Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Have you ever experienced playing an online game for 72 hours none stop, by killing the 5000th monster, you finally found the axe (very unique, cost 10000 gold to buy and you get 1 gold per hour of game play) you have been looking for, you feel like the luckest guy in the world. Log off the online game, sleep for 12+ hours, and the first thing you do after wake up is to log back into the game and try out your new weapon, and BAM, you realise the axe is gone due to a service failure. You contact the game service provider, and they tells you to get lost, it’s only a game. The rage makes you want to sue them, but you then tell yourself that’s just rediculous… Well, you don’t have to feel that way anymore, go ahead and sue them, and you will win. The above was a real story happened last December in Beijing, China and the court ruled the game service provider to restore the the lost property in the virtual game environment.

According to the defendant’s lawyer, many virtual items in the online games can be considered as personal propeties since it cost the player’s time, knowledge and hard work to gain and thurs they should be protected by the law. There is a legal committee in China which includes over 20 lawyers currently fighting for approval of the new law to protect the virtual property. Heck, maybe it’s time to start a Virtual Property Insurance company…

If you have been using a pirate version of Microsoft Windows XP, and you are calling Microsoft and its loyal consumer’s suckers, then you will probably be the next sucker coming up. US Microsoft Corporation just announced plans in Beijing, China to stop the pirated copies to future retrieve updates and security patches from the Microsoft servers. This means the pirate copies will be vulnerable to the upcoming hack attack and viruses.

This will be the biggest corporate strike to the software piracy world. Only this time, Microsoft is relying on the hackers and virus creators to teach the pirate traders a lesson. According to the strategy of war, Microsoft has made a beautiful move: security attacks and piracy acts are the two biggest threats to this giant corporation, and now, Microsoft stepped back and let the two figure the thing out themselves. LOL, man, what a great move…

If you read chinese, go to this URL to read more:
http://www.tj.xinhuanet.com/2005-01/28/content_3649595.htm

Sim 2 University Expansion Pack will be out on Mar. 1st, and some sneak previews on this expansion really make me want to try out the popular computer game. I know it's gonna be addictive and time consuming but the idea of living through the college life one more time is just exciting, only this time I am aimed to have more fun.

Campus life involves studying, partying, and going to class. The Sim character will actually "study hard" to make the grade. According to the previews I have read, the character in the game will just "disappear" from the screen while "attending classes", but a real time clock is running to keep a track of the hours being spent in the classes. I am just wondering what if Maxis incorporates some real University course wares into the game? Name it "SIM Real College Expansion - Art History (or choose your own major)". Players can actually jump into real knowledge learning environment from the game and hop back into the game after 30 mins of class time. The score is no long based on a simple computational calculation of how many hours of class time the character "disappeared for class", but some actual marks from the knowledge tests in the game.

This may sounds really crazy, and Maxis will never get into this simply because the amount of extra costs to make the game and lack of interest from the games... Anyway, just some crazy thoughts to end the day...

US based education group McGraw-Hill announced that it will invest in Chinese online education service provider PRCedu last week. The company and an unnamed US fund will invest 150 million Yuan (25 million CAD$) in total in PRCedu. PRCedu was founded in 1998 and its current investors include Citibank and IDG. Most of the 68 online universities licensed by the Ministry of Education are PRCedu partners. (pacificepoch)

I think it's the time for all the big identities (Publishers, Media Companies, Entertainment Corporations) to finally realize online learning is the future and it will change the way people seeking for information and solution in daily life. So, instead of waiting till e-Learning get taken over by new, independent companies, these giants will simply invest and "buy" the future today. I believe we shall see more publishers invest into e-Learning industry in 2005.

China National Publications Import & Export Corporation presented their joint project with eyouCT (WebCT) on CNPC ECourse (ePack) packages at the China Bilingual High Education Conference. The project is to introduce ePack to the Chinese post secondary insitutes. The presentation used two successful studies: ePack being used in University of Yale and Hong Kong City University. It definitely brought attention to many institutional participants at the conference. Although the demand of bilingual instructions being used at the post secondary level is still limited in China, but the first impression on ePacks were still overwhelming. Many institutional representatives favored the package due to the simplicity and well published learning contents. I personally think ePack did not impact the American e-Learning industry well enough in the past 5 years. However, due to the increasing demand of bilingual instructions in China and the lack of foreign online learning resources, ePack make be the right product to the Chinese bilingual education market.

CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) just released their newest survey result on the newest Internet Development in China. Total internet users in China exceeded 94 million by the end of 2004, about one half of the amount of internet users in the U.S. (180 million). Among them, the number of broadband users was 42.80 million. In the mean time, the number of computer hosts in China has raised to 41.60 million, an increase of 14.6% over the past 6 months. The numbers of domain names and websites registered under .CN were 432077 and 668900, increasing by 50000 and 43000 respectively, compared with the figures of 6 months ago. The bandwidth of international connection has reached 74429M; the total number of IPv4 addresses allocated to China has been 59945728, presenting a half-year growth of 38 percent and 21 percent respectively.

In additional to this, CNNIC also studied the diversity of the usage. The studies shows the information concerned by the netizens was no longer just focused on news. The figures from the report unveil the following results: as for the information that was mostly inquired, 29.3% users believed educational information was the mostly inquired information, 13.8% took automobile info and 24.2% considered recruitment info; as for the Internet services, the following Internet services or functions are still developing rapidly: Email, search engine, online banking, online trading, online advertisements, news, Internet games, among which, Email is still one of the most concerned Internet applications. The satisfactory degrees of the users for charged email and free email are 32.6% and 71.9% respectively.

The report tells that the primary reasons for non-Internet users not to access the Internet are that they do not know how to use computer/Internet (40.1%) and that there is no facility to access the Internet (23.1%). The level of the development of education and economy is still the main factor to limit the improvement of Internet. Thus, to facilitate the enhancement of the Internet in China, the promotion of the fundamental knowledge of Internet must be intensified and the local economy be greatly developed. (CNNIC "15th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China")

"We were a learner and follower in the development of the first generation Internet, but we have caught up with world's leaders in the next-generation Internet, become a first mover, and won respect and attention from the international community," said Wu Jianping, director of the expert committee of the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) and a mastermind in the development of the next-generation Internet in China.

CERNET was the first network that brought World Wide Web into China by laying out a national wide university based network back in the 90s. It simply changed how China sees the world and the world sees China. With the help from Intel and HP, CERNET is taking the game up a notch, in the past 12 months, a new network is being carefully planned and tested out – CERNET2. According to the newest update (December, 2004), the speed in the backbone network (IPv6) of CERNET2 reaches 2.5 to 10 gigabits per second and connects the universities at a speed of 1 to 10 gigabits per second.

The National Development Reform Commission (NDRC) set up a China Next-generation Internet (CNGI) fund of 1.4 billion yuan (US$169 million) to support six next-generation Internet networks. Half of them will be used on CERNET2-related projects. The rest of the money was given to five telecom operators.

In CERNET2, half of the key equipment, including routers, was provided by Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies and Tsinghua Bit-Way.
Huawei has already become one of the strongest competitors to Cisco, which achieved prosperity with the Internet and has a dominant position in related technologies.

- Data collected from China Daily ( 中国日报 )

The Beijing government launched a staff training network last November. The current daily traffic to the web site is exceeding 2.5 million. The training network uses many advanced media based learning materials such as video on demand, animations, and video conferencing. Participants in the network are mainly government workers varies from the mayor to the secretaries. It is focused to provide the HR Management Trainings, Political Trainings, Cultural Trainings, Technology Trainings, Business Trainings and Social Management Trainings. All of the learning contents in the network are up-to-date and some of the newest information are pumped into the knowledge database on a daily basis.

This is only an experimental attempt for the Chinese government and the feed backs so far are overwhelming. There is a definitely a possibility that the Chinese national government will soon launch a national wide training system for all of their staff and thus It will be the largest government training site ever!

According to Blackboard’s marketing unit, they will increase their investment in the Chinese e-Learning market in the year 2005. There are currently over 40 institutes (universities, colleges and K12) using Blackboard in China to enhance their e-Learning environment. Blackboard had a joint adventure with kejiao.net.cn, together, they fired up a new company – CeBibo which will be their pioneer into the Chinese market.

