Update – Procurement Entering Final Phase

The selection process is now entering the final phase.  The full ‘Invitation to Tender’ document is being issued to the shortlisted suppliers in the next few days.

The new end date for the process is now the 21st November 2011.  This is later than planned because:

• of time pressures on the Procurement Manager;
• of the need for further and more detailed technical assurance for the option of remote hosting;
• of the need to give suppliers adequate time to respond to what is a very complex procurement.

We still aim to have the system ready for courses to be built for the 2012 academic year, and have asked the suppliers to provide project plans for how this will be met.

We will publish plans for development and awareness, migration strategies in December 2011, once the choice is made.

We aren’t able to discuss the specifics of the shortlisted solutions outside the project, so do be patient with us.  I can assure you that we are working hard on getting a solution that best fits the requirements we’ve gathered from across QM.  Also I should say that we genuinely have not chosen yet – it all depends on the proposals we get back from suppliers and how they meet criteria for functional requirements, technical assurance and value.  So please ignore any rumours!

- 28th September 2011

Update – Procurement Documents

The procurement strategy was approved by the E-Learning Project Board in June 2011 (paper here).

The Procurement phase is well underway and has been going on over the summer.

The following documents have been produced and used in the procurement phase:

• The Pre-Qualification Questionnaire June 2011 (this was used to score suppliers who completed it, as a gateway to proceed to the dialogue phase)
• The Descriptive Document August 2011 (this gives suppliers the definitive overview of what we want, and includes all the functional requirements)
• The Invitation to Participate in Dialogue August 2011. (this invites the shortlisted suppliers to give more information about their solution, and to respond to various use scenarios which are drawn directly from our functional requirements.  It is then scored to either exclude any suppliers form further participation, to prompt further questions and dialogue, or to proceed to the Invitation to Tender).
• The Invitation to Tender.  This is the final document, which suppliers will respond to and which will be scored to arrive at the preferred bidder.  It is being drafted at the moment and will be posted here when completed.

These documents are available on the QM Intranet and are not for external viewing.  They are the documents we have been using to elicit responses from suppliers and do not contain any information about suppliers or their solutions.  They are provided for info to the QM community in order to raise awareness about the detail and nature of the procurement process.  We are not able to discuss the responses of individual suppliers outside the governance of the project.

- 7th September 2011

From Knowledge Building to Requirements Gathering to Procurement

A general note…

Over the last year we have gathered requirements from colleagues and students in a variety of ways, such as:

• A launch event with QM staff: What I Wish I Could Do With Blackboard, But Can’t
• Open forum workshop sessions with QM staff to gather requirements across broad areas of functionality
• An extended series of subject-specific sessions. At these, requirements were elaborated on, written up, and then shared back for approval. Included multiple for particular disciplines. e.g. for SMD at UG, PG level and at the senior SSLC
• Running the online learning section of the IT Student Focus Groups, late 2010
• Harvesting data from VLE usability focus groups, our own VLE surveys, the IT student survey (for which we wrote some VLE-specific questions)
• Liaison with IT services for technical requirements
• Extracting information from other sources (e.g. Student Experience Seminar materials from 2009, SBCS VLE presentation)
• Email invitation to all Heads of Department to engage with the process

We are confident that this has resulted in a comprehensive set of requirements, emerging directly from what people told us they wanted to be able to do.  The general consultation is now closed, but if there is anything else you would like to relay to us, or if you have not yet engaged with the process and would like to, please contact s.brenton@qmul.ac.uk in the next two weeks.

We also undertook a knowledge building exercise, which was an internal options appraisal process to see whether we needed a new solution, what others were doing and generally what was available.  During that exercise we talked about different products and possibilities.  That process led us to conclude that we did indeed need a new solution, but did not result in any definite choice of product or ranking of potential products over each other.

The current phase – Procurement – is where suppliers have the opportunity to match their solutions to our requirements.  It is through that process that we end up with a choice of online learning environment. The process we are following is called a competitive dialogue EU tender.  If we have got the criteria and requirements right, we should be able to choose the one that best fits them.

So, to be completely clear: no one has chosen yet.  Any preferences are individual ones. Please disregard any rumours that this is a fait accompli.  It really isn’t.

- Sam Brenton, Head of E-Learning. June 21, 2011

Update: Procurement Strategy finalised

The E-Learning Project Board met last week and endorsed the procurement strategy for the new online learning environment.

The IT Programme has hired a Procurement Manager who is working with us on the procurement process, and has devised a strategy which fits into the timescale (though it does push it to the end of the summer), is flexible, and complies with the relevant EU process.

You can read a paper on the process here (QM only) and see a copy of the draft requirements here.

Please do not circulate either of these papers outside QM.

- June 21, 2011

UCIA TEL Survey 2010

UCISA runs a major e-learning survey every two years or so (now known as the Technology-Enhanced Learning Survey). This has the biggest sample and scope (91 HE institutions responded) of any e-learning survey relevant to UKHE and gives us good background data about the changing e-learning landscape, much of it relevant to this project.

The results from the 2010 survey were recently released, and make for interesting reading.

