Challenges in the Reuse of Learning Materials: Technical Lessons from the Delivery of an Online GIS MSc Module

Abstract

Programme delivery through consortia of institutions, each contributing different areas of expertise, is seen as one solution to the teaching challenges posed by increasing subject specialization within academic departments. For the institutions within such consortia, this may mean that specialist modules will be delivered to multiple streams of students from different institutions, backgrounds, and possibly even countries. This paper draws on experiences in delivering a specialist online GIS MSc module to distance learners studying at three different US and UK institutions. It describes technical lessons learnt from delivering the same learning materials to different groups of students, from both a GIS and an educational perspective.

Keywords:

• E-learning
• GIS
• reuse
• learning object

Introduction

In several subject areas, multiple institutions in different countries have begun to collaborate in developing and delivering their curricula. In medicine, for example, some 50 medical schools collaborated through the IVIMEDS project to develop an international, virtual medical school (Harden & Hart, 2002; Harden, 2005). Within geography, there have been calls for such internationalization (Reeve et al., 2000; Shepherd et al., 2000; Solem et al., 2006) and the UNIGIS programme has delivered such international teaching collaboration (Buckley & Donert, 2004). Such international collaborations have several potential advantages. With higher education institutions increasingly specializing in narrow research areas, such collaboration enables institutions to offer modules outside their specialisms. It also provides an international perspective on teaching, which is particularly relevant where the students themselves are drawn from many countries. In the context of GIS education, this model permits consortia to offer a range of specialist GIS application modules beyond that likely to be available from any single institution.

This paper describes our experiences and lessons learned in delivering an MSc module to students from three different institutions. There are several dimensions to the reuse of course materials in such an international setting, related to the organizational issues associated with programme management, differences in learner cultures and levels, and the technical issues in implementing such collaborative teaching. This paper focuses on the technical issues in reuse of materials. It is not our intention to suggest that physical content provides the most important component of learning, and indeed the resources described here include numerous activities and prompts for interaction among students and between students and tutor. Similarly, the collaborations described here have taken place within the context of a network of collaboration agreements between the participating institutions, aspects of which are addressed in a related paper (Martin & Treves, 2007).

In the sections that follow we provide the background to the module delivery and then describe the development and delivery of the course materials. After that we discuss the GIS-related lessons emerging from our experience, and then describe the more generic lessons also relevant to online course delivery in other subject areas before drawing together some conclusions.

Background

The Universities of Leeds and Southampton in the UK, working together as part of the Worldwide University Network (WUN: http://www.wun.ac.uk) were successful in obtaining funding in 2003 from the UK eUniversities (UKeU) to develop a new wholly online GIS master's programme with application-oriented pathways, including GIS for health. The UKeU model required students from multiple institutions to be taught together using the same online materials via a common VLE, through which participating universities uploaded learning content and interacted with students. Following the demise of UKeU, which has been described elsewhere (Fernandez Young et al., 2006), the participating universities took on the programme as a collaborative venture (http://www.gislearn.org/). Collaborations within WUN led to a further agreement to share a Southampton-authored optional module ‘GIS for Analysis of Health’ with the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) World Campus GIS programme (http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/). This programme is currently delivered exclusively online to distance learners, although some modules within the programme have subsequently been made available as options to students on a face-to-face Southampton MSc programme in Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis.

This arrangement has meant that the Southampton-authored ‘GIS for Analysis of Health’ module has been delivered simultaneously to up to three different streams of MSc students from three different universities:

•	PSU students enrolled in the World Campus GIS programme;
•	University of Leeds students enrolled with Leeds in the joint Leeds–Southampton online GIS master's programme;
•	University of Southampton students, including both those studying online and at distance through the joint programme with Leeds and those studying in a face-to-face master's programme.

Although the number of students taking each module delivery is small, a total of 57 students have now taken the module and valuable experience has been gained in the design and delivery of online course materials for reuse.

