The Power of Open v. the Death-Grip of Closed: Tornado Alley at Janux

This week the start-of-semester rush has finally slowed down a bit, and I have some time to start posting here again. I wanted to follow up on something I posted at Google+ this morning to put it in more context, and also to ponder the power of OPEN before our chat this Friday as we get the #OpenTeachingOU / #OpenOK chats up and running again. Here's what I posted at Google+:

The power of OPEN... versus the death-grip of closed. My school is still listing Gary England's Tornado Alley as a top marketing priority as you can see here OU Integrated Marketing Group ... but when I went to log on at the very closed Janux course (open enrollment, but the content is all closed closed closed), you can see it is dead in the water. The last activity, such as it was, 9 months ago. If they had made this an open site that people could naturally discover using search engines and link to (you know... hyperlinks? HTML? the Internet? does anybody remember the Internet?), then it might have taken off: weather is of huge interest in Oklahoma and Gary England is a huge celebrity. But by choosing to lock this up behind the Janux/NextThought password-protected barrier, they have killed it. I wonder if anybody from the marketing team has logged on to the course in recent memory... Screenshot below is from me logging on just now. You can log on too; it's open enrollment after all. You just have to make an account, remember your password, blah blah blah blah blah: GaryEngland.ou.edu

So, that's what I posted at Google+ and here I'd like to contextualize that some more: this is a colossal lost opportunity for my school, and a salutary warning for other schools that are pouring millions of dollars along with other precious resources into closed LMS platforms.

So, let's start...

Visiting GaryEngland.ou.edu. When you arrive at the site, you are first prompted to "log in or create an account."

The account referred to there is a Janux/NextThought account. Janux is the OU-branded installation of NextThought, an Oklahoma-based LMS start-up in which we have invested millions of dollars (literally) over the past few years.

About Janux. And just what is Janux? Well, according to our marketing people: "Janux is the first of its kind in OpenCourseWare, combining multimedia-rich content with interactive social tools and a broader learning community to create an unparalleled learning environment" (source). I've written extensively at this blog and elsewhere about the gap between that hype and the reality. I'm not really sure what is up with the Open (OpenCourseWare) claim; the content at Janux is not "available for use and adaptation under an open license, such as certain Creative Commons licenses," although some of the videos are offered at YouTube; see below.

When it first debuted a couple of years ago, Janux was being promoted as our open learning platform; now, though, you don't hear much about the open courses anymore, which is no surprise, as the open courses seem to each fizzle into non-existence (the Beer course apparently being the one exception: it fizzes instead of fizzling, fueled as it is by a real community of brewers and fans of beer, although that course is not being offered right now).

Instead of supporting open courses, the Janux platform is now apparently being used primarily for our HistoryChannel course ($449 for credit, undercutting the History department's own offerings; $149 for fun), along with some new online degree programs. None of that is open or free.

Closed Content, Lost Opportunity. In that initial rush to have our very own Coursera/edX knock-off, plenty of courses were created, at enormous expense, and there they sit: locked up behind a password-protected barrier so that you cannot link to the content or gain access in any way, unless you create an account and log on. Take a look:

What on earth was could be the point of keeping all that content locked up so that it cannot be accessed by a search engine? Open platforms make it possible for people to discover and use educational content: search engines index the content, web addresses make it possible to link to the content. None of that is possible with Janux.

If you look at YouTube, where some Janux videos can be found, it's a completely different world: the videos are indexable, linkable, shareable. Here are Gary England's Tornado Alley videos at YouTube for example (embedding: pretty nifty, isn't it?):

So now I have to ask: what is the point of paying millions of dollars for an LMS if what we are providing is educational content that people are ultimately going to access via YouTube and not through the LMS at all? And why did anyone ever think it was a good idea to build an educational weather website inside this LMS when the goal was to reach as wide a public as possible?

Tornado Alley 2015. There was a big (BIG) marketing blitz when the Tornado Alley Janux site was launched in 2015. But how many of the people tweeting the self-congratulatory hype when the site launched actually logged on and participated at Janux? Almost nobody. There was far more talking about the course at Twitter than ever happened in the course itself.

To see what I mean, take a look at the Twitter stream for garyengland.ou.edu (see widget at bottom of this post for the latest tweets; use the link to see the ones from months ago). Then, compare those hundreds of tweets to the course activity itself: there are a grand total of 33 comments at the actual course:

Literally nothing is happening:

I'm not sure what the difference is between a forum and a discussion, but nothing ever happened in the forum either:

So, what have we got? Videos... in which case I'd far rather watch them at YouTube where I can save them and share them, and I don't have to log in if I don't want to.

Tornado Alley Redux: February 2016. Yet Tornado Alley is back again, showing up unexpectedly at Twitter and in the Marketing Group blog post which I read today. And since this is a marketing thing, I have to wonder what the marketing people really think about this. If they want people to actually participate in the "course" (what do we call this Janux thing exactly...?), they have a hard task ahead of them. Whatever was tried last time around clearly did not work. Are they going to do anything differently? Or will it just be another marketing blitz at Twitter and elsewhere, without anyone caring one way or the other whether people actually go to the Janux site...?

P.S. Statistics Meanwhile, since I'm logged on to Janux right now, I'll check on that open Statistics course that I enrolled in as a test this semester to see if it is still completely moribund as it was when I last checked. And yep, it's flatlining.