Some headlines:

The Main VLE currently in use within institutions (of those who responded):

25% – Blackboard Classic
23% – Moodle
20% – Blackboard (all versions formerly known as WebCT)
9% – Blackboard version 9.x
6% – Other VLE developed in house
3% – Sharepoint
1% – Blackboard (the version formerly known as Angel)
1% – Desire2Learn
1% – Commercial Intranet-based product
1% – Sakai
10% – Don’t know/not answered

Are there departments within your institution hosting a VLE in addition to the main centrally provided VLE? [ie. not just centrally offered VLE, but all VLEs in use in an institution]

Yes – 35%   (in pre-92 HEIs: 49%, in post-92 HEIs: 28%)

No – 59% (in pre-92 HEIs: 46%, in post-92 HEIs: 67%

Not answered – 6%

What VLE, if any, is currently used in your institution?

55% – Moodle

40% – Blackboard (inc. Classic, v9.x and Angel)

29% – Blackboard (all versions formerly known as WebCT)

15% – Other VLE developed in-house

13% – Sharepoint

4% – Commercial intranet-based product

3% – Sakai

3% – Other commercial VLE

2% – Desire2Learn

2% – FirstClass

2% – Other Open Source

2% – Other intranet based developed in house

1% – Boddington

0% – No VLE

Summary

We can say that of those who responded 79% percent of institutions who specified a platform are using either Moodle or Blackboard (in its various strains following the acquisitions of WebCT and Angel) as their main, centrally offered VLE.  Moodle is currently the main centrally provided VLE in 23% of institutions who responded.  Other central VLEs are in use, though in relatively low numbers, though 15% still use an in-house option (down from 23% in 2008 and 38% in 2005).

So, Blackboard products still dominate the market for centrally offered VLEs, though if you treat BB Classic and BB WebCT as different products then these two and Moodle are the three main central platforms with roughly equal share.

The great majority of institutions have a centrally offered VLE – although 10% either did not know or did not answer the question.  0% of institutions did not have a VLE at all (in 2008 this figure was 4%).

35% of institutions have more than one VLE in operation, in addition to the main centrally provided platform (in -pre ’92 institutions this goes up to %49).

Across all instances of VLE (ie. both centrally and locally implemented platforms) Moodle features in 55% of institutions, while Blackboard (in all its various strains) features in 69%.  If you treat the various versions of Blackboard as different products, though, BB Classic and BB WebCT now each feature in 29% of institutions, with their new single product line (version 9) so far adopted by 9%.

There’s a great deal more in the survey, and the comparative data to 2008 and 2005 is also useful.  You can download a copy from http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/ssg/surveys.aspx.

Moodle 2.0 is released

We will post occasional pieces of information about VLE products.  These do not express preference for any particular product, and are published here to inform the e-learning community at QM about developments in the market…

After two and half years of development, Moodle 2.0 was released on November 25th.

It’s a major release, with new features and ground-up rewriting of features from version 1.9.  You can see the release notes here.

Also useful is this set of 17 videos about the features in Moodle 2.0, made by Thomas Lasic, an Education Researcher at Moodle HQ.

VLE Selection workshops – change of date

We have had to reschedule the session looking at requirements for Assessment and Course Management in a future VLE, due to the tube strike on 29th November.

We’re now going to run this after the session on Content and Communications which is running from 10-11.30am on Monday 6th December.

So the two sessions now run back-to-back, from 10am to 1pm at the latest.

Almost everyone who was due to attend has been able to make the new date, so we’ll see you there.

A reminder that if you’d like to be involved, but can’t make these sessions or the separate subject-based sessions, do get in touch.

Notes from VLE Selection Event, May 2010

This is a post from July 2010, originally posted on the E-Learning Unit’s website and transferred here for information.

It was called “What I Wish I Could do in Blackboard, but Can’t”. Thanks to all who attended – it was a really useful session and a good snapshot of some of the things that people are itching to do.

Here is a pdf of notes from the event - my thanks to Gill Ritchie and Eoin McDonnell for taking these.

And here’s a copy of the presentation (without sound) which gives overview and context.

VLE Selection workshops – invitation to staff

As part of the VLE Selection Project, colleagues are invited to two themed workshops to help gather requirements for the next VLE system at QM (due to be live for the start of the 2012-13 session).

29th November, 2-3.30pm: Content and Communications
6th December, 10-11.30am: Assessment and Course Management

Venue: Room 3.11, Francis Bancroft Building, Mile End (the Learning Institute Seminar Room)

At these sessions colleagues will be presented with an overview of the project and a set of draft functional requirements in the above themed areas, which they will have the chance to add to and refine.

These requirements will later be mapped against viable VLE systems and this will contribute to the selection of the next VLE system at QM.

If you would like to attend, please email s.brenton@qmul.ac.uk to let him know you’re coming. Similarly, do email if you can’t attend but would like to be involved in defining the functional requirements for the next VLE system.

