Yale classes are already streamed around the world in high definition through the University’s revolutionary Open Yale Courses initiative. This program allows students to watch lectures and access certain class resources from anywhere at any time, but not for course credit. The idea that Yale credit cannot be earned through an online only program began to change in 2010, however, when Yale Summer Session Dean William Whobrey was approached by university officials about the possibility of introducing online courses for Yale credit in the summer of 2011. After a four course pilot, the experiment has been labeled a success and is expanding in the summer of 2012. To describe the ideas behind  the Yale Summer Session Online courses, and the technology that powers the program, Dean William Whobrey and Richard Collins from the Yale Summer Session, and Lucas Swineford, from the Yale Broadcast and Media Center, came to TwTT to present on distance learning at Yale.

The first priority of program planners was to ensure that the courses offered online were held to the same high standards as their conventional

classroom counterparts. Besides putting each course through vetting  by the Course of Study Committee, each class had to meet a strict set of criteria before students could be allowed to register. All online classes were versions of courses taught in previous years on the Yale campus in conventional classrooms, ensuring the existence of a comparative metric and effective subject material. To control for the possibility of an atypical student body, registration in the pilot was limited to current Yale undergraduates, and enrollment was capped at 25 students or fewer, creating a “seminar feel.”  Despite the small class size, each course was also assigned a teaching fellow to maximize student access to material. Despite all these controls, Bill argues that what ultimately makes these classes unique is the outstanding teaching quality. All courses were taught by Yale ladder faculty, bringing students as close to a Yale campus experience as possible, regardless of their location in the world.

After settling on the general guidelines for the courses, the summer session team had to choose a learning management system (LMS) to be used as a platform for the program. From many vendors laying out a panoply of competing products, Rich Collins explained that the group ultimately settled on Pearson’s e-college suite, a cloud based learning environment in use at Columbia University and other peer institutions. Pearson’s excellent customer support and immediate technical assistance were weighted heavily in the decision process since faculty members worried that software problems might disrupt their classes – a fear that proved unfounded. The Pearson Learning Studio environment also allows significant flexibility in teaching. Professors could post readings and collect written assignments, initiate threaded discussions, broadcast recorded lectures, moderate group activities, and also administer exams and assessments. When students are in compatible time zones the software has a video conference feature which allows up to 25 participants to “meet” online in a live session that is recorded for later review. The LMS also has a facility that allows a common media space to be shared by all participants, which can include slide shows, podcasts, video clips, PDFs, or a white board where control can be limited to the professor or delegated to students. The Pearson LMS allows students and faculty to interact directly and use a variety of learning tools – a degree of personal attention that is nearly unique in the world of online classes – and the reason why students are charged regular summer session tuition for participation.

Given the variety of teaching styles made possible by the Pearson LMS, it is unsurprising that each of the four classes used a slightly different model, from campus based sections to seminar style interaction to a more conventional distance class based on recorded lectures. Tom Duffy’s Jazz and Race in Americamet at regular times on Yale’s campus, but used the online system to deliver additional content to students. Donald Brown’s course Computational Financebrought all students online simultaneously to work through problem sets together on on a virtual whiteboard. An online section of Craig Wright’s Brains of Genius ran at the same time as the classroom course, resulting in a distance experience that mirrored the classroom. Ellen Lust taught her class completely from overseas, recording lectures and guest speakers for students to watch, and also hosting online sections to ensure that students had an opportunity to discuss content face to face.

Bill pointed out that all of the classes are highly atypical in the distance learning community, and that this uniqueness is something that program administrators consider important. Indeed, the novel class formats have received very positive reviews from both students and faculty. Although the sample size was too small for rigorous scientific study, professors felt that they could teach effectively using the LMS, and that the classes were certainly worthy of Yale course credit. In a vote of confidence, all four faculty members plan to teach online again. Students also responded positively to the program, explaining that online classes actually proved to be more work than conventional equivalents.