There is just that one Introduction post from the one other person who seems to have enrolled, and she has not posted anything ever again. Could this course thrive on the open Internet? My guess is that it could. In any case, it would certainly not be doing worse in the open than it is doing locked up inside this closed space...

And here is the beginning of the latest marketing blitz at Twitter:

Tweets about garyengland.ou.edu

Web Culture at OU, New and Old: A Cautionary Tale

Some of you may have seen the gorgeous new redesign of the OUCreate project which Adam Croom announced in a blog post here: Rolling out a new front page for 2016. You might also have read Jim Groom's follow-up, where he talks about how this represents "a sign that this could be a much broader shift in the academic web culture of the university." Here's Jim's post: OU Creating Again.

While I am a big booster of OUCreate, I am dismayed to think that the bigger picture of "academic web culture" at OU is not being taken into account here. One of the problems that OUCreate faces, in fact, is the big discontinuity between OUCreate and OU's previous efforts to support web publishing through our IT department at faculty-staff.ou.edu and students.ou.edu. Since students.ou.edu was shut down in December 2015, and since faculty-staff.ou.edu is scheduled to be shut down this summer, I thought I would say a few words here about my experience as a user of both of those services since back in 1999, and why I am much more cautious than Adam and Jim in my assessment of OU's support for web publishing by students, faculty, and staff.

And, yes, this is tl;dr ... which is one of the problems with the assessment of OU's web culture. It takes some time to work through the nitty-gritty of what we have at the moment and how we got here. But the nitty-gritty is important, and OU has a history of making bold claims without the follow-through that is essential in long-term projects like web publishing. I've been teaching students how to publish their creative work on the web since the Fall of 1999; in that time, I've probably taught 2000 students some basics of web literacy that they can use, if they want, to create a web presence for themselves in school and beyond. I'm in this for the long term, and in this post I'd like to sketch, from that long-term perspective, some of the history of web publishing for faculty, staff, and students at OU, along with some of the questions we need to be asking so that we can avoid making mistakes that have been made in the past.

Faculty-staff.ou.edu and Students.ou.edu. When I first came to OU in 1999 as a faculty member in the Classics department, I was glad to see that there were web publishing opportunities for faculty, staff, and students. The system had just been set up in 1998, and for its time, it was really excellent! We didn't have to request permission from anybody for anything; we just went to the IT account management page where also we set up an OU email alias, password, etc. You clicked a button, and an account was created for you based on your "dotted name" which is a unique identifier that OU still uses for default email. My dotted name is "Laura.K.Gibbs-1" (the number is for those rare instances when someone has the same first-initial-last name). Students.ou.edu was shut down in December, but you can take a look at this screenshot to see how it worked for faculty, their directories being listed on pages alphabetically in this view of the site:

You can tell how ancient the system is because it features the old OU logo (unkindly nicknamed "the toilet seat") which was phased out around the year 2002.

Yet at the time, this was spectacular: any faculty, staff, or student could turn on their webspace and start uploading files, publishing on the open Internet. I had students publishing webpage projects in their spaces using Netscape Composer in Fall 1999, and faculty were publishing with Netscape Composer or maybe Dreamweaver, the tools of the day back in 1999. Student webspace was limited (just 3MB if I remember correctly); faculty space was limited too, but you could request additional space. After I left the Classics department in 2001, I went to work for IT, evangelizing about faculty-staff.ou.edu and urging faculty to create and share teaching materials online. In 2002, I started teaching for the online course program in the College of Arts & Sciences, and my classes then, as now, focused on students sharing their work online.

Integration with search.ou.edu. One of the best things about this system was that it was automatically integrated with search.ou.edu; when you looked someone up in the official Search Directory, you saw the link to their webspace along with their name, office location, email address, etc. That integration still works; someone who searches for me at OU instantly finds my faculty-staff.ou.edu web address, which I have configured to redirect to the web space I actually use for my homepage now:

That was super; you could also enter a redirect directly through the account management page (no longer true, since web space management has disappeared without fanfare from the IT accounts page). What's going to happen when faculty-staff.ou.edu is taken down this summer? Are we going to be able to manually enter some kind of address for our web presence? Configurable profiles are something IT started promising the faculty back in 2001... I know, because I was one of the IT employees making that promise. Here we are in 2016, 15 long years later, and that basic element of web presence is still missing. OU will help you find someone's email address, sure. But their web presence? Nope. Presumably it's just not important.

Student profile links at search.ou.edu. So, students.ou.edu is gone. What does that mean for their web presence? Well, if you search for a student at search.ou.edu right now, you still see a link to their students.ou.edu account; click on the link and you get a splash page that says students.ou.edu is out of service.

Can a student update their profile to indicate their new web address? Hmmmm. I'm not sure. The IT Help pages online tell you where to go to activate your OUCreate space (it's not an IT project, so you go to the create.ou.edu space that Adam Croom and the Center for Teaching Excellence are maintaining). I couldn't find any information for students about how to now display your correct address in your profile. If OU students were relying on this system to help boost their web presence to, say, potential employers, the broken link and an OUCreate splash page is surely not going to help their job search.