Implementation

Materials Development

Although we did not anticipate delivering the module to multiple streams of students initially, materials for the module were developed from the outset with reuse in mind. In writing our courses we have used learning objects, broadly following the model favoured by the UKeU, but using a definition more in line with IEEE:

Any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used and referenced during technology-supported learning. (IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee, 2006, p.1)

As originally designed, the module in question was intended to be worth 15 credits at the Universities of Southampton and Leeds or 150 hours of student learning. (In the UK system a full master's degree is worth 180 credits.) As shown in Figure 1, the module was divided into eight broad units, each of which contained multiple learning objects—discrete, self-contained blocks of learning material. Cross-referencing from one learning object to another was explicitly prohibited, so that learning objects could subsequently be recombined with maximum flexibility. The exceptions to this were the ‘sacrificial learning objects’ designed to introduce each unit. Following an approach taken elsewhere (Fernandez Young et al., 2006), these did refer to the content of the subsequent objects and were thus designed from the outset to be non-reusable.

Figure 1 Structure of the ‘GIS for Analysis of Health’ module, showing its design for subsequent reuse

The content of each learning object was intentionally very graphical in nature (Treves & Martin, 2009), to take advantage of the likely learning styles of students studying GIS, which has an inherently visual content. Each learning object's content was documented via metadata, held in a custom-designed relational database. This database also documented the planned course deliveries to each student stream and the associated packaging of the individual learning objects for each of these streams.

Each learning object underwent several authoring stages, managed through a shared workspace in the Moodle VLE, which we treated as a versioning management system. It was written, reviewed by a GIS specialist, reviewed again by a learning technologist and then revised by the original author. This allowed parts of the content to be reviewed, whilst other parts were still waiting to be written.

GIS Content

The target student group was anticipated to be international in nature, and so the practical content included health data sets from areas such as the UK, US, France, Eastern Europe and southern Africa. This made the repurposing of the original materials to US-based students more straightforward. However, one learning object, which made use of UK census data, had to be dropped from the US delivery of the module because of licensing restrictions on the UK academic purchase of census data (Martin et al., 2009).

Initially, the three programmes used different GIS software packages. PSU students used ArcView, whilst Leeds and Southampton students used Idrisi. This meant that new instances of all learning objects involving practical exercises had to be created for delivery to PSU students. Furthermore, the different GIS software packages had different functionality. Thus, Idrisi contained a DISPERSE function for modelling atmospheric dispersion of pollutants. This function had no direct equivalent in ArcView, meaning that the content of some practical work had to be changed in line with the software available to each student stream. Conversely, a wider range of options for detecting disease clusters was available in ArcView relative to Idrisi, thus broadening the range of practical work that could be undertaken. Over time, all three institutions have standardized their teaching using ArcGIS and practical assignments have been rewritten, largely without the requirement for consequent changes to the more conceptual learning content.

Strategy for Delivery

Delivering these course materials was potentially challenging, because each institution used a separate Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The University of Southampton uses BlackBoard (http://www.blackboard.com) as its institutional VLE, PSU uses Angel (http://angellearning.com/) and the University of Leeds initially used the Bodington VLE (http://bodington.org/). The original solution adopted was to package the content independently of the VLE using the content packaging tool ReLoad (Mohan, 2004). As the use of ReLoad proved somewhat time-consuming, this process was subsequently automated by generating a list of learning objects for each module from a database. This text output is then customized to produce a web page index with links to the relevant learning objects that constitute each instance of a module. Under both the original and revised packaging system, the output was published as a native webpage and accessed via a link from within each VLE.

Rather than requiring students to register for a different VLE, the course tutor was granted guest access to each of the three institutional VLEs. Figure 2 illustrates this structure whereby delivery-specific indexes of the learning objects contained within a module (Module 1) are constructed independently of the learning object library, for access by students within the different institutional VLEs (A, B and C). No duplication of actual objects takes place, since objects are accessed via a unique index of their locations. There is extensive commonality between the indices for different deliveries of the module, but they may refer to different GIS software or application examples, or to different deliveries of the same course, reflecting updated content (i), (ii) etc. As with the GIS software, there has now been some convergence of institutional VLEs, with Leeds deciding in 2007 to adopt BlackBoard.

