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We're going to be heading to the University of Greenwich in July for their 2009 conference Making it personal.
At Sussex University the data in Skillclouds comes from our Oracle database.
We cannot really expect everyone else to have the same database, tables or data. The data we display in Skillclouds at Sussex is personal and sensitive.
For this reason the Skillclouds open source version is not really a stand-alone system. It is a template for a webpage within an already existing (probably) internal and password protected web site. It's also not platform specific to a Framework, CMS or ILE like Moodle.
Skillclouds does provide you with data structure diagrams, UML, interactive Javascript, PHP classes, adaptable CSS and front end XHTML web pages to add the data you want to. SkillClouds also provides you with some dummy data, so when you unzip SkillClouds it all just works out the box as if you were a logged in as student at Sussex! Alongside the the code documentation, code layout and variable naming this 'out of the box' approach got the best response from our testing with developers.
The initial code we tested with some developers included PHP's PDO which allows you to connect many a database, and have a layer of abstraction.
Sounds great ? Well almost.
When testing the open source version of the Skillclouds code with developers and we came across some issues with this.
The first problem came when a developer we were testing with had a database PDO didn't support. Just our luck we thought.
The second set of problems came when we found some institutions didn't have the information Skillclouds was asking for in any database! They then had to edit more code than if the PDO layer had not been there.
Another developer described how they write queries for fetching things from their institutions database every day, and so knows how to do this like the back of their hand. Skillclouds having this layer of PDO was more of an obstacle then an advantage to them. They found it quicker to plug in their own code, then plug in the PDO layer.
It is a common problem for open source code that isn't platform dependent.
The outcome is we left the open source Skillclouds code as open as possible for the moment. The PDO layer might come back in the next stage, but for the moment the overwhelming developer feedback was to leave it out.
We can recommend the information you should provide in your own Skillclouds installation, but we are not going to tie you to it.
We are interested to hear from other projects having similar issues, other developers opinions on this and we are still looking for developers to test the next stage of development with. Just press the Contact us link above and say hello.
On most of the projects I work on we spend a great deal of time looking at user experience and making the end user enjoy a site. Sometimes an equal amount of time is put into the back-end design with an enjoyable cms interface. Very rarely is the developer who has to set up the project considered in any user testing.
When programming code for the open source community it is a completely different approach. Whether contributing a plugin to wordpress or a library to jquery you're putting the code out there to your fellow developers for peer review, and they become your primary stakeholders/target audience.
After showing out SkillClouds code to a number of developers at the recent JISC dev8d developer happiness days we took the opportunity to extend our user centred design approach to the users who have to install, configure and implement SkillClouds in other Universities.
We started off asking developers about the SkillClouds documentation/readme file - the structure, the style of writing, how much detail they like and generally how ours could be better. Lots of very obvious things came up you might not think of when your head is so far into the code - just the same as during front end user testing.
At the next stage we started looking at code, and got some very nice comments from all the testers about the structure, variable names and general semantic nature of the code.
There were some conflicting views on data structure, with the general view being that to integrate SkillClouds into another University's systems it would take a developer, as compared to a systems administrator. Automated database installation was not seen as a good idea, but an abstract data layer was seen as helpful. There were also conflicting views on complexity vs object oriented abstraction, and how these might increase project set-up time.
Our approach of providing 'dummy data' so as SkillClouds runs straight out the box was given a thumbs up with, apart from a permissions problem, all users having a working demo almost straight after unzipping.
We are now refining the SkillClouds code based on the developer feedback - a big thanks to all involved!
Members of IT Services took a poster from the SkillClouds team up to Liverpool for the UCISA 2009 conference poster session:
http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/2009/conference/posters.aspx
Our poster and abstract are available for view on the publications site:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=ucisa2009
A key indicator of the success of JISC projects (from JISC’s perspective) seems to be the extent to which the outputs are adopted, by both the home institution and external organisations. In terms of the former, we can claim some success, as Sussex - and specifically, its Teaching and Learning Committee - has taken the view that SkillClouds can help support some of the University’s strategic priorities.
The University is particularly interested in using SkillClouds to support student personal development and the role academic advising (personal tutoring). For the remainder of the academic year we will be meeting all departments at Sussex to explore how they can use to tool in their differing contexts. We have secured additional funding to carry out further development and integration of the SkillClouds.
In terms of the possibility of SkillClouds forming over other parts of the country, we have had some interest from other universities and are currently liaising with them. Stuart (the project’s technical developer) has created the first version of an open source version of SkillCloud pages. People can add their in-house style sheet and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution.
Feedback on this version has so far been positive and has been described by one member of the Emerge team as ‘beautiful code’. Now, as a non-developer, I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I imagine there can be no higher praise from one of your peers.
Finally we are in discussion people working at a university in Australia who think SkillClouds could be useful to their institution.