Integration with enroll.ou.edu. We used to have a homegrown enrollment system, and it was fully integrated with faculty-staff.ou.edu. That was seriously cool: when students were searching through the online course catalog and enrolling in courses, there was a link displayed automatically for faculty who had activated their web space. If you wanted to share your syllabus with students so that they could know what they were actually enrolling in, you could do that! I always did that. It was great. That was the closest OU has ever come to a system that could support open syllabuses.

But when that homegrown system was replaced with a new SIS called Ozone (I think that was in 2009), that integration disappeared. Poof: all gone! OU Faculty are told to upload their syllabuses in the LMS... but those syllabuses are only visible after classes start and only to students who were already enrolled in the class. The ability of faculty to proactively share course information with students that we had in enroll.ou.edu was gone. Will it ever come back? It would be great it it did. I doubt very many people even remember that we used to have that integration back in the days before Ozone.

The end of faculty-staff.ou.edu. As mentioned above, students.ou.edu is now gone; see below for a bit of information about a previous plan (aborted) to shut down both students.ou.edu and faculty-staff.ou.edu back in 2010. Web hosting is a serious business, and to end a web hosting service requires enormous care. Yet faculty are still updating content on faculty-staff.ou.edu; I saw at least one faculty member still using it for the open content of his Spring 2016 course (a highly touted "Presidential Dream Course," in fact, one that was written up in our student newspaper just last week). But people with active accounts on faculty-staff.ou.edu have not received any specific information about the shutdown of the service in Summer 2016. The only reason I know about that is because Adam Croom included that information in an email he sent out to all faculty about OUCreate in the Fall; how many faculty simply missed that email? (We get a LOT of email.) No email, so far as I know, has gone out to people with content on faculty-staff.ou.edu; I have a redirect page there and some old files, so I would presumably receive such an email. Nada.

Indeed, if you go to faculty-staff.ou.edu right now, there is nothing about a coming shutdown. In fact, the site even urges you to go to account.ou.edu to set up your account:

But if you go to account.ou.edu there is no mention of web hosting of any kind at all (you can see the current logo there by the way):

I looked through the IT Help site to find out just what was planned regarding the summer shutdown, and the only information I found said that when students, faculty, or staff leave the university, their faculty-staff.ou.edu or students.ou.edu space is closed. It didn't even say that students.ou.edu was completely shut down down (as it is), and I didn't find any information about the coming shutdown of faculty-staff.ou.edu at all.

Help! I'm sure OU IT is eager to get out of the web hosting business... but helpful, detailed, timely communication with customers is crucial. Here we are with the final semester of faculty-staff.ou.edu already underway, yet there is apparently no way of finding out that the service is being shut down this summer, much less any way of knowing what to do about it. Will IT assist in the migration to OUCreate? Will there be redirects from the old directories to a new address we can designate? Will there be an address we can list in the search.ou.edu profile? So many questions. Answers: none. When I asked IT about this directly last August upon first hearing about the demise of faculty-staff.ou.edu, I received this reply: "We are formulating a specific plan and will communicate the details directly to all involved as we flesh them out. We do intend to allow some sort of forward / directory transfer or alias feature for faculty and staff, but until that is decided and we have the details, we will not be able to answer your specific question. We are working with CTE and will ensure that adequate communication is made. Please let us know if you need anything else." I guess they are still fleshing things out.

Optimistic... but cautious. So, while I am excited about the potential OUCreate has to offer, and while I am indeed recommending it to my students as one possible web publishing option, I am cautious. I have to be. It's not just about the poor management of faculty-staff.ou.edu and its coming demise; there are other reasons to be cautious. OU giveth, and OU taketh away. I've written up two appendices below that provide examples of OU's unsteady support for academic web presence; I could list more (just click on blogs.ou.edu for the aftermath of another defunct effort).

As I said above, I am in this for the long term. The single biggest mistake I've ever made in my online teaching was to have relied on students.ou.edu long after OU was willing to support it; that is a big part of my cautious attitude now. I hope that OUCreate really does represent a new era in commitment to student web publishing, as well as support for faculty and staff web publishing. I've been waiting for that a long time here at OU, and I'm still waiting — more optimistically than before, to be sure — before claiming we really do have a new academic web culture at OU.

~ ~ ~

APPENDIX 1. Portfolio.ou.edu. Back in 2010, IT made its first effort to shut down students.ou.edu and faculty-staff.ou.edu. For those of us who were relying on students.ou.edu at the time (as I was for all my classes), it was a disaster. OU IT set up a branded installation of Xythos named Portfolio.ou.edu, insisting that this was the web publishing alternative that was going to replace the student and faculty-staff web servers. It was clear to anyone actually publishing on the web that Xythos was an inadequate solution. Why? Xythos was built for file-sharing, not for publishing on the web. I tested it extensively and concluded it was not adequate for my students, and it was certainly not adequate for my web publishing. That was when I realized I could no longer rely on OU to support my students' work, and I began recommending third-party alternatives — Google Sites, Wix, Weebly, etc.,  free sites that the students themselves set up and maintain, keeping the content up or taking it down after the class was over. That is the practice I still follow, with the addition of OUCreate to that list of recommendations (which, while not free, is absolutely a bargain at $12/year).