CeBibo is a service provider that provides e-Learning solutions to the Chinese institutes using Blackboard technologies. Some big names that are using CerBibo’s elearning solution packages: Renmin University, Beijing University, Ocean University of China, Nankai University, and Harbin Institute of Technology. According to my “Chinese sources”, CeBibo is currently seeking for K12 clients in Shanghai.

Over a day long discussion at “Learning Object Interoperability Working Group Meeting”, organized by Scott Leslie, BCcampus, many challenges have been laid down on the table and many solutions were generated. One thing raised in the meeting was how we can overcome the “lack of sharing” mentality.

Over the years of instructional development practices, I realized one unique trend – the smaller the learning object is, the more willingness of sharing by the authors. Content creators are usually ok of sharing bits and pieces of their courses rather than the entire course as a whole package. This is understandable, while others collect and choose to re-use the “smaller” pieces of objects, they must put in their own intellectual procedures to re-assemble them into usable learning materials. This process is usually respected as a proper “re-publishing” process. Anyway, in simple, I believe us e-Learning developers should keep this in mind and always make sure the contents are modular and broken down to “smallest chunks” possible for the maximized re-usability.

What is Rapid e-Learning?

A new term was derived by the e-Learning industry in the year 2004: Rapid e-Learning. To make it simple, Rapid e-Learning contain 3 unique characteristics: 1) Content authoring should be simple and web based. 2) In order to minimize the time from content authoring to content publishing, the subject matter experts (SME) must take the primary role instead of the instructional designers. 3) Each learning/training organization must have a content sharing platform/database.

Here are some common factors of Rapid e-Learning:
- Common web authoring software like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and Flash are not being used. Instead, SME use web based authoring tools/platforms to generate digital contents. These contents will then be delivered to the learners as html, flash and other media formats via the web.
- SME needs minimum trainings from using these authoring tools/platforms.
- The learning contents are in smaller “chunks” usually, say, less than 30 minutes of studying time for each “chunk”. Then the course creator will “assemble” these “chunks” into a self contained courseware. These chunks can be viewed as learning objects.
- The learning materials can be delivered in synchronous, asynchronous and mixed mode learning environments.
- The contents must be learner centric instead of the “instructor feeding” style.
- Each content module must have a clear theme which allows the module to be presented as a stand alone learning object thus the production time for each of these objects can be “pumped out” on a efficient time basis.

Why Rapid e-Learning?

In the new millennium, production cycles in most of the industries are shortened. Enterprise and institutions are constantly facing changes in the surrounding environment such as new product demands (e.g. Oracle acquires PeopleSoft ), new government polices (War against Terror), new market competitions (China joins WTO), new diseases (SARS) new technologies (Blog) etc. The entire chain of learning is reacting to these changes in a faster and faster pace. e-Learning in general is playing an more and more important role in our society. In order to deliver the most accurate, the most up-to-date, the most high quality knowledge to the learners, us educators must restructure the traditional ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) model, and come up with a new solution. Thus Rapid e-Learning was born. Where do we go from here depends on how our learners respond to the change of the world.

Every thought about speeding up your xml feeds? It is well known that XML parsing are sometimes too slow compare to other types of data parsing. The reason behind this is because XML formatting calls for each element within a document to be tagged with labels written out as text. XML-based bottle necks can also occur during XML-based protocols calls. For an instructional developer like me, this is an very obvious issue when I use Flash to parse any xml files.

The solution to this dilemma may be a new format of the data schema - Binary XML. This solution intend to compresses XML transmissions to save parsing time and bandwidth. Sun is currently researching heavily on the topic and hopefully they will come up with some kinda open-source software which would do the trick.

CJK OSS = China Japan Korean Open Source Software Initiatives.

Under the support of the Ministry of Education in China, the Chinese OSS federation is planning to deploy linux based OS training courses in 35 universities plus 35 colleges. This initiative will be sponsored by Intel, IBM, HP, Novell and RedHat. There will be an additional sponsorship for software and Linus training/support over 100 Chinese post-secondary institutions.

Due to many reasons (Political, Military and Cultural), China has always been cautious about using Microsoft OS in government and educational organizations. This opens up room for OOS to grow at a high speed in China. The new Open Source business models may also be a key solution to the software piracy issues in Asia. (e.g. The product is free, we are now selling the service, how are you going to pirate our services?)

