On the Sustainability of Open Source Projects: Lessons Learnt from Cyberdam

Pieter van der Hijden, 17th December 2009 @ 14:52

Presentation at Online Educa Berlin – 3 december 2009

oeb09-pieter-van-der-hijden-fig11

Pieter van der Hijden MSc (pvdh@sofos.nl); Stichting RechtenOnline (Foundation LawOnline) (www.rechtenonline.nl) & Sofos Consultancy (www.sofos.nl), The Netherlands

1 Cyberdam

Cyberdam is a Virtual Learning Environment for online role playing games in the context of a 2D virtual city. It is owned by Stichting RechtenOnline (Foundation LawOnline, The Netherlands) and is available as a free and open source package. Initially aiming at law schools, Cyberdam developed into a product for education and training in many higher education programmes.

Cyberdam offers its participants authentic learning situations consisting of roles, a given case or problem, instructions and directions, and a virtual city with background information. The participants play different roles and try to bring the problem to an acceptable solution. This all takes place via the Internet.

oeb09-pieter-van-der-hijden-fig2

At the moment, the Cyberdam Software comes with 20+ ready-made games (English and Dutch), various virtual cities and English and Dutch system languages. Teachers can start and facilitate game sessions based on ready-made games, adapt the games to their wishes or create new games from scratch.

This presentation describes the development of the current Cyberdam open source product and the lessons learnt from it. It describes the Cyberdam story in four stages: creation, survival, growing up and independence.

2 Stage-1: Creation

The Cyberdam story starts in 2003 as twinning project Sieberdam/ROCS, a combination of an interactive city map (Sieberdam) and a role playing game engine (ROCS). Since 2007 the name Cyberdam is used for the whole. The original projects were funded by a programme of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs that aimed at introducing ICT in Dutch law schools where it was almost absent at that time.

2.1 Nice wishes

From the beginning the initiators have chosen for free and open source solutions, both for principle and for practical reasons. The principle reason was that you should not commercialise products paid from public money. Another one was that open source software should be of high quality as community driven development implied a better alignment with user needs. The latter reason was also a practical one. The initiators expected the open source community to pick-up their concepts and ideas on gaming/simulation and to start creating and/or updating the necessary software without being paid. Another practical reason was that an open source product could be integrated more easily with other (open source) systems.

As a platform, the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) was chosen. It was used by well-known universities in various countries, had an active users community and a flexible internal structure.

2.2 Hard reality

Unfortunately, the nice wishes did not become reality:

  • The OpenACS community was not really interested. Apparently the concept was too narrow-focused, but also too vague to attract much interest.
  • As nobody started programming voluntarily, nor offered any help for free, programmers had to be hired. As OpenACS expertise was almost non-existent in The Netherlands, they had to be hired from abroad.
  • The foreign programmers saw their market value and could agree excessive rates. When the budget was gone and the system almost finished they had other priorities. As system documentation they delivered 200 pages of chat log with their clients and almost nothing more.
  • It took extra money to find a programmer from even further away to debug the system and to keep it running for a couple of years.

To conclude, Cyberdam at that time had a strong idealistic view where a realistic view would have been more adequate.

3 Stage-2: Survival

From 2005 government funding was over. The newly established Stichting RechtenOnline (Foundation Law Online) became the owner of Cyberdam. With a very limited budget it tried to keep the system alive, i.e. have it hosted, get support from an OpenACS programmer when necessary and organise help for users. It further tried to attract new interested parties to use the system.

3.1 Free lunches

Apart from some incidental lecturers of law courses, the interest for Cyberdam mainly came from larger projects, not specifically bound to law faculties. There were three in total. All preferred the hosting solution as offered by the owner and all were willing to pay, albeit from three different perspectives, instrumental, exploiting and cooperative:

  • Instrumental - One project paid for the hosting and nothing more. It used the product intensively, had ideas on how to develop it further, but did not want to invest any money in improvements.
  • Exploiting - A second project went even further. It paid for the hosting and nothing more and expected to make money by re-selling the original documentation that was free until then.
  • Cooperative - The third project paid for the hosting and, as far as its budget allowed, for immediate software improvements. It considered Cyberdam as a valuable tool that could play an important role in their education for years.

