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.

Rubrics & the Fudge Factor

Rubrics ensure fairness in grading the work of students. I was talking to a colleague once who did not want to use a rubric because it did not allow her to use the “fudge factor,” assigning a grade based on what you know—or feel you know—about a student rather than wholly upon the student’s actual performance. She thought the “fudge factor” was an equalizer helping to ensure students got what they deserved not just what they earned. I was horrified and took it as my mission to help her understand how not using the rubric was innately unfair to the majority of her students in a class in which the essay was the major method of assessment. With a diverse student body, many kinds of biases could creep ever so quietly and unknowingly into the grading process. Ethnicities, language, social status, styles of clothing, hairstyles, etiquette standards or lack thereof…and just the good old fashioned disdain much of the young have for older adults and authoritative types mean that, despite how hard you try, the way you see the student (in a ground class) plays into their score, in mostly subtle but perhaps sometimes in very large unconscious ways…even online. The fudge factor works against us by allowing us to reinforce subconscious biases. The only way to manage our own subconscious skewing is to use rubrics.

What Goes into a Hybrid

Hybrid courses, which are also called blended courses, present many advantages to both the institution and to the students. In a hybrid course some time on the physical campus is replaced by time in the learning management system. At my institution it usually works out to be a 50-50 arrangement. The institution gains valuable classroom space to deal with a burgeoning student population. Students love the apparent reduced time in a classroom seat.

However, a conversation that I have had many times with my colleagues is that reduced time on the physical campus should not equate to reduced overall learning time. The online portion of the class is not equal to homework. The online portion of the class should include real learning. There should be—and this is not an all-inclusive list—activities, discussions, interactive exercises, group work, etc. Online students should expect multimedia, announcements, and feedback.

For students, real learning is not just reading from the text or from the web, nor is it simply posting an answer to an assignment, nor is it taking an online quiz, exam or other assessment. The online portion of the class should be as dynamic and lively as the on-ground portion. In other words, the online portion of a class should be a class.

If all you need is static, one-way content, if all you need is to post homework, then I would assert that a hybrid course is not what you need. Keep the students in class for the full number of credit hours and supplement those hours with the online support materials you would like.