The success of the online classes offered through the Yale Summer Session in 2011 has guaranteed that the program will be expanded in 2012. Although online classes pose significant technical and logistical challenges – Rich compared administering the program to running a live radio show – the successful learning outcomes and positive response from students and faculty seem to justify the extra effort. The program may also be expanded beyond the summer. Although it is unlikely that students will be able to take term-time classes online, Yale’s professional schools have expressed interest in the program, and may begin to offer their own distance learning programs. Despite fear of technical problems and poor learning outcomes, the Yale Summer Session Online Courses program has demonstrated the distance learning is a viable and effective complement to Yale’s traditional course offerings.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below
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Like many academic library patrons in 2010, if Yale library users found a book available on Kindle through Amazon and wanted to get it from the library, they would have to find a print copy of the book in the Yale system and go to a library to pick it up. This changed in June of 2011 when Yale University Library became one of only a few academic libraries in the world to offer eBook lending through Overdrive. In order to explain how this came to pass, and to describe some of the challenges associated with integrating eBooks into the collection of a major reference library, Tod Gilman, librarian for literature in English, and Marsha Garman, acquisition librarian and interim head of library acquisitions, came to TwTT to talk about the development and implementation of the two year Overdrive pilot.

Patrons have wanted to borrow eBooks almost since their invention, but the lending of an intangible work poses many challenges, not least of which is the technical one. Without running afoul of copyright law, the library had to figure out a way to distribute electronic texts where readers had to return the books for use by others after the lending period, without keeping permanent copies for themselves. Initially this was set to be done through the lending of entire Kindles, but with ambiguous wording in the Amazon user agreement, as well as the physical difficulty of lending and collecting the reader, this approach was deemed infeasible. Instead, the Yale library turned to a service that has become popular in public libraries known as Overdrive.

Overdrive is an eBook lending service that allows libraries to purchase items from a catalog of over 650,000 electronic books and audiobooks and then distribute them using a web site branded for the individual university, but maintained by Overdrive. This creates an online digital library, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that behaves much like a conventional print library. Users search for and check out a title, which they can then download to their portable reader or audio device. Once they have checked out a title, it is theirs for a period of 7, 14, or 21 days and cannot be used by other readers at their institution unless the library has purchased multiple copies. If users finish an eBook early, then they can return it from the device they initially used to download it, freeing their account to borrow another book up to a limit of five at a time. Titles that are not returned before their deadline are automatically returned for use by another reader.

While the Overdrive service is both intuitive and convenient, it presents several challenges for research libraries. The first, and possibly most significant, is that with a history in public library lending, Overdrive’s catalog has many more popular titles than academic press books available for purchase. The second major challenge is the integration of Overdrive’s service into existing university infrastructure, including the online catalog, Orbis, and the existing central authentication system (CAS).

Although Overdrive provides tools to connect library users to the eBook lending service, these systems were designed for barcode based public libraries. In order to allow NetID login to Overdrive, Yale had to develop an application that could communicate between Yale’s authentication system and Overdrive’s. Once access was possible, the challenge of linking the catalogs became apparent. In order to make Overdrive books visible in Orbis, a new catalog entry, known as a MARC record, had to be inserted for each book. First, the most basic form of each book’s record was obtained from the online computer library center (OCLC) using a list of acquired titles. Next, metadata from Overdrive was overlaid onto those basic MARC records. After the creation of the record, a link is inserted that allows patrons to connect to the item on Overdrive from the record in Orbis. Audiobooks also appear in the Orbis catalog, and can be identified by an audio icon next to the title. The result is that electronic books and digital audiobooks appear alongside physical books and CDs in the electronic catalog, making them more accessible to users.

Although users may be able to find electronic books alongside print versions in Orbis, they still have to download the items to their own personal reading devices in order to actually view the texts. Most books can be read on a laptop with either Amazon’s Kindle reading app or Adobe Digital Editions software installed, and many users will choose to use a tablet or an electronic reader for book consumption. Although tablets will often be very flexible in the content they can display, electronic readers are frequently more selective when it comes to format. Overdrive specifies before a book is added to a user’s shopping cart the formats in which that book is available. If a book is only available as a Kindle book, the only e-reader to support that item will be Amazon’s Kindle device. If a book is only available as an Adobe .epub file then most devices, including the Barnes and Noble Nook and Sony e-reader, will be able to open the item, but it will not be readable on a Kindle. Audiobooks must be loaded through Overdrive’s “Media Console” software to be transferred to individual devices. Although Yale has tried to ensure maximum availability of all works, individual publishers may set restrictions on the distribution format of their electronic books.

Like format, some other features of electronic books and media are restricted by publishers. Annotation and copying rules follow the platform in use – a product of publisher guidelines and device capabilities. When a Kindle book is annotated, Amazon stores all of the highlights and notes in the cloud so that if the user borrows the book again or purchases it him or herself, those notes and marks are saved. There is no comparable central storage system for Adobe based books, and the default Adobe software permits bookmarks as the only form of annotation.

