[Using Sakai] [DG: Open Forum] Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE) > Thoughts on the Vision and Future

[David Horwitz]

One correction for the CET people:
 
Anthony Carr (01366541) not Genevive Chang (01428013) is on on Sabatical.
 
So Chang must migrate, Carr not
 
D



>>> Josh Baron <Josh.Baron at marist.edu> 2012/12/06 11:36 PM >>>
Apologies for the cross posting to multiple lists, just trying to cast a broad net... 

Colleagues, 

It has been some time since I’ve posted to these lists so I hope this message finds people well as we head towards the New Year. 

With the goal of stimulating a broad community dialog around OAE, I thought I’d share some new thoughts in hopes others would take a few minutes to reflect on them and share your ideas and opinions.  Before doing so, I should note that these are my own personal thoughts which I share “wearing my Marist hat” and do not reflect any official views from the Sakai OAE project or Foundation. 

I began my OAE journey about 9 months ago when Marist began to prepare for several small scale OAE pilots.  At the start of this journey I felt confident that the vision of OAE evolving into a full LMS with all the related LMS capabilities was right and that ultimately the pilots we were starting would lead (possibly 5+ years in the future) to replacing the CLE.  Over the course of the past semester though my confidence in this vision slowly eroded and I was ultimately left with a much different perspective on what OAE represents… 

AH-HA MOMENT #1: CO-HABITATION 
One of my first realizations came after speaking with some of our faculty involved in our pilots and being surprised to hear that they were excited about the capabilities of OAE but rather than wanting LMS tools integrated into to OAE, they seemed to prefer keeping them separated.  In working to understand this more I began to realize that there was a strong analogy between the CLE and our structured classroom environments on our physical campus while OAE was more analogous to our “academic commons” or the more unstructured and open collaboration spaces.  I’ve developed a brief document for use here at Marist that discusses this in more detail and the conclusion I reach that deploying both the CLE and OAE, with some level of “co-habitation” between the two systems, is likely the strategic direction for our institution.  The document is available to review and comment on at:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1piKoZpT2DEkhcaP9uzImHRt0WRlZyW6WQPUmR8GgHvE/edit 

AH-HA MOMENT #2: SOLVING THE COMMUNITY “SECRET SAUCE” ENIGMA 
Marist has been an early adopter of distance education and has continued to grow our online programs over the years.  Although our courses and programs have received a range of recognition, we’ve struggled to bring the feeling of community that so many cite as being the “secret sauce” in our face-to-face programs to our online students.  Part of the challenge in doing this has been creating online the types of open spaces that allow students to organize around their own interests and network with each other (and those outside the institution) which seems to be central to community forming on our campuses.  As we continued to run our pilots and discuss the core capabilities of OAE, we started to realize that it might be the solution to the “secret sauce” enigma as it would provide us with the tools needed to form a rich student-centric online community.  We are now starting to experiment with this idea through new pilots but are excited about the potential it holds to greatly enhance our online presence. 

OK, I’ve likely already lost 75% of those who started to read this and thought it was too long so I’ll wrap it up here for now… 

I would love to hear from others in the community with reflections, different opinions, or other visions related to OAE with the hope that we might collectively work towards a common vision.  Where this goes and what value it might bring is a bit of an unknown but I think it will help Sakai move forward strategically in important ways. 

Thanks for listening, 

Josh 

-----------------------------
Joshua Baron
Senior Academic Technology Officer
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, New York  12601
(845) 575-3623 (work)
Twitter: JoshBaron 




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