Figure 2 Generic structure of learning object (LO) library, learning object indices and instances within different virtual learning environments (VLEs)

Submission and Feedback on Assessed Work

Whilst the summative assessment remained unchanged for each student stream, the arrangements for submission of work and subsequent feedback by the tutor presented a challenge. Students in each stream were accustomed to different methods of submitting and receiving feedback on assessed work. At PSU, for example, e-portfolios were used for the majority of module deliveries described here (Avraamidou & Zembal-Saul, 2002). At Leeds, students typically submitted work by email or through the institutional VLE and received feedback by email. At Southampton, face-to-face students were accustomed to physically submitting work in paper format, whilst online students had previously had experience of the Leeds system from earlier modules in their programme. As a result, different strategies were adopted for submitting and providing feedback on work with each stream of students. PSU students continued to submit their work in the form of web pages, which formed part of a broader e-portfolio, developed throughout their programme of study. Feedback was provided to these students by email. University of Southampton students submitted their work via the institutional VLE, BlackBoard, and received feedback through the VLE via uploaded pdf copies of their work, annotated with comments. University of Leeds students submitted their work either through the Bodington VLE or via email and received feedback by email.

GIS-related Lessons

Several lessons emerge from our experience in delivering the ‘GIS for Analysis of Health’ module to multiple student streams that concern its GIS-related content. First, some application-orientated GIS courses need to be modified to suit the local context. For example, whilst the content of the ‘GIS for Analysis of Health’ module, concerning techniques for investigating patterns of health and disease, can be translated fairly readily from a UK to an international context, the content of another module developed more recently as part of the same programme, ‘GIS for Healthcare Management’, presents different challenges. In this case there are major structural differences between national healthcare systems including essentially welfare-based models (such as the UK National Health Service), essentially insurance-based models (such as the US) and many nationally specific variants (World Health Organization, 2000). Nevertheless, writing this course with an awareness of possible international use led the course team to draw on a range of international case studies and to devise assignments which encourage students to apply conceptual material to their own national settings. Discussion fora offer the opportunity for students to interact and compare experiences of different systems in practice.

GIS education programmes necessarily contain a significant element of computer practical work. In delivering learning materials to multiple student streams, differences in the GIS software adopted by the different programmes can be a significant obstacle. Aside from the time-consuming redesign of practical materials (e.g. from ArcView to Idrisi), GIS packages have different functionality and this affects the nature of the practical work that can be undertaken with a given software package as discussed earlier, although, in our experience, institutional convergence has served to reduce the difficulties associated with this. The learning object model has proved remarkably resilient to the replacement of practical activities and data without comprehensive reconstruction of course materials.

In planning course materials for delivery to multiple student streams, there is a need to select case study data sets that are internationally transferable from the outset. Aside from the relevance of different data sets in an international context, there is also an international dimension to data access and we have endeavoured to avoid the use of data sources which are restricted by licence terms to use or redistribution within a single country, preferring students to retrieve and analyse locally relevant data or data from internationally accessible sources.

Generic Lessons

Module Design Using Learning Objects

There are also some more generic lessons that emerge which are relevant to other subject areas. Although we had initially planned to deliver the materials to a single stream of students, our materials were designed for reuse from the very start. In this approach, learning materials were divided into discrete learning objects, whose content was catalogued via metadata in a custom-built database. When opportunities to deliver the course to other student streams did materialize, we were thus able to re-purpose our materials relatively quickly.

Learning objects have been criticized for their definitional vagueness (Friesen, 2004; Churchill, 2007), excessive concentration on the technical (Boyle & Cook, 2001), and insensitivity towards the context in which learning takes place (Koper, 2003). However, in this setting, we have found them to have several advantages.

•	Forcing authors to define a prospective course in terms of learning objects works well at preventing scope creep. Courses that are less rigorously defined may expand beyond their original scope during authoring.
•	GIS software and theory is a rapidly developing field and using learning objects also enables materials to be updated easily, since it avoids duplication of content.
•	As mentioned previously, separating content into learning objects helps with the workflow of reviewing a course.

In common with some other groups (Laverde et al., 2007), we have encountered relatively few problems with the learning object approach. There is an initial investment of time needed to learn how to write them. They also tend to break up the narrative of a course. It is obviously useful to be able to reflect on earlier objects at points within a course. Although we have denied ourselves the facility to do this within the individual learning objects, the use of ‘sacrificial’ (i.e. non-reusable) learning objects, VLE announcements, discussions, assignments and email commentary from the course tutor have worked well to preserve progression through each delivery of the module, highlighting cross-cutting themes and issues.

Our approach to using learning objects differs from the more sophisticated approaches to object management that fully comply with international standards (e.g. Downes, 2001). Such approaches are intended to facilitate learning object reuse across institutions. However, Strijker (2004) suggests that most reuse is likely to be intra-institutional. We concur with this view and believe that, given the advanced level of our materials, their extensive internal reuse (as has, in fact, been the case) is more important than external reuse. We reason that learning to use object management software and entering detailed metadata entails a large time overhead. By using simple metadata and a simple database we have reduced the time taken to develop our objects but have still recorded sufficient metadata for our own reuse of the objects.