And what about Portfolio.ou.edu? It is being shut down in June, but without any notice to users (at least no notice so far). I have files on the system that I put up for testing, and I have not received any information about the demise of the system. Shouldn't they have said something to users about shutting down our personal web space, as they claimed it was...? It was where we could "create personal web space," as the screenshot shows:

So, yes, if you go to the site, there is a note that the system is being shut down, and users are told to go to OU's Microsoft Office 365. Help transferring files? Support for redirects? Nothing about that. Too bad for anybody who trusted OU back in 2010 when they told us that Portfolio.ou.edu was the web publishing solution we should be using. I wonder if OU IT will ever get around to sending a note to users who put their trust in Portfolio.ou.edu.

APPENDIX 2. Janux.ou.edu. In a flurry of press releases and an ambitious marketing campaign, OU released Janux.ou.edu in Fall 2013 as a platform that would support courses for registered OU students as well as courses open to the general public: "OU [is] now offering courses taught by university professors to anyone around the world." Indeed, we had set a new record: "The 20 open courses offered by Janux sets the record as the highest number of classes offered in the first year by any other university. By comparison, the University of Texas system launched in the Fall of 2012 and so far has offered four courses." The webpage making these claims is still up; you can see it here: Janux Open Courses.

I have made it a point to enroll in an open Janux course every semester to see how they were going; without exception, the courses I enrolled in fizzled into non-activity. If you go to Janux.ou.edu to see what courses are available for Spring 2016, the first thing you see is the US History course that is for sale — in fact, it's on sale; $449 for credit (marked down from $500), $149 not for credit (marked down from $200). There are three open courses, a sharp decline from the "record-breaking" 20 courses of 2013.

It's not that our support for Janux has gone down; the OU Regents voted to spend $3 million dollars on a contract with NextThought, the company that provides our Janux platform (well, not quite 3 million: $2,800,000, following costs of $2,770,000 last year and $709,400 in the first year of operations; those numbers are from the September 2015 Regents Agenda). I have no idea what the overall budget for Janux is; the contract with NextThought is the only part that has been made public.

Just to keep up my past practice, I enrolled in the Janux Statistics course, which is one of the three courses being offered in Spring 2016 as an open course. As near as I can tell, nobody else is enrolled; there is, anyway, zero activity on the discussion board. Janux claims to be a social learning environment; that claim doesn't match the reality of those screenshots. I wonder if anybody at OU has even looked at the open course. Is there anybody else even enrolled in the open course...? Hard to tell.

Assignments? Baffling. There are two views; one with a list, and one with colored boxes; neither of them makes sense. Although I apparently have three quizzes and an exam "due today" (the class started last week):

I'll see what kind of notifications I get now that I've enrolled, and I will update this post accordingly. I did get an email when I enrolled, a generic email, the same as for all the Janux courses I've ever enrolled in: "You are about to embark on a one-of-a-kind learning experience through Janux. More importantly, you are joining a true learning community built to connect, engage, and inspire all who wish to learn." The marketing for the open Janux courses may have pretty much come to a halt, but the hype lives on.

~ ~ ~

In closing, I hope that OUCreate morphs into something more and more real with each passing year, a story of rising up rather than the story of decline-and-fall that has marked our previous web efforts. OUCreate is an excellent product, the kind of excellent product our students, faculty, and staff deserve. I'm even hoping that the faculty-staff.ou.edu transition could still work to OUCreate's benefit. Will faculty get the support and encouragement they need to transfer their content to domains through OUCreate? Or will they just abandon their web presence out of frustration? That's still really up in the air; perhaps this blog post will play some role in moving that process forward. I'll be sure to update with any information that gets sent to faculty-staff.ou.edu account holders in the months to come!

OU-HistoryChannel Inside Higher Ed article

There's an article about OU's History-Channel-branded online course in Inside Higher Ed today: Cable History by Colleen Flaherty. Here's how I happened to be quoted in the story:

October 2014: I wrote a long post about the OU-HistoryChannel course here at this blog, expressing my dismay about the course: Online Courses and Marketing Fluff: What is an immersive history course? Some people from OU contacted me to say they agreed with what I had said, but they also explained that they did not feel comfortable speaking out themselves. Not a good sign. I believe we need a wide-ranging discussion that brings in as many perspectives as possible as OU looks at its investments in online courses and online learning materials. The fact that people are afraid to speak out means we cannot have that discussion. I also had a great email back-and-forth with Mark Carnes of Reacting to the Past as a result, and that was really encouraging: I am always glad to spread the news about RTTP because it is one of the most exciting teaching innovations that I see on the horizon right now.

May 2015: Jennifer Ebbeler's blog post about her online Rome course at UT Austin, The Ruin of Rome, or Something Happened on the Way to the Forum, led to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, When Your Online Course Is Put Up for Adoption, which led to another blog post from Jennifer, Another Funny Thing Happened..... Meanwhile, Jonathan Rees, the most keen observer of the MOOC scene that I know of, wrote up these related posts: Cut the professor a check and walk away and “Would you mind telling me whose brain I did put in?” . So, Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed read Jonathan's blog, which led her to my blog, and she then contacted me to do a follow-up on the History-Channel-branded course. (I was curious about that, so I did indeed ask her if Jonathan's blog was the link in the chain, and it was.)