3.2 No momentum

The first two projects considered Cyberdam as an almost free lunch. The third project had a far-reaching view on gaming/simulation in education and the potential of Cyberdam. Although on its own, that project could not generate enough momentum to let Cyberdam grow; at least it helped to keep it alive, both as a technical artefact and as a promising educational concept.

Summarised, Cyberdam was product oriented, instead of market oriented. It accommodated projects that passed, while it could better have searched for itself for promising projects.

4 Stage-3: Growing up

The Cyberdam story accelerates in 2007 when Dutch government hold a competition on developing serious games for higher education. The Foundation formed an ad hoc consortium with some higher education institutes, an educational publisher and a commercial game developer. This consortium won one of the prices which resulted in a new project that lasted until November 1st 2009.

4.1 Scaling up

The new project aimed at scaling up Cyberdam in three directions: software, content and organization.

  • Software - the Cyberdam software was migrated from OpenACS to Java, obsolete functions were removed, many new ones added.
  • Content - more than 20 new games were developed, used in educational practice and evaluated.
  • Organization - a sustainable organization was created (see below).

4.2 Cooling down

Amongst the project partners, the educational publisher had the lead in developing the new and sustainable organization to support Cyberdam, keep it alive and let it flourish. They felt handicapped, however, by the free and open source character of the product. They could not imagine a business model that was interesting enough for them. When the firm became part of a merger operation, it decided to leave the project.
A broker in game enterprises showed up, willing to commercialise Cyberdam. They forecasted and expected huge profits, not at least for themselves. As their orientation was quite different from all other partners, it never came to an official partnership.

The new partner was found in a firm dedicated to content development and hosting services for educational institutes and corporate HRM departments. Even they have their doubts about the sustainability of the new organization. Nevertheless they stayed on board, offer hosting and helpdesk services and help the other partners think about the near future.

In short, partners who expect millions of dollars in return of a modest contribution should be avoided. Passion for learning should be their nature.

5 Stage-4: Independence

Since November 1st 2009, Cyberdam reached a new stage in its development: (financial) independence. It now has to generate its own income to cover its costs. Instead of the earlier consortium a new system of public and private partners has been put in place.

5.1 Server

The Stichting RechtenOnline (Foundation Law Online) is still the owner of the Cyberdam Software and the licensee (for free) of the games developed so far. It delivers the following services to its clients:

  • to distribute the free and open source Cyberdam software and documentation,
  • to maintain the Cyberdam software (e.g. by minor modifications and bug fixing),
  • to innovate the Cyberdam software (e.g. by adding new functions).

The distribution costs are marginal; the maintenance costs are about EUR 5,000 p.a., the innovation costs heavily depend on the actual Road Map for software improvement (see below).

To cover its costs for maintenance, the Foundation makes both a production environment (server) and a helpdesk available and charges institutes for using them. The additional costs for this server are about EUR 10,000 p.a. Institutes will have to pay an annual fee (EUR 500 by course or EUR 2000 by programme or EUR 5000 by institute) to use this production server and help desk. The only risk is that they may find it cheaper to run a server themselves or via a third party. As the Foundation is planning to provide value added services to its clients, like seminars and workshops, the risk may be neglected.

To cover its innovation costs the Foundation engages in new and innovative projects based on Cyberdam but funded by external parties.

5.2 Clients

Newly established is the Cyberdam User Group, an association for individuals (teachers, HRM staff) interested in the development of Cyberdam and its games and/or their application. It stimulates mutual exchange of experiences and works on a shared vision, a road map, for future software development. It will advise the Board of the Foundation. All together it offers more body to the community of users than an interactive web site alone.

The Foundation is willing to transfer Cyberdam to the Cyberdam User Group in due course.

Given the past, Cyberdam is now more mature, but still very modest. Given the richness of the product and the interest in the market, it is time for a more assertive course.

6 Conclusion

We presented our search for an adequate and sustainable business model. The Cyberdam organization grew up from naive expectations about open source communities programming for free, escaped from being “kidnapped” by a commercial publisher, learnt from experiences of other open source projects and ultimately found its own way.