Although some figures in the library were nervous about the ability of patrons to navigate different book formats within the Overdrive console, librarians were very enthusiastic about the possibility for patron driven acquisitions in Overdrive. Patrons can use an online form to ask the library to check whether a book is available through Overdrive and to acquire that book. The platform also has a feature where if there are four or more people on the waiting list for a book, another copy is automatically acquired and made available to the first person on the list. This ensures that even though electronic books cannot be “recalled” like physical books, there is always availability. Having a straightforward and fast acquisition path for new books is a boon to librarians, but just as important is the platform’s ability to host institution generated content. If, for example, a professor wants students to read his dissertation through Overdrive, there is a process through which the document can be published to Yale’s overdrive library and made available to Yale library patrons without being published to all the libraries that Overdrive serves.

Although the Overdrive program will continue as a pilot through the end of May 2013, the enthusiastic response by patrons and rapid growth of the electronic collection suggest that the library will continue to lend electronic books into the future. The future of Overdrive based electronic book lending at Yale may also someday extend into reserves. The current e-reserves system only permits the library to post a small percentage of the total page count of a book for student download. If courses require entire books, it may be possible to purchase multiple copies of the book for the Overdrive library and then lend the reserves electronically. While the precise nature of Yale’s future eBook lending program has yet to be decided, the Overdrive pilot makes it clear that minimizing format and licensing issues opens the way for eBooks in education.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below

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Since the 1970s, students at the Yale School of Management have gathered in conference rooms and ballrooms in groups as small as 15 students and as large as 240 students to test their financial prowess in a game that simulates the New York Stock Exchange. Although the original game was developed to be played with colored paper and a deck of playing cards, in today’s TwTT Professor Roger Ibbotsson and Instructional Technologist Sam Cohen presented a new web-based version of the game that could expand the market simulation to an audience limited only by server capacity.

Before Sam presented the updated version of the game, Professor Ibbotson took the audience back 30 years to invention of the simulator. At that time, there was a need to teach students the dynamics of a trading floor where most transactions were carried out in person. To this end a game was developed where four fictional companies, identified by color, are assigned a hidden value using playing cards drawn at random from a deck. Students are issued an equal number of shares from each company and $200 of simulated cash. They can then buy “peeks,” a glimpse of 3 of 10 cards that determine value, from which they form a notion of the value of a company. Shares are then exchanged as traders try to acquire shares of a company for less than those shares are worth. At the end of the game, companies are liquidated, and players are ranked by their final assets. To monitor progress up to this point, however, graduate students had to roam the room, listening to traders shouting sale prices and updating a blackboard, or more recently a projected spreadsheet, at the front of the room.

As electronic trading supplants floor trading, the Yale Stock Market Game’s playing cards, spreadsheets, and shouted trades began to appear dated. To bring the game into the age of electronic finance, Professor Ibbotson contacted the Yale Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2) to work together on the creation of an electronic version of the game. The outcome of that collaboration was a browser based, iPad friendly, backwards compatible web application written in Java 1.6. A persistent client server connection ensures that as soon as a transaction occurs between any two people, it can be seen by all players, and a tabbed interface makes research and market watching closer to a modern electronic trading platform where trades are directly between players than a physical trading floor or trade with a bank.

As Sam discusses the electronic version of the game, he points out that usability was a priority in development. In the present version there are three sections to the screen. The first is the “banner” where there is a ticker and a countdown timer. The second is the content area where actual trading and research takes place, including  the trading tab, showing current market activity, sell orders and buy orders, and the research tab where players can buy peeks. There is also a persistent sidebar which shows each player his or her private information,  including current portfolio and trading history. When the game ends and all companies are liquidated to compute final scores, all players are presented with a valuation screen which reflects how well they did individually and also in comparison to others.

The new format of the game confers significant advantages over the paper based predecessor. Possibly the greatest advantage is that a large physical space is no longer necessary, reducing the time required to set up a game to minutes from weeks, and allowing instructors to focus on teaching rather than administering the game. And although the fact that traders are interacting directly with each other rather than with a bank still necessitates a minimum of 15 participants, the electronic game has almost no theoretical maximum number of players and can accommodate traders all over the world over a span of several days. Finally, the electronic format allows for unprecedented amounts of data collection. At the end of the game instructors can download a .csv formatted spreadsheet with the trading history of the session, allowing future discussions of why participants behaved as they did and an analysis of trader insights and errors. Future versions of the game may even include other market traded items, including bonds, warrants, and options, turning it into a teaching tool for a variety of securities.