I had a long talk with Colleen on the phone, urging her to get in touch with Mark Morvant and John Stewart from our Center for Teaching Excellence and the related (I think) A&E/OU/History Institute, and also to contact Rob Reynolds who is a key person doing great work at NextThought, the developer of our (very expensive) MOOC platform, Janux. Rob is new this year at NextThought, and he is someone who really is trying to take NextThought in some exciting directions; if he succeeds, they would be able to lay claim to some real educational innovation. I was also hoping that Colleen would be able to persuade more faculty in the History department to offer their perspectives. As it turns out, it looks like she found one History faculty member who would speak on the record (Ben Keppel, one of OU's best, IMO), along with one faculty member who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

And that is what concerns me most here. I am sure many people at OU would have urged me not to have posted my thoughts in a blog post to begin with. In fact, they would probably urge me not to blog or use Google+ or Twitter or do anything public or even semi-public that could be taken as a criticism of the university. Obviously, I feel differently: I believe that we need as many voices as possible to participate in conversations about the university — students, faculty (both tenure-track and adjuncts like myself), staff, everybody. The future of higher education is really up for grabs right now, with no obvious right or wrong answers; every option has its advantages and disadvantages, and as we weigh all those options, well, the more knowledge and experience we can bring to bear, the better, in my opinion. Plus, OU is a public university, and I believe that the use of blogs and other public spaces is an important part of how we make ourselves accountable to the people of Oklahoma. As our school motto says: Civi et Rei Publicae.

Will we have a public discussion of the History Channel course and our other online course and online content development initiatives? I hope so! Meanwhile, I've commented at the Cable History article at IHE. I hope others will add their thoughts also.
Update: Sadly, no one else from OU commented at the story, so I guess there will be no public discussion. People surely have lots of question, ideas, opinions, fears, hopes, about this partnership and related projects, but they will not be coming together in a public dialogue. I see that as a lost opportunity; I hope there will be some other opportunity again sometime somewhere.
Update updated: Well, maybe there is hope! Audrey Watters included a note about this in her weekly round-up at Hack Education (thank you, Audrey!). Maybe some kind of conversation will take place at IHE after all. :-)

~ ~ ~

... Ouch, this is kind of depressing, but I guess not surprising. I was going to include an image of the university's beautiful seal which shows the University of Oklahoma emblem of the "sower" and that wonderful motto, but when I went to grab a good, clean copy of the image, I found out that the image is trademarked, and I probably am not allowed to use it here in this blog as my blog is far from being an "official University document." So I'll find a nice picture of the sower that is CC-licensed at Flickr instead. :-)

Photo by Majdan at Flickr; cropped.

Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Janux Next: A Strange Story of Closed and Open

Last Friday, faculty at my school (all faculty? just faculty on the Center for Teaching Excellence mailing list?) received an email which I've included as an image below, urging us to apply to put our courses inside Janux, a new learning management system in which the University of Oklahoma has invested millions of dollars (one million dollars last year to the company, NextThought, that is building the platform; two million dollars this year... and that is just the budget for NextThought software, so it does not include all the money being spent on actual course development). What was really strange was that these courses, which are being called "Janux Next," will not have an OU-version and open-enrollment version; instead, these will be for University of Oklahoma students only. So, the one thing that is open about Janux currently — open enrollment — will not even apply. These will be closed courses in a closed learning management system. Which is about as closed as you can get.

At the same time, it's pretty clear that the open side of Janux has not been a big success, press releases and student newspaper articles to the contrary. I participated in an open Janux course in Spring 2014, but I dropped out after a few weeks because of frustration with the software and lack of any sense of a learning community. When I dropped out of that course, there were three people participating (counting me). I decided to try a different course in Fall 2014, but I dropped out even more quickly; there was even less participation than in the class I had tried during the spring.

So, when the email came on Friday about Janux Next not having an open-enrollment side, it made me curious: is anything really happening at all on the open side of Janux? I just now checked in for all 9 courses currently being offered and, except for the beer course, it appears that nothing much at all is happening. Maybe people are watching the videos (I have no access to those statistics), but I see none of the social learning that Janux claims to promote. Even the beer course, which naturally connects with an existing real-world community, does not appear to have much participation on the open side. Yet the welcome emails to the courses proclaim that I will find true learning communities here: You are about to embark on a one-of-a-kind learning experience through Janux. More importantly, you are joining a true learning community built to connect, engage, and inspire all who wish to learn.

Now, the Janux software is a nightmare to navigate, but here is what I found when I looked in the discussion areas for the courses, seeing the last comment that anyone had posted. Comments are not dated, but Janux labels things by "X weeks ago" and "X months ago," and I looked for comments more recent than 3 months ago:

Sociology
1 month ago 2 comments total (2 people participating)

Law and Justice
3 weeks ago 5 comments total (4 people participating)
2 months ago 4 comments total (1 person participating)

Global Community
3 weeks ago 1 comment total (1 person participating)
2 months ago 8 comments total (4 people participating)

Human Physiology
3 weeks ago 1 comment total (1 person participating)
2 months ago 3 comments total (3 people participating)

Computer Programming
1 week ago 4 comments total (3 people participating)
2 months ago 2 comments total (2 people participating)

Gateway to College Learning
no comments more recent than 3 months ago

General Chemistry
no comments more recent than 3 months ago

Philosophy and Human Destiny
no comments more recent than 3 months ago

Chemistry of Beer
There are 8 open discussions, 6 of which have comments:
3 comments (2 weeks ago)
4 comments (3 weeks ago)
5 comments (4 weeks ago)
9 comments (1 month ago)
13 comments (1 month ago)
60 comments (1 month ago)

And here is a screenshot of a typical course discussion area. The Janux software automatically pops up the discussion board topics unit by unit, topic by topic, but no one is there to comment:

I find this all very depressing. I personally believe in open everything: open content, open learning, open outcomes, open it all up! If someone wants to justify a closed system with open enrollment because, they believe, a closed system is needed to build trust in a community... well, Janux apparently is not succeeding in that, as the low participation rate shows. I suspect there are many reasons contributing to the low participation in the open side of Janux. The main reason I would guess is the top-down, instructor-driven course design but low-to-no instructor presence. The software is also a serious problem. Problems like these would not be easy to fix now that the courses have been designed and the software has been built.