  • During the creation stage, Cyberdam had a strong idealistic view where a realistic view would have been more adequate.
  • During the survival stage, Cyberdam was product oriented, instead of market oriented. It accommodated projects that passed, while it could better have searched for itself for promising projects.
  • During the growing-up stage, Cyberdam met partners who expected millions of dollars in return of a modest contribution. They should be avoided. Passion for learning should be their nature.
  • And finally, during the independence stage, although more mature, the Cyberdam organization is still very modest. Given the richness of the product and the interest in the market, it is time for a more assertive course.

Acknowledgements

The Stichting RechtenOnline (Foundation Law Online) is the owner of Cyberdam. The official name of the 2007-2009 project was Learning in a Virtual World (project leader Diny Peters, technical project manager Pieter van der Hijden). It was sponsored by the Dutch Government programme M&ICT (Social Sectors & ICT).
References

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OLPC (One-Laptop-Per-Child) in Suriname

Pieter van der Hijden, 24th December 2008 @ 12:55

The Republic of Suriname is a third world country situated at the North coast of South America. During my consultancies over there, I tested the potential of the One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) concept. At a meeting of the OLPC-Netherlands grassroot organisation in The Netherlands (Utrecht, 13 December 2008), I presented my findings. Here is my summary in English.

Suriname

suriname_map

Source: Wikipedia on Suriname Dutch English

The Republic of Suriname is a third world country situated at the North coast of South America. Guyana (West), Brasil (South) and French Guyana (East) are its neighbours. To the North it borders the Atlantic Ocean.

Suriname counts 500,000 inhabitants, about 25% aged under 15. About 70% live in the capital city of Paramaribo or its immediate surroundings, 20% in the rest of the 40 km wide coastal area and 10% in the interior. The interior is almost completely covered with tropical rain forest.

Education

The state of the education is ready for big improvements. At this moment, about 7% of the population (mostly women) did not receive any education at all. Another 13% did not finish primary education, another 20% did, but stopped at that level. About 4% received higher education. In general, drop-outs are numerous as are repeaters. In the city the children have much more educational chances than on the countrysite, not to mention in the interior.

The current educational system consists of a preprimary (2 years) a prrimary school (6 years) and a variety of secondary education options at junior level (4 years), followed by senior level and tertiary education. The government is exetuting a Basic Education Improvement Project (BEIP) to replace preprimary, primary and junior secondary by an integrated system of 11 years.

OLPC

Since three years I’m visiting Suriname regularly. As a consultant (Sofos Consultancy) in organisation & ICT’s, I have been involved in various e-learning projects and governments assignments. Interested in the One-Laptop-Per-Child project (OLPC), I bought two XO-laptops via Ebay and took them with me to Suriname. Only showing them to the Ministry, at educational institutes and to whoever crosses my path generates  a stream of positive reactions. I also lent them to my 12 nephews and nieces there. I could experience therefore what children do with their laptops at home. I resume my findings as a small SWOT-analysis.

Strengths

The XO-laptop as the One-Laptop-Per-Child laptop officially is called, is a good looking, solid, low energy device. Once unpacked, it works. It has more than ten standard applications (now called activities) on board and as many more that only have to be activated/installed. Most activities have cooperative functions that allow children to invite their peers to work together and/or exchange information.

The fact that I did not bring any manuals, nor translated the English software into Dutch was no problem at all. The standard software offered something for everybody from 2-14 years old. The laptops also raised the interest of the parents of the children. It could be a big incentive if every child had a laptop of their own.

Weaknesses

There are some weaknesses to face as well. Children who have worked with modern PC’s will find the XO relatively slow and might miss the enormous amount of software as it is available for the Windows platform. The user interface, called Sugar, is innovative and child friendly, but can be clumsy sometimes. The standard software assumes personal ownerships of the laptop, which is not always a realistic option. Sooner or later the absence of localised software and teacher manuals will be hindering.

Opportunities

In Suriname many grassroot organisations are active in the field of education and/or ICTs. They could form an interesting breeding ground for OLPC projects. Traditionally also many NGOs are active in the country.

A USA-based supplier of a big telecom provider is willing to donate 200 XO-computers. A service club in Paramaribo wants to raise money for such a project. Further, the Ministry of Education and Community Development (MINOV) is modernising basic education, while another Ministry is promoting the use of ICTs in all industries. In the near future an Expertise Centre on Education and ICTs will be established (ECOIS).