While the current game is limited to stock trading and is access restricted to Yale NetID holders, the future scope of the game is far from set. Usability testing for the current beta version is ongoing, and will culminate in a full scale pilot session from 6 to 8 pm on April 17th at the School of Management (SOM A74). The final version is expected to launch in time for classes in the Fall 2012 semester. Parties interested in participating in the pilot, which will feature food and drink, should  RSVP to Gabriel.Rossi@yale.edu.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below

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In the past few months, most students and some faculty members received invitations to leave behind the old central webmail and its infamous horde interface to transition to the new EliApps system which is based on the Google Apps for Education platform. More than an email system, however, EliApps offers an expanding suite of tools to students and faculty, and Loriann Seluga, Adam Bray, and Laura Tomas of the Yale Student Technology Collaborative (STC), along with Ken Panko of Yale’s Instructional Technology Group (ITG) came to TwTT this Tuesday to give Yale’s first public presentation on the educational applications of EliApps.

What is EliApps, and How do I get an account?

Rather than thinking of EliApps as any one application it is better to conceive of the platform as a modular collection of applications offered by Google that can be turned on or off individually for the Yale network. The core of the current package comprises five apps: Mail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, and Groups. The Maps, Books, and Bookmarks services have also been enabled, and more applications are being examined for deployment at Yale, particularly Google Moderator.

Although the EliApps applications, and all user data, reside on servers managed by Google, an EliApps account is different from a commercialGoogle or GMail account. This is reflected in the privacy policy. Although the language is the same as Google’s commercial policy, Yale, rather than Google, is specified as owner of the data. There is also no merging of data between a user’s personal Google account and their EliApps account – email sent to a user’s @Yale.edu address will not appear in that user’s private GMail inbox unless he or she has manually linked the accounts using forwarding or IMAP access. Since the EliApps accounts are different from commercial accounts, there may be times when users want to be signed in to both their EliApps and regular Google accounts at the same time – checking mail from both accounts in different tabs, for example. To do this, users can find instructions at yale.edu/its/eliapps for instructions on how to use a feature called multiple sign in, which enables the same person to log in to Google services with different credentials.

Google Apps for Education users experience some benefits over regular commercial accounts. The mailbox capacity of an EliApps account is 25GB,much larger than the 7.5GB limit of commercial GMail. Docs users will also enjoy 1GB of cloud storage space. These changes come to an interface that most users will recognize from commercial Google products, that is, EliApps Mail will look like GMail with the exception of the EliApps logo that appears in the top left corner of the page instead of the Google logo.

EliApps is slowly being rolled out to the entire central campus, with students and faculty making the switch first, while other staff members may have to wait a bit to make the change. Essentially, if you use a pantheon mail account you are eligible to transfer to EliApps. If you use Connect or Exchange to access your mail, you are not eligible to make the transition yet. The single largest exception will be staff that handles confidential electronic health information – the students, faculty, and staff of the medical campus. Since this information has different legal requirements associated with its transmission and storage, there will be no transition to EliApps for these accounts into the foreseeable future. For now, however, eligible faculty interested in switching to EliApps should contact faculty support, and students should follow the instructions they received in an email invitation to make the transition.

How do I Use EliApps for Email?

EliApps will eventually take the place of pantheon services, most notably email, group mailing lists (panlists and mailman lists), and department email accounts. The platform will also extend new services to users, particularly shared calendaring and document sharing. In order to improve service, however, the format and interfaces of existing services will change during the transition to EliApps.

One of the most common group collaboration tools currently used is the Mailman service, which allows users to send content to mailing lists. This service will be replaced in the coming year by the Google Groups tool. Although not completely live yet, Groups will be available by April 1st, and introduces some new features to campus mailing lists – improving the control list owners have over content. The Groups tool will allow a number of different preset configurations, including “team” which restricts the group to members only, “public” which allows anybody to send an email to the mailing list, and “announcement only” which can be used for a list where only the owner will be allowed to send mail. Group owners will also be able to manually set privacy and distribution restrictions, and can take advantage of the new archive feature, where all the messages sent to the group are stored and threaded to create a timeline of list activity. Groups can also be used to contact people outside of Yale, although non EliApps users will not be able to take list ownership.

While some departments may choose to use Groups to handle shared inboxes or departmental email addresses, others will probably choose to use a feature known as “shared accounts.”  This feature is built into the Mail app, and allows a department to make an email account (e.g., Yale.Library@yale.edu), and then assign privileges to other individual users to access the inbox. These users can then switch between their personal inbox and the department inbox from a drop-down menu. This has the benefit of allowing actions taken on messages to be seen in real time by all users of the mailbox.