Is Janux succeeding better with paying students who are taking the courses for a grade? I am sure that it is, but because that side of Janux is completely fenced off, there is no way to see what the Janux software is like when people are actually using it in large numbers. So too with the new History-Channel-branded courses; those courses will have no open side at all ($500 for credit, $250 for badge only), so we will not get to see what is actually going on.

Are there going to be faculty who want to put their courses in Janux Next? Maybe there are. I am not one of them.

Instead, I'm sticking to the open Internet. I was always a believer in open courses, and the people I've met in Connected Courses and the great examples of their work that I have seen make me an even stronger believer in the pedagogical value of open. I sure wish we were spending millions of dollars on open courses at my school, instead of on Janux. Luckily, though, whatever the budgetary priorities of my school, I still have the freedom to teach my classes in the open, and that's what I will keep on doing!

~ ~ ~

Here is the email announcing Janux Next:

Online Courses and Marketing Fluff: What is an immersive history course?

So, we have a new online course program at my school, "the very first television network-branded online course for credit" as Variety magazine online proclaims. The first course is "United States, 1865 to the Present," and there will be more history courses to come. You can find out more at HistoryChannel.ou.edu. Here's the badge you can get (for $250), and three units of University of Oklahoma college credit are also available (for $500).

Update: Both options are now discounted.

In the big marketing push for this new online course, the hyperbole is naturally extreme. For example, at the HistoryChannel.ou.edu page we are told that the course is like no other, the first of its kind, taking online learning to the next level. In the press release, we are told that the course is unique, groundbreaking, singular, world-class, pioneering, and innovative. Update: A recent marketing email I received describes the course as "unforgettable," so that's another word to add to the fluff list.

The press release also claims that the course is "immersive," as you can see in this screenshot:

Update: You can also hear Professor Gillon claim that the course is "immersive" in this marketing video.

It's no doubt pointless to complain about all the marketing fluff words (unique, world-class, groundbreaking, etc.); that's just how the marketing game is played these days. But a word like "immersive" makes a specific claim about the course design that is both misleading and inappropriate, and it is that wrong use of the word "immersive" that I want to focus on here.

Although the course is closed, there is some sample content provided at the OU website, along with a syllabus. So, let's look at that sample content. Is this course immersive? No, it is not. This is simply a cookie-cutter video-driven course in which students watch videos, read the written materials that accompany the videos, and then participate in discussion boards, just like in online courses ten years ago. The syllabus confirms that the discussion boards are the core component of the class. Discussion board posts count for half of the grade, two short papers (3-5 pages) each count for one-sixth of the grade, and quizzes count for the remaining one-sixth. The discussion board posts will be graded with a rubric, as will the two short papers.

Because there is a discussion board, the marketing people describe the class as dynamic, interactive, engaging, etc. Presumably the course earns the title "rigorous" because of the two short papers. As for the rest of the hyperbole — pioneering, groundbreaking, singular, unique, like no other, etc. — it's just the usual marketing fluff. I'm not really even sure how effective that kind of fluff is anymore, but it certainly seems to be inevitable.

The real problem, though, is this use of the word "immersive." Just because something is online does not make it immersive, although that must be what the marketing people concluded, and no one saw fit to correct their error. What is really discouraging about turning "immersive" into just another marketing fluff word is that immersive learning in history is a very real and very exciting course design option. Consider, for example, Reacting to the Past, an immersive role-playing approach to teaching history that is now being used at over 300 colleges and universities. You can find out more at the Reacting to the Past website, and there is also a new book out by Mark Carnes — Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College — which provides an overview of Reacting to the Past and its great educational potential.

In 2013, I attended a Reacting to the Past regional workshop (for which I paid out of my own pocket — that's how excited I was to learn more about this approach to teaching history), and at that workshop I played the game about India: "Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945." Players are assigned roles before the game begins, and then they prepare by reading detailed background material about the topic as a whole, along with specific materials for their assigned role. Some roles are historical figures (e.g., Gandhi, Jinnah, Ambedkar), while other roles are generic (I was a member of the Indian National Congress). You stay in character for the duration of the game; some people also stayed in character outside of the game too — I guess you could call that extreme immersion! I had an excellent experience with the game, and if I were teaching history classes, I would definitely be using this Reacting to the Past model.

Unfortunately, despite the claim in the press release, there is nothing immersive about OU's first History-Channel-branded online course. It is just another video-driven, discussion-board-dominated online course like pretty much every other online course being offered by companies like Coursera and the many schools that have jumped on this video-driven online course bandwagon. Yes, I know the marketing people have to sell the course, so naturally they are going to use all the marketing fluff words that they can muster; that's inevitable. Still, I am sad to see that "immersive" is apparently now just another fluff word like "engaging" and "interactive." The kind of immersive history learning promoted by Reacting to the Past is one of the most exciting things I see on the educational landscape right now, something of substance in the midst of all the fluff. So, maybe ... just maybe ... the other courses that OU is planning to develop with the History Channel really will be immersive, going beyond the video-discussion model in order to take advantage of what Reacting to the Past and other innovative programs can offer. And what a great thing that would be!