Threats

Threats for succesfull OLPC implementations are:

  • Many grassroot initiatives evaporate rather quickly.
  • In general these projects (and their sponsors) are mainly interested in creating something new and have difficulties in trying to make that sustainable.
  • As there is a wide variety of initiatives, the attention of sponsors, volunteers and public easily can go to other nice projects.

Ultimately, OLPC does not offer a systematic concept for the improvement of learning. This implies that although reinventing learning could imply the application of ICTs, it is not self-evident that the optimal solution would be OLPC.

Conclusion

My conclusion so far is that it makes sense to walk around, talk and demonstrate with my XO-laptops in Suriname. It creates awareness on education innovation and the potential of ICTs.

As a community we should develop teaching concepts based on OLPC, develop a model for OLPC grassroot projects, and localise the software and corresponding documents. Even more challenging could be to organise a debate on educational innovation and the role of ICTs, to develop implementation strategies from there and to find out where OLPC might be a fruitful solution.

Appendix: useful hyperlinks


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Online Educa Berlin 2008: Presentation “How to implement an e-learning system; the Moodle example”; part 2: Top-down

Pieter van der Hijden, 23rd December 2008 @ 07:58

<< Part 1: Bottom-up

4.  Turning point

Only the complexity of our matrix illustrates that the bottom-up approach has its shortcomings. It is simply too much for an individual to cover this all. Sooner or later, a turning point is reached. For positive or negative reasons management gets involved. A positive reason might be that thanks to pilots and experiments and the dissemination of their results, management starts to develop a vision on educational innovation and more specifically a vision on the potential of a certain e-learning system. A negative reason might be that students start complaining about malfunctioning systems, loosing assignments, grading failing to occur, teachers not responding anymore, and in general being confused by the patchwork of online solutions invented by different teachers. Time for management to take their position, indicate the desired development trajectory, and align procedures and allocate budgets to accomplish that.

5.  Top-down

When implementing an e-learning system in a top-down way, the critical success factors are the sustained commitment of management and the involvement of stakeholders like teachers and students in the process. Expertise in the fields of education, technology and management is required. The average educational institute will not have their rules, regulations, standards and procedures for this type of operations. As far as methods and tools can be found in literature, they are either too fragmented (e.g. only dealing with ICT) or too abstract (e.g. introducing too many new concepts that have no meaning for the stakeholders).

The implementation process cannot be handled as a regular management task. It requires a project organisation with educational, technological and organisational expertise and representatives of the most relevant stakeholders. For this group we developed a dedicated management game, Tactec.

6.  Tactec

The management game Tactec initially was developed to explore the complex process of implementing electronic commerce. In its essence, however, it is a frame game that can be loaded with a different content. We use it as an exercise by which groups can develop a global implementation plan for an e-learning system, not a fictitious one, but their own. The game or exercise takes half a day and consists of the following steps:

  • Stakeholder inventory - During a Tactec session the participants first generate a long list of stakeholders involved in the process. Once they come to about 25 stakeholders, they are asked to reduce this number to the seven most significant ones. This usually results in a very interesting discussion where a common base of concepts is created and people agree on what is important or not. We focus further on the seven stakeholders.
  • Role allocation - The participants will be allocated to seven different roles. Each role takes care of one of the stakeholders. They have to guarantee that the stakeholders’ perspective is recognised. Note that they are not “playing” the stakeholder.
  • Current situation - Each role summarises the current situation from its stakeholder’s perspective. This results in seven short descriptions (a few keywords is enough). The group will review them for completeness and consistency. Results are written on coloured stickers and sticked to the game board (a large poster).
  • Desired situation - The previous step is repeated for the desired situation; i.e. the desired outcome of the implementation process from the perspective of the stakeholder.
  • Scenario - Next, the roles will formulate a plausible way to go from the current situation to the desired situation in a sequence of about four activities. This will result in seven scenarios sticked to the game board (see Figure 2). Again the group will review them for internal horizontal consistency.
  • Cross-check - Finally, the group will cross-check the whole for consistency and completeness. Maybe activities on one line have to be postponed until certain activities on another line have been completed, i.e. vertical consistency.

