been more willing to build programs that do more than provide a good liberal arts foundation but rather increasingly provide direct job skills which may even more lead to industry-style standards of measurement of performance. After all, a sizeable proportion of our students are looking, not to transfer and certainly not just enlightenment, but rather for transferable and marketable skills. It seems manifest that at some point there will be a greater demand for us to be held accountable for our students’ performance.

I know that all my colleagues, faculty and administrators, in college are dedicated professionals who care about their students and their student’s futures. However, once the kinds of standards that have stabbed dagger-like into the status quo of compulsory public school have been imposed on community colleges, how will we fair? The answer is likely split. Some parts of our colleges, such as our nursing and technology components, are accustomed to performance measures. Both born out of public necessity and applauded by local government and industry for their ability to improve each region, the programs were initially structured in a way that performance measure is part of their infrastructure. While it has strong ties to our colleges’ liberal arts tradition, distance learning, due to its continued scrutiny and foundation in technology, seems more readily accepting of performance measures. Other more traditional parts of our colleges, those that are more focused on a traditional view of the liberal arts college (not necessarily traditional in the community college sense) will undoubtedly have more difficulty adjusting.

Performance measures and our acceptance of them cannot solve a Central Falls kind of problem. The performance measures are only a way to provide the institution with data. The way that the institution interprets the data and the proposed solutions form the locus of problems. Without knowing many more of the details of the Central Falls superintendent’s proposal than I have outlined here, it is difficult for me to say how fair the proposed changes were to the teachers or if the union should have accepted them. Knowing our mandate to provide college opportunities to all, if our colleges’ data showed we had a similar problem, I am not sure that dedicating more faculty time to the problem would help us. I also cannot imagine college deans and presidents taking such extreme measures to achieve what will likely be only marginal increases in overall college achievement. Until we arrive at that place in time it is not clear how we should respond. Unfortunately, the right time to contemplate the issue for community colleges is when the problem does not yet exist. The right time is now.