Update: For a comment from a member of the OU History department, see the write-up in Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Update: There is now also an article in Inside Higher Ed. In that article, we learn that revenue for the course is being split 50-50 between OU and the History Channel. To my way of thinking, that seems really surprising: we certainly would not split revenues 50-50 with the company that provides the textbook for a class. But our relationship with History Channel is different from the relationship we might have with a textbook publisher: this is not just about content, but about branding — so presumably part of the reason why History Channel is able to make a claim for half of the revenue is that enrollment in the class will be driven by the marketing boost of the History Channel brand. Anyway, there is clearly much worth discussing; I added a couple of comments at the article's discussion space since we don't really have a discussion space of our own at OU. We offer online courses, yes, but not an online discussion space to talk about those courses!

Update... And I guess this will be the final update to this post. The course is no longer being offered, and it has been effectively erased from the web as if it never happened. What did we learn? And how much did we earn/spend? Well, I have no idea, since we're just pretending it never happened. Burn After Reading pretty much sums it up:

Thoughts on Web Space at My School

So, as I learned from Twitter and the blogs of folks like Audrey Watters et al., a Domain of One's Own is coming to my school. But apparently it is coming to my school in the top-down, by-invitation-only way that other technology initiatives have happened over the past couple of years. Not a word about this at the Academic Technology blog or the Center for Teaching Excellence blog. Nope, you will not find an announcement about the workshops that are apparently (???) happening right now on campus, and certainly not any kind of invitation to follow and/or participate in this, even though there are surely quite a few faculty on campus who would be curious about this important experiment which might, for the first time ever, provide serious support by my school for online content development by both faculty and students. No call for volunteers (and you know I would love to volunteer...), not even a listserv to subscribe to (email is still the main way information gets spread at my school). In fact, when I contacted the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence week before last (by email) to ask about blogging and other online community options for the coming year, not a word of this was mentioned in the reply. Nada. Thanks to the openness of Twitter and other people's blogs, though, I did at least get to hear about it!

So, on the one hand, I'm glad this is happening, but I'm also discouraged that it is not happening in a more open way... and I'm also not surprised. Last fall, the Janux learning management system (in which OU is apparently prepared to invest millions of dollars) came to light without any preliminary warning and, it seems, that very expensive learning management system has been built to serve the needs of just a couple dozen faculty members, without any shared opportunities for the rest of us struggling to find ways to make our online courses more social and interactive than is possible in the Desire2Learn course management system.

Something similar happened a few years ago, when a WordPress/Edublogs installation was finally set up at my school... but individual faculty were not even allowed to request accounts, much less students. No, that blogging system was set up to serve the needs of departments and other academic organizations. The sad results can be seen here: http://blogs.ou.edu. Without the momentum that could have been provided by students and faculty who are really excited about the online world and the use of blogs to build online presence, that blogging initiative went nowhere. Was anything gained by excluding students and faculty from the experiment? Just the opposite: I would argue that the failure to open up the system for all interested members of the campus community is what resulted in its now moribund state.

I teach fully online classes, with student content creation and sharing being the heart and soul of those classes. Since Desire2Learn is completely inadequate to that task, I've relied on external tools for many years to make it possible for students to share their work online.

I've used a variety of blogging and discussion tools, starting out with EZBoard  and then Bloglines (remember the Bloglines Plumber?), and then Ning and now, because of the demise of mini-Nings for educators, I'll be recommending that students use Blogger next year, although any blogging option they prefer will work. It's still pretty rare for me to meet students who have built up an online presence and thus have a blogging preference already, but it's great when that happens — one of the students last semester did his class project as a section in his existing WordPress blog, which was super!

For websites, I recommend that my student use Google Sites although, once again, if there is another system they want to use, that's great. For example, last year one of my students wanted to learn how to use Wix, and that worked out nicely! After a disaster in August 2010, when the IT folks at my school erased, without warning, hundreds of the websites that my students had published in their students.ou.edu webspace (that webspace, which I think is still 3MB per account, was set up for students in 1999), I started recommending Google Sites. I've been very happy with the results: Google Sites is easy to use, and the sites belong to the students, so they can choose to leave them up or not after the class is over. I am so grateful that almost all the students leave their sites up, realizing as they do that the archive of previous student projects is the single most important resource for each new class! You can see the archive of student projects built with Google Sites here at eStorybook Central. One of the fun tasks I have next week is going through the archives to check for any sites that have gone offline (there are usually not more than a handful), while also adding the new sites from the wonderful stuff people did in the Spring semester.

So, naturally, as someone with a long-term interest in student web publishing, I have followed Jim Groom and his colleagues for many years, watching the development of the Domain of One's Own project with great interest.

I'm also impressed with the use of Google Sites for student portfolios at Clemson University, where online portfolios are used in conjunction with all the General Education classes.

The big question: what will happen now on my campus? Is Domain of One's Own going to go the way of OU Edublogs (dying out because it was not widely available to all faculty and students) or of OU Janux (by-invitation-only to a select few) ... or will it finally provide the catalyst for truly open, truly participatory web culture at OU...?