08pvdh-oeb-extended-abstract-fig2

Figure 2 - Impression of a TacTec game board

7.  Conclusion

There is nothing wrong with the bottom-up approach. It is a fact of life that in many organisations innovation starts this way. If it is too early to move to a top-down approach management would be wise to foster the bottom-up approach while trying to avoid its pitfalls: tolerate and even stimulate experiments, encourage the exchange of experiences throughout your organisation, offer support and knowledge from an organisational, educational and technical point of view, but let them not convert into business processes.

The main pitfall of the top-down approach is that vision and commitment of management are limited to the first concrete steps. It leaves the organisation confused about what is next. Once again it turns out that participation of the stakeholders is a critical success factor in an implementation process.

8.  More information

  • Moodle is a free and open source e-learning system that combines an authoring environment with a Learning Management System and a Virtual Learning Environment. For more information:
  • Moodle international community at http://moodle.org
  • Using Moodle; teaching with the popular open source course management system; 2nd edition; Jason Cole and Helen Foster; O’Reilly Community Press, 2007
  • Moodle Administration; an administrator’s guide to configuring, securing, customizing, and extending Moodle; Alex Büchner; PACKT Publishing, 2008.
  • The TacTec Game; The Tactics of Electronic Commerce; Pieter van der Hijden; in: Proceedings of the ISAGA 2000 Conference; International Simulation and Gaming Association, Tartu, Estonia, 2001; http://www.sofos.nl/LinkedDocuments/00pvdh_tactec.pdf.
  • Ned-Moove (www.ned-moove.nl) stands for Nederlandstalige Moodle Vereniging, the Dutch Moodle Association with members and activities in The Netherlands, Belgium/Flandres and Suriname (South America).

9.  Acknowledgements

The System Management Matrix is a “spin-off” of UNESCO’s Caribbean Universities Project for Integrated Distance Education (CUPIDE), funded through the Japanese Funds in Trust for Capacity Building (www.cupide.org).

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Online Educa Berlin 2008: Presentation “How to implement an e-learning system; the Moodle example”; part 1: Bottom-Up

Pieter van der Hijden, 22nd December 2008 @ 09:43

1.  Kick-off

From dozens of e-learning consulting assignments of which about ten had to do with implementations of Virtual Learning Environments in educational institutes, the author derived two fundamentally different approaches for implementing e-learning systems: bottom-up initiatives by teachers and top-down initiatives by management, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Educational innovation with information technology often starts as a bottom-up process initiated by some teachers, ICT professionals or even students. At some moment, institutional management gets involved. Innovation converts from a bottom-up into a top-down process orchestrated by management. When observing the implementation of e-learning systems we see the same patterns.

As a consequence, how to implement an e-learning system heavily depends on the stage of educational innovation at an institute: bottom-up or top-down. Both situations require their own approach and both will be dealt with during our presentation. Although our experiences are based on Moodle implementations, our lessons learned may be relevant for other e-learning systems as well.

2.  Bottom-up

Although educational institutes vary greatly, individual teachers always have certain degrees of freedom. Even when formal procedures have to be followed for implementing new systems, they can be neglected when the investment costs are (or at least seem to be) about zero. This is the case when implementing a free and open source Virtual Learning Environment like Moodle. But even in the case of commercial systems, suppliers may be so eager to penetrate an institute for business that they are inclined to offer their services for free (for a limited time) to whoever lets them in.

When I was lecturing at a university of professional education without Virtual Learning Environment, one of my students constructed a website to distribute my materials. As I found it a bit messy, I replaced it with my own site, one year later. The third year, I wanted more interaction on my site. That’s why I downloaded Moodle for free. I uploaded it to a website I hired personally from a cheap provider. Then, I could facilitate my part-time students not only by distributing handouts and other materials, but also by offering them a forum for regulated contact with me, and, as they discovered soon, with their fellow-students. To stimulate their continuous learning, I gave them weekly assignments to be submitted and graded through the system. This all worked great (initially).