How will EliApps fit into Work and Teaching?

While Groups and the shared mailbox feature of Mail allow users to replicate services offered under the previous mail system, the greatest strength of EliApps is that it not only extends previous services, but also introduces new ones. With the introduction of Calendar, Docs, Moderator, Sites, and other apps and tools not yet activated, the applications of EliApps in work and teaching are limited only by user creativity.

Among the new tools, many consider Calendar to be one of the most exciting. Calendar allows users to not only create and maintain separate schedules for personal events, classes, activities and other regular happenings, but more importantly to selectively share calendars with other EliApps and Google Calendar users. The applications of shared calendaring in the classroom are manifold. Class sessions, office hour sign-ups, relevant campus events, or anything else can be instantly shared with all members of a particular group or course. The link to the calendar can be sent out using Groups, and the invitation itself can be restricted so that people have different levels of access to the calendar you are sharing. At the most private level, other people can only see when an event is happening (time marked as busy) without being able to see titles, descriptions or locations. At the highest level of sharing, other users can not only make changes to the calendar but also share it with other people. This level of integration allows both peer to peer communication and instructor student collaboration to happen much more efficiently since meetings can be scheduled without email or telephone tag, and event sharing is instant.

Some people will notice that some of the features of EliApps, including office hour sign-ups, already exist through Classes*v2. Although this is true in some cases, many more features are new, and those that are duplicated are implemented in a fully integrated way not possible through Classes*v2 alone. The schedule feature is an excellent example. Although faculty could previously set up a class schedule in Classes, it was fully independent from students’ personal schedules. In EliApps, however, when an event is scheduled by the professor, it will instantly appear on the calendars of all students subscribing to that class. Other features like Docs simply don’t exist in Classes*v2, but have obvious applications for instruction and may be integrated into Classes*v2 in the future, ensuring that the systems will coexist rather than compete.

Although EliApps tools have not yet been integrated with Classes*v2, instructors may still find EliApps useful in their teaching. The collaborative editing features and web integration found in Docs can give instructors more feedback about students’ writing process than a document left in a drop-box, and can also make peer editing much simpler. Unlike most word processors, Docs tracks changes to documents across time and allows multiple users to work on a document at once. This has the obvious benefit of allowing students to work together on editing a paper, or students to see instantly where revisions have been made by instructors. Another benefit, however, is that if a student writes an assignment in Docs the instructor can look back over the revision history and see how the paper took shape – giving him or her insight into the student’s writing process and where he or she may be having problems. Beyond word processing, Docs offers other office-suite tools, including powerful presentation and spreadsheet applications. Since Docs lives in the cloud, it can leverage web connectivity in ways not possible for standard desktop office applications. One example is the “importHTML” feature. This allows users to pull data directly from websites, updating the spreadsheet as internet data is updated. Information can then be presented in the form of charts and graphs, including a novel form of three dimensional chart that has a slider allowing the chart to show change over time. Yet another feature of docs with great classroom potential is the “form” tool. This allows the creation of web based surveys and forms that automatically populate a spreadsheet as people fill them out. This can be for everything from collecting student suggestions to carrying out surveys for class projects.

While students can obviously work together using Docs, some may choose to create a more involved collaboration space using Sites. This service is a very simple web publishing app open to anyone with an EliApps account. Although not an environment where custom HTML pages can be uploaded, Sites allows a website to be created and published in minutes. Sites can also be access restricted, creating closed collaboration spaces. This service could be of particular use for a laboratory class, where students are working in short-term temporary groups. Each group can quickly create a site and upload all data to that site instead of passing it between each other using flash drives or email. It should be noted, however, that Sites is intended for small and temporary sites – permanent labs or recurring classes should still use the university’s commons, Drupal, and WordPress services.

As use of EliApps expands, faculty can suggest the activation of other Google services on the platform. Google+ integration may be enabled if there is interest. Google Moderator is another service that will likely be flipped on in the near future. Moderator is a service that runs as a lecture is going on, and allows people to ask questions and then vote on them – essentially giving real time feedback on the understanding of the audience and where problems may be emerging, allowing the lecturer to know what he or she needs to review or present in more depth.

The final shape and role of EliApps is not yet certain, and for now, staff members using Connect or Exchange for email and Sharepoint for collaboration will not see too many changes. Students and faculty, however, can begin taking advantage of the new EliApps services immediately, and as semesters pass, new uses for EliApps in teaching, learning, and collaboration are sure to be discovered.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below
(note a slight delay upon initial playback):

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