I await the results with great curiosity.

Meanwhile, since I've still got online classes to teach starting in just a few weeks, I'll be working on my Blogger and Google Sites support materials... because I cannot afford for the university to catch up to what my students and I have been doing since back in 2002: creating and publishing content online every single week of the semester, starting in Week One.

Which means....... SOON.

And thank you, Google, for making that possible!

My Janux Project and Pinterest

Although I am so frustrated with the Janux software, I am really excited about the new project it has sparked for me: Latin sundial mottoes. Since this is a project that has a strong visual element - the beautiful sundials themselves! - in addition to the text, Pinterest is a logical channel for me to use in sharing my project, along with my usual blog posts. So, I wanted to write up here how I am using Pinterest exactly:

1. I have a private board where I am bookmarking higgledy-piggledy the sundials that I might want to use. This is actually better than bookmarking in Diigo because I need the VISUAL cue provided by the image as I go back through what I have bookmarked and select the item I want to work on. I am keeping the board private because I am bookmarking CC-licensed images as well as images that are not CC-licensed; eventually I may decide to contact the copyright owners of those non-CC-licensed images to see if they will give me permission to use their images in a blog post. So far, though, I have plenty of CC-licensed material to work with.

2. I then created a public board for Latin sundials, and as I add new blog posts, I also pin them to the board. Here is what I have so far: Latin Sundials at Pinterest.

3. I also learned how to create widgets for individual pins! That is something new for me. You can see those in the sidebar of my Janux History of Science blog, and I've pinned one here below as an example. My plan for the blog is to have two pins in the sidebar from my two most recent blog posts. So, as I add a new post, I'll move the top pin down in the sidebar and add the new pin up top. It takes just a moment to do; you just go to a pin, click on Share, choose Your Website, and then grab the embed code. You only need the actual js script once on a page; after that, you can just grab the data line. Very impressive: I love widgets!

I am really glad I learned how to do this. It's a great use of javascript, and I think my students will really enjoy being able to integrate a Pinterest board into a blog post or into their blog sidebar. See also earlier post where I learned how to do widgets for an entire Pinterest board; it's a little bit more complicated than doing a pin widget, but not by much.

Adventures (and Misadventures) with Janux

Unexpectedly, it looks like a good portion of my free time this semester will be taken up with a really terrible digital tool, Janux, the new (and VERY expensive!) MOOC software platform that my school has built. There is a course I really really REALLY want to take, but the terrible software is making me regret my decision to commit to the course. But I am committed, and I will see it through. I'll post an update once a week here about how the tool is working ... or, rather, not working. This will definitely cut back on my Digital Tools postings, but I will make sure to post about Janux as a kind of round-up of my latest (mis)adventures.

Of course I created a blog to get started, since I have to have a blog for any project I am doing. How would I keep track of things without a blog?
JANUX History of Science

I am posting in there regularly, so I created labels to organize my stuff:

ASSIGNMENTS: These are my actual class assignments, and I am reposting them in the dismally CLOSED Janux system... when the system allows me to post, that is. (See troubleshooting diary below.)

VIDEO NOTES: I am recording my notes for the course videos in my blog. I would never trust my notes to this buggy software platform (as it wants me to do), nor do I see any value at all at keeping my notes private. So, I'm posting them in my blog. I just wish I could embed the videos that go with them. It may be possible to do that, but I am doubtful. Waiting to find out.

EMAIL: Since the instructor of the course is a fantastic communicator with many years of online teaching experience (he and I started out teaching online at the same time!), I am recording my thoughts about his emails here since I know I will get some good ideas for communicating with my own students. His emails are the best by far from any instructor of any MOOC I have taken.

SUNDIALS: I've already started a new project thanks to this course - Latin sundial inscriptions! Although I'll be blogging about that at my long-term Bestiaria Latina blog, I'll crosspost here too. It's good to have a class-related project to work on when I give up on Janux in frustration. Which leads me to the final label...

DIARY: This is where I am posting documentation about my frustrations with the system, software troubleshooting, etc. It is just depressing, but by including screenshots and other details, I hope I can make it useful for the Janux developers. So far, every one of my Janux sessions has ended up abruptly in complete frustration, not what I would expect from a platform for which there is an annual budget of almost a million dollars and which was supposedly tested with actual courses last fall. Sigh.

So, I'll have more to say in future weekly round-ups here, but it was useful to spell out my plan. Plus, I will be learning some more things about using Blogger here which should help me get some good ideas for how I can encourage my students to start using Blogger next fall in my classes. There is a lot of overlap between what I am doing for Kerry's course and what my own students do, and no surprise: Kerry and I first built our courses together, and we had so much good back-and-forth as we did that! My whole approach to revision and the project calendar, for example, all comes from Kerry's insights then.

My absolute #1 goal is to get them to open up the video content for the course so that it can be shared and embedded elsewhere; right now, only the promo video is at YouTube. You can get a sense from just this video of how fabulous Kerry is and what a great course he has created.

I am pretty sure he would want to share the videos as widely as possible given all that he has done to make the History of Science Collections available to all — just look at this OU History of Science Collections Flickr stream for example! Wow! That's the kind of sharing I would to see for the videos too. Fingers crossed... maybe I will have good news about that next week.