My personal history is not different from the experiences of many colleagues at other institutes and even at Human Resource Departments of commercial firms. The fact that systems like Moodle are free, that a provider is cheap (eventually you pay it yourself) and that installation on a server is straightforward, has given us the opportunity to acquire and implement a Virtual Learning Environment within hours. As your own system administrator, you could realise great benefits at minimal costs and create a great learning opportunity (at least for yourself).

When my provider, without prior notice, decided to move my VLE to another server, performance went down with about 90%. When I went temporarily to a third world country where Internet bandwidth was less than 1% of what I used in The Netherlands, I could hardly access my own VLE at home any more. Grading my weekly assignments was no longer possible. Students started complaining to the management and it became clear I had bitten off more than I could chew.

My personal experiences show in a nutshell the strengths and weaknesses of the bottom-up approach. Realising quick and cheap solutions and being able to learn a lot from them are unmistakably strengths. Crossing the border of an experimental playground and offering professional services while not being able to run them adequately are evident weaknesses. In fact implementing a Virtual Learning Environment requires expertise in the fields of management, education/training and ICTs. A motivated teacher can show the way, but not complete the whole expedition alone.

The same is true for an ambitious ICT department, also often an initiator of bottom-up innovation. In one case they installed the software and created more-or-less empty courses for all their institute’s courses. The whole was standardised and good looking. They failed, however, to involve the teaching staff in this process. When some teachers got interested, they were not very welcome, as they had their own ideas on how to use the system. In another case, the ICT department installed the software on their own initiative and thought that was all they needed to do. After a year they complained that teaching staff was not interested in their new stuff.

In general we would recommend to the bottom-up initiators to be aware of their limitations, to learn from others and to communicate about their successes and failures. Their managers should welcome these innovative initiatives, stress their experimental character, support them where possible and organise the dissemination of positive and/or negative experiences throughout the organisation.

3.  The matrix

In four different countries we could organise workshops for teachers, ICT professionals and management/staff from institutes that all were in their bottom-up stage of innovation. During these workshops our participants contributed a wide range of issues that had to be solved when implementing a Virtual Learning Environment. They classified these issues as educational, technical or content/data related. Some were operational in nature, others tactical or even strategical. This resulted in a 3×3 System Management Matrix (see Figure below).

At later occasions the matrix turned out to be a valuable frame of reference to discuss relevant issues from management, educational and technological perspective. It helped to give all upcoming issues a place in a greater context, to discuss the allocation of responsibilities, to evaluate them and to make improvement plans and define improvement projects for the coming years.

Part 2: Top-down >>

System Management Matrix
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SURF explores the future of higher education

Pieter van der Hijden, 19th December 2008 @ 12:05

At its annual conference “onderwijsdagen” (11-12 November 2008, Utrecht), SURF presented four scenario’s for digital learning in 2020.

SURF, the foundation of higher education institutes in The Netherlands on ICTs and innovation, surprised the visitors of its annual conference this year by omitting the casual opening key note speaker. Instead, at the entrance of the theatre, four Newspapers where distributed, while inside a talk show took place. The themes of the Newspapers were Airport, Department Store, (Stock) Exchange and Super Market. During the talk show these themes were introduced by a video clip and a couple of guests each. In fact the overall theme was the future of higher education, while the Airport, Department Store, Stock Exchange and Super Market represented the four scenario’s of the future of higher education SURF developed during the last year. Ultimately, the audience could vote which of the four scenario’s they preferred.

The talk show and the newspapers made clear that there is no well-defined future for higher education, but at least a whole range of possible futures. The fact that we all got four voting cards stimulated active listening. Which of the four scenario’s was most appealing for me, and why? However, I felt more and more uncomfortable with the scenarios. I realised that I did not like them all. For me, they all had an ego-centred and technical undertone. I can imagine that such values might dominate one of the scenario’s, but I cannot imagine that they have to be present in whatever future scenario of higher education. Time was over, I had to vote one out of the four scenario’s and nothing else. I tried to find out what the real differences between the scenarios were, the underlying assumptions or scales. The talk show did not make that clear. Finally, I took the Super Market, as it sounded most streetwise for me. I guess more people found it difficult to vote. The outcomes did not show a very clear “decision” anyway.