You can read more about the open source version at the SkillClouds blog http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/skillclouds-open-source-its-alive.html
Today we finally made public the first edition of our Open Source version of the SkillClouds pages. Previously the development has been within the Sussex University MLE - Sussex Direct - but the latest versions are all non-platform specific.
We first took the open source demo to the Jisc emerge U&I strand meeting in York as our 'project artefact' and showed it to other members of our Jisc strand, from which we got some very nice feedback. While creating the artefact we thought it was important the developers could just unzip the file, add their 'in house' style sheet, and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution.
During the recent Jisc Dev8d event we were able to show the front end, and code, to some other Jisc developers and get feedback on how they would like to see it develop from a coder's perspective. It's just as important to do your usability testing with the developers who have to implement a system, as the front end users. With this in mind, over the next few weeks we will be user testing our open source code with a few other developers in the Jisc community. If you're interested in taking part email us at skillclouds@sussex.ac.uk !
Want to take a look ?
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/demo
Bonus fun stuff :
Click on the link - Special - Change the style sheet, and you can add your own style sheet!
Liverpool University worked so well, we added it to the defaults in the drop down menu. If you find any interesting ones, email us or leave a comment and we will add them to the default list.
It's official - SkillClouds are presenting at the Hertfordshire University Blended Learning Conference 2009.
For this presentation, we are going to be looking at the 'hidden curriculum' of skill outcomes and the way that this could potentially perpetuate inequalities.
We have found that some students are concerned about appearing to be 'arrogant' or 'boastful' when they are put into a position where they need to talk about the skills they have developed and practiced at University.
We'll explore how the use of SkillClouds can help students to feel more confident about articulating their skills.
For more details, see the SkillClouds web site:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=blu2009
As we work on our final report on the SkillClouds project, we have been reflecting on the way that the direction of the project has changed as we have responded to the new understandings that have emerged from our research.
The change in direction has been most marked around a key part of our original idea for the project, which foregrounded the use of the social bookmarking service delicious as a way of collecting institutional metadata on skills. Our idea was that we could view a course/module as an object which could be tagged with the skills that it would help students to acquire. We were particularly interested in exploring the potential clashes between an institutional taxonomy and a user generated folksonomy, and in seeing whether using a tool like delicious made the collection of skill data more acceptable to staff.
Initially, the staff we spoke to about this seemed keen (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/user_engagement.php for a summary of activities carried out prior to bidding).
However, as we progressed further with the project, this approach began to seem less useful.
First of all, we had technical issues with the use of delicious. The delicious tagging model does not permit spaces in tags, whereas our stakeholders wanted skills to be expressed as naturally as possible ("data analysis and interpretation" rather than "data-analysis-and-interpretation"). We also had problems using the API for search as it was doing greedy matching - see http://stuartlamour.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/delicious-bug for a fuller description of these issues.
Even more significant were our findings about students' requirements. As our research progressed we gained a much deeper understanding of their information needs (for a description of this research, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php and our presentation at ALTC2008 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=altc2008). In our original plan of SkillClouds we had paid relatively little attention to the resources that would be made available to students who clicked on a skill-tag within our proposed tag cloud. We had described this in our original bid as:
The individual skill tags could then link the student into pages from the institutional student intranet, for example showing all the courses taken in which this skill was identified and enabling the student to drill down to view their course performance pages. Alternatively, skills tags could link to pages provided by careers specialists to support students in the development of their CVs.
However, by the end of our research phase, we had amassed rich data about where students really were in terms of understanding skills. We found that their information needs were much more basic than we had suspected and that they found the language of skills very alien. We therefore realised that a key to the project was going to be the provision of high quality data on each skill to empower students to use the language of skills themselves.
Whilst social bookmarking tools such as delicious would enable staff to tag university modules with relevant skills, they provide little support for the authoring and management of information that would help students to understand what was meant by a given skill and to see how they might be able to demonstrate this skill to employers.
A further reason for the reduced emphasis on the use of delicious for data collection was that of the work-flow for staff around the development of new modules/courses. Staff are expected to fill in a document using Microsoft Word, and even if they were using a tool such as delicious to collect the skills meta-data, the rest of the process for defining a new course would require them to use another system in addition to delicious. It was not feasible to build it into a work flow for general use.
We also discovered much more about the difficulties that academic staff face when they try to define the skills that their courses may help students to develop. When we tried to stimulate their interest in using SkillClouds to help them define skills for their courses, they told us that "What we like about SkillClouds is that you are doing it for us, so we don't have to!". There was little enthusiasm evident in the staff members that we spoke to in using SkillClouds tools to define skills. Staff were almost always excited by the possibilities of SkillClouds and how they could use it to work with their students, but not interested in being part of the data capture process. Staff who tried out the use of delicious to tag courses found it acceptable, but we realised that it was unlikely to be something we could roll out across the institution.