On Open Systems and Flexibility

These posts are a series of reflections on issues surrounding the implementation of a VLE at an organisation like QM.  These are provided in the spirit of sharing thoughts along the way for background knowledge and collective conversation.  They don’t constitute a preference or indicate the project’s final recommendation.  They may at times discuss particular products so they are QM-only and not to be exported outside the organisation, so as not to prejudice any future purchasing negotiations…

We had a productive subject session the other day.  In these, we try not to talk about specific products, or to guide people towards particular requirements, or to favour particular philosophies of software.  A couple of things emerged, which I thought might feature:

That Schools’ requirements will likely extend beyond just the functionality provided in a typical VLE, and the VLE will need to sit within an ecology of software tools for learning and teaching, and as a delivery vehicle for content which is created outside a VLE and may also sit outside its walls, with links or feeds to it from inside the course areas.

That there is an impression that with Open Source systems, you can simply change features that do not suit your processes.

On this last point, an example was given, that if the Assignment Submission tool does not suit a Schools’ needs, we could reprogram it so that it does.

One advantage of home-built, or home-customised software is that you can match it closely to what you do.  For example, the software used in SEMS has some very detailed features for matching students together in clusters and allowing them to peer-assess/review each others’ work, in a way that matches the Schools’ processes.  No VLE that I know of would do this in the same way out of the box.

So, on the face of it, it would be sensible to select a system that you could simply modify to do the things you want it to.

It’s here that you might run in to problems, though.

Let’s say we chose an Open Source product (that is, a VLE whose license terms allow you to modify all of the code as you choose), intending to heavily modify features that don’t suit our processes in some Schools.

We then hire (or outsource to) programmers to modify specific tools for specific requirements.

What if there are competing requirements across different subjects that are at odds with each other?  Which modification do we choose to go for?  What if we modify a tool that natively works perfectly well for some subjects?

Well, you could have a sort of federated VLE, with one product but different, linked installations of it in different subjects.  But then you are developing different instances of the same software in different directions within your own organisation, and over time you risk creating multiple flavours of one platform, in an accelerated evolution of the divergence that open systems are sometimes prone to anyway.

How then do you support a system that has many divergent iterations, both technically and in terms of user support for staff and students?

What happens when you need to upgrade the core product? Are your modifcations going to work with the upgraded core?  Will the modifications break the core? Do you have to upgrade at different rates depending on your various iterations?

What happens if there are problems with the modifications you have developed – who supports them? Do we want to own (and pay for) that knowledge to be kept in-house or is this a big point of risk for a core College-wide system?  What if our programmers leave, or are promoted beyond those duties, or make a mistake?

Most hosting providers won’t support lots of bespoke customisations or a federated installation, so we’d have to host it ourselves.  The lack of third party application support (if you host it yourself) may be mitigated by the depth and knowledge of a large user community, but if you have developed the product so heavily yourself away from the core product used by the community, you lose that resource (unless the community adopts your changes, or you’re part of a consortium that approves changes in step – in which case you lose some of that flexibility anyway)?

(The Open University spent millions of pounds on developing an open product for their own means, and supporting it – is there value in us doing the same thing?  Ought we to try? )

And, before all this, is it even possible to tailor a tool in the way we want to, given that it has been written to work in a certain way?  Sometimes: certainly.  Or sometimes you could write a plug in that bolts on to the core product, but do we want to support a whole ecology of home-made plug-ins?  Does this lead to an ever more complicated user experience over time?  Do we re-write them every time requirements change, across our many departments?

This is not to decry open software in principle (by open I mean a product that has a code base you can openly access and are free to alter and develop).  I’m trying to open up some of the issues around the apparently straightforward benefit of being able to re-program tools that don’t quite fit your requirements in their vanilla state.

Lurking behind all this, too, is the issue common to almost all software implementations: can you select a product that will meet – or you which you can customise to meet – all your processes?  Should you try to do so, or will you inevitably have to examine your processes in light of the possibilities of the software?  Can you support divergent processes with the same software?  Should processes converge where they are divergent across an organisation?

These are some of the things our approach is designed to explore.  We’re gathering requirements and use scenarios.  We’ll then (in collaboration with volunteers from subjects where possible) map those to potential systems.  That mapping – or modelling – may result in processes which are different to those currently used, but which nevertheless show how you could use given software to meet requirements.  So long as the requirements are met, the processes are flexible, so long as they don’t necessitate  labrynthine new processes?  Right?  Or wrong?

And where we uncover requirements that are absolutely core to a department’s business, but which cannot be met by any VLE, is that a reason to choose a VLE in the expectation that we can just change its functionality, or are we wary about that commitment given some of the issues raised above?  Or do we recognise that a VLE is one system that may live alongside subject-specific systems that do meet those requirements?

People may have requirements which no VLE can natively meet, and the answer may not be simply to shoe-horn all e-learning requirements into one VLE (and many of those requirements may not really about e-learning at all – they need to be articulated nonetheless), but to recognise there will be other ways of doing particular things.  Or we could commit to choosing a VLE we could modify to multiple and differing requirements and processes across the organisation.

We will, of course, see what requirements emerge, but the purpose of this post is to ask whether that last option is as attractive as it first seems.

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