It was clear that SURF did not develop these scenarios during a brainstorm session one week before the conference. Recently, they published a report describing the 11 month project with about 300 people involved that resulted in the scenario’s. Of course, I browsed it to find the grid that defined the four scenarios.

First of all, it turned out that the study was not on the future of higher education, but on the future of the digital learning (and working) environments of students (and staff). The dimensions to define the scenario’s were: the curriculum (Institute driven versus Student/user driven) and the digital learning environment (Institute driven versus Student/user driven). The following table shows how the four scenario’s fit within this frame.

 

 

Institute driven digital learning environment

 

User driven digital learning environment

 

Institute driven curriculum

 

Airport

Department Store

User driven curriculum

 

Super Market

(Stock) Exchange

What for me was not clear during the conference, but became obvious through the report, is that the topic was not really the future of higher education, but options for educational delivery technology. Of course, it helps to distinguish a variety of models then. They exist already today, they will exist tomorrow and we could study which conditions could make one model more preferent than another. Personally, I would have reserved the scenario methodology for other types of problems. Nevertheless, it was great that SURF experimented this way and tries to innovate its conference as well. At least, I’m curious already about the next one.

Interesting links (all in Dutch unfortunately):

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Minister announces completion of Suriname Educational Network (SON)

Pieter van der Hijden, 18th December 2008 @ 09:35

At the 40th Anniversary of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname, Minister Wolf of Education announced the full implementation of the Suriname Educational Network.

At a special ceremony celebrating the 40th Dies Natalis of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname (AdeKUS) on November 1st, Minister E. Wolf of Education and Community Development stressed the importance of ICTs in Education. He noticed the fact that in recent years the university realised a “fit for the future” technical infrastructure on its premises. In the near future it should become the base for a national school network, the Suriname Educational Network (SON). This network not only offers the techical infrastructure, but also the platform for cooperation between educational institutes in order to realise a knowledge society.

As part of the Caribbean Universities Project for Integrated Distance Education (CUPIDE), AdeKUS cooperated with four other regional universities. One of CUPIDE’s outcomes is the implementation of the AdeKUS Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), i.e. Moodle, that can be accessed through the Internet from all over the world. Lecturers have been trained to use this system and to make their courses less dependent of time and place. In fact, it does not matter where teachers, supervisors, and students are. Even the interior can be reached once modern ICT solutions are in place. Via the VLE they always can communicate and have access to their resources.

ICTs pave the way for modern distance education. It will enable Suriname Bachelor students to go for a foreign Master’s degree without having to leave the country for some years. On the contrary, it enables AdeKUS to offer some of its courses completely online, also to students abroad.

The completion of the Suriname Education Network (SON) by extending it to the national level should no longer wait. It even is a prerequisite to let Suriname fully participate in other international initiatives like CARIBnet, the ICT infrastructure of the Caribbean Knowledge and Learning Network (CKLN).

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Expertise Centre for Education & ICT’s in Suriname

Pieter van der Hijden, 17th December 2008 @ 07:26

The Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development SLO and the Suriname Institute for Teacher Training IOL started cooperation to improve Suriname’s education by the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Sofos Consultancy will support them. UTSN is the sponsor.

The Multi-Annual Development Plan 2006-2011 of the Government of Suriname states that its educational system needs further improvement in qualitative and quantitative sense. The numbers of dropouts and repeaters should decrease, especially in the interior. Teaching methods may be modernised, accessibility can be improved.

SLO and IOL have as shared vision that that ICTs could improve Suriname education considerably. It could become more attractive and motivating for the pupils. It can apply new didactics. It enables new ways of course delivery (distance edication). Together. SLO and IOL want to set-up and run a centre of expertise for education & ICTs in Suriname. It aims at supporting the field organisations, implementing new programmes and advising policy makers.

In the coming months Wim de Boer of SLO and Ton Wolf of IOL will study the feasibility of the proposed expertise centre. Pieter van der Hijden of Sofos Consultancy, active in e-learning both in Suriname and The Netherlands, will support them.  Through various conferences in Suriname they want to meet the fields and share their thoughts with as many stakeholders as possible. In March 2009 they will present their outcomes. The Dutch Suriname Twinning Agency UTSN sponsors their efforts.

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