Videos, Wikis, and Blogs, Oh My!

   As I continue developing online courses, the question of just which course technology elements are most appropriate plagues me. In considering which technologies to use, I began considering the following factors:

1. Low Bandwidth Access
2. Simplicity of course design
3. Technical support
4. General tool usability
5. The necessity of using additional tools (external to Blackboard) in light of available tools in Blackboard.

   Addressing these issues is difficult because there is a tightrope of technology to navigate between usability, support, and accesss. While several technologies (You Tube, Podcasts) Score high in usability, they score low in access for different reasons. YouTube, for example, is impossible to access for dial-up users. This isn’t even a case of slow download speed for YouTube, but it actually appears the download never happens. In testing, video is simply impractical.  Similarly, Podcasts can provide dynamic and easily updated audio content, but without a fast connection, even audio files are limiting for students with slow connections. Is multimedia the only way to provide dynamic course content? Certainly there are alternatives, but this defeats the cost benefit of making content available from a central point without accruing production costs. This forces me to ponder what other kinds of software or technologies could provide dynamic content. If we still must consider access and bandwidth issues, then this makes collaborative tools much more appealing for dynamic course content.

   While blogs are quite robust in their ability to broadcast various media and allow fairly solid control features, wikis are much more collaborative. I am thinking about several possibilities for integration of these tools into Blackboard, while still maintaining security and accountability. For example, this blog, WordPress, allows the instructor to add or limit student access to page changes, posts, and moderation of the blog. In effect, many of the same features found in Wikis can be replicated in a well-designed blog page. Wikis, however, are inherently editable from the start, and are designed with that feature in mind. Of course, both technologies are essentially using the same functional model – primarily that of easily sharing ideas via web pages.

   Blogs such as WordPress, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, and Edublogs allow users to essentially journal their lives. For course content, these pages could be set to blog the life of English 101 for the duration of the class. In essence, it serves the same purpose of discussion boards, with a much more usable interface. There is an additional advantage of creating an English 101 community that can continue after the class is complete. For students completing online degrees, this could provide an excellent networking opportunity, just as traditional college students meet friends in classes and continue the relationship into the world of careers and post-college.

   Similar to blogs, wikis allow the users to edit page content and even create branches directly from wiki content to other content. Wikis use hypertext in a way that is slightly different from the web as a whole in that the links are internal. Students and faculty can effectively manage the hypertext links, and templates can be created in each course to manage the content and assign research elements for a course. For an example of this style, see http://wikiwrite.pbwiki.com .  Other styles can be applied to wikis that are more linear such as in http://idwiki.pbwiki.com which contains a database of categories that are edited by specified users.

Given that these tools can both easily incorporate audio and video content, one logical place to try making courses more dynamic might be blogs and wikis. This brings me to a consideration of the problems with implementing these tools. One consideration is the increase in complexity whenever tools are combined. While web pages can appear within the learning management system frame, the usability and reliability of control is diminished. Certainly, faculty and instructors would need to learn how to manage these tools and the instructional/course designers would also need to consider how best to avoid confusion that may result from going outside the Blackboard environment. There are also issues related to whether the tool has a reliable help page, whether the tool can be supported within the Blackboard environment, and instrutor buy-in.

In the context of my own design experience and the situation present here, it seems that the instructor or faculty member must drive the integration of new technologies. I believe it is prudent to help instructors understand the pedagogical/androgogical advantages to utilizing collaborative methods online. While collaborative methods such as blogs and wikis are not a direct substitute for multimedia content, the inclusion of these tools can make the course more dynamic and supportive of learning.