Delivery

The ‘GIS for Analysis of Health’ module has now been delivered eight times to PSU students; three times to Southampton face-to-face students; and three times to Leeds/Southampton online students. A total of 57 students have now taken the module. The module was well received by all student streams. Forty-two PSU students completed the module, evaluating the overall module quality as 85 per cent when converted from a Likert scale. Similarly, 15 students studying at Southampton (both at distance and face-to-face) and Leeds rated the overall module quality as 90 per cent.

The packaging of learning objects outside the different institutional VLEs enabled materials to be rapidly prepared for delivery to different student streams. The fact that students remained within their native VLE meant that they were working with an environment with which they were already familiar. We were able to embed our assessment strategy into each VLE in a manner sensitive to the needs of different student streams. Thus, PSU students submitted work as e-portfolios, whilst students from the Leeds and Southampton streams submitted work either by email or through their VLE. There were, however, several disadvantages to this approach. First, whilst using the three different institutional VLEs to deliver course materials reduced the workload of the students, it increased the complexity of the tutoring task. Second, in simultaneous deliveries of the course materials, opportunities for student–student learning between streams were reduced because each stream was unable to access the VLE and associated discussion forums used by other streams. Whilst the tutor can copy relevant postings from one stream and make them available in other VLEs to the other student streams, much of the opportunity for interaction is lost. However, this did make the process of using different GIS software packages with the different streams more straightforward. This is analogous to running separate practical classes for a large student group, but with the disadvantage that practical lessons need to be explained more than once. The use of different VLEs for different student streams may merit further research. Leung et al. (2009) identify three modes of exchange of e-learning materials: ‘content exchanges’ whereby materials are simply passed from one institution to another and reused; ‘people exchanges’ whereby students or tutors move between learning environments, as described here, and ‘access management exchanges’ whereby students from one institution can authenticate against a collaborating institution's VLE and gain access to specific online courses. With increasing convergence between VLEs we see considerable merit in this latter course, whereby Federated Access Management systems would allow students from multiple institutions to take part in the same course delivery, hosted by one tutor and able to engage with the same learning content and interaction, including student–student communications. This is an avenue of active research between our collaborating institutions.

Finally, the use of content that is packaged and held outside the VLE means that any tracking for individual learning objects is lost and the potential functionality of some VLEs is therefore reduced. Since the packaged learning materials are published on the Web, access to them is unrestricted and this may be an important consideration in different contexts. An alternative approach adopted by some authors (Qu & Nejdl, 2002; Gonzalez-Barbone & Anido-Rifon, 2008) has been to publish content as a SCORM package and import it into each VLE. However, we found this to be technically more demanding and it would also have made content editing during course delivery more cumbersome.

In summary, we think it is more student focused to move the tutor to the students' VLE rather than force the students to deal with an unfamiliar VLE. The time required to set this up was minimal and it has caused little technical difficulty.

Conclusions

We have successfully taken materials from an MSc module designed for delivery to one stream of students and reused them with two new streams of students. We have focused here on the technical aspects of this reuse of our materials. From a technical standpoint, we believe that there were two main factors behind the successful delivery of the module to different student streams. First, the fact that the learning materials were designed with reuse in mind from the outset made it easier to repurpose our materials. For example, learning objects that were inappropriate for a given stream could be dropped, without having to revise other sections of the course materials. Second, each stream of students continued to use their separate institutional VLE and in effect the tutor was ‘exported’ to a different VLE rather than the students. Although there were some disadvantages to this approach, overall it meant that materials could be repurposed quite rapidly.

The teaching of the three student streams described here is ongoing, and it is possible that such internationally collaborative teaching arrangements will become more common in the future. There is active interest within the WUN consortium for extending this approach to other modules and courses.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of their Worldwide Universities Network colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, particularly Dr David DiBiase, Beth Bailey and Annie Luck, whose support and enthusiasm enabled the teaching collaboration described here to take place. Similarly, they wish to acknowledge the contribution of Dr Linda See at University of Leeds for the same reasons. This work was funded in part by the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom project DialogPLUS (http://www.dialogplus.soton.ac.uk/).