First Mac Shuffle, then Mac Mini. What's next? Macintosh finally took another step to respond to the lack of consumers' response in the personal computer market. Over the years, Apple computer has always been labeled as the "luxury" computer which was 10-25% more expensive than Intel Chip based PCs. Now, a new Mac computer - Mac mini is launched. It is a size of a lunch box and cost less than 500 US dollars! The bench mark from ASD for Mac Mini is quite impressive. I think I am gonna give it a try once it is popular on the market.

Now, weather this will change the way people look at Mac? I don't know... The main issue I have had with Apple computers has always been it's compatibility... Let's see if 2005 would be the .net world or .mac world. :)

Wanna watch some lego robots compete with each other? Wanna see what happens when top notch AI mix with simple toys? Check this out! NASA is broad casting the 14th FIRST Robotics Competition! This is the right / nerdy way to spend your Saturday afternoon! Go grab some nachos and enjoy the show!
http://robotics.nasa.gov/first/2005/kickoff.htm

Today, Brent Simpson from the university of Auckland came to visit. The visit was great and successful, although he did not bring the New Zealand summer breeze with him. Instead, the snow continues to pour down, but luckily all programs at UBC remains normal. We had some great conversations at my office, and there was some excellent information exchanges. He is a true expert in web based content editing using online editors like "html area" and "BitFlux Editor"! Guys, you really should check out BitFlux Editor if you havn't seen it yet. "Bitflux Editor is a browser based Wysiwyg XML Editor – and that changes everything! You can edit now your content semantically and at the same time display it to your users and editors in its final form. " (From BitFlux's official site)

Brent is a Web Developer / Instructional Technologiest over at CDFL (Centre for Flexible & Distance Learning) of the University of Auckland. Brent has worked in UCLA and also worked on the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) which was one of the early example of web content released under an open content license. Brent is also a key member in the eXe project which belongs to the EduForge network.

Brent managed to show us some great works done at CDFL, and some good discussions on the eXe initiatives. Hopefully, further collaborations can be developed in the open source e-Learning community between our units cross half of the earth. Thank you Brent for the visit!

"The snow has closed one major post-secondary school. The B.C. Institute of Technology is cancelling classes Thursday afternoon because of the snow." - CBC News

The first large snow dump on Vancouver in the new year! I had to walk 45 minutes to work! UBC didn't shut down, but I must have observed over 5 car crashes on the way to work! I think this is a perfect day to stay at home and check out your online couse materials, do some pre-class readings and stay in touch with the rest of the classes via the internet. One day in the future, we won't need to travel for study, I can see it coming. So, everyone can save some money from crashing into snow men.

4). Content sharing initiatives face new challenges
Ever since learning object was defined, content sharing became to be the number one research topic in many public institutions across the world. Canada alone has performed over 20 well known researches projects that varies from Learning Object Repository Developments (CAREO, BELLE, POOL, etc.) to EduSource distributed LOR initiatives. Many standards have been implemented (AICC, LRN, IEEE, ADL/SCORM, etc.). I personally believe these researches and developments will further advance in the year 2005. Growing with the rapid e-Learning demands everywhere, content sharing environments will be expanded in a great deal.

5). Rich media is zooming
Rich media is being used in the e-Learning practices at an increasing rate last year. Macromedia continuously produces amazingly popular rich media authoring tools such as Flash 2004, Breeze Alive, Flex and RoboDemo. I think macromedia is doing everything right in supporting the e-Learning industry. They have always played a role as the inspirer and supporter instead of the direct solution provider. However, they have made a clear move into the e-Learning and web based training market by acquiring e-Help. There are many other tools work just as RoboDemo, like Camtasia, Firefly and Epiance. However, RoboDemo certainly will take the advantage of the wide adoption of Flash and other Macromedia technologies. This year, we should be able to see more learning contents online using rich media.

6). A war is starting between the content publishing vendors
There are three main course content providers in the e-Learning industry: Skillsoft、Thomson NETg and ElementK. However, I vision there will be more traditional publishers soon join this market simply because there is still a large room in the digital content market.

I guess this is enough for the vision in 2005. There may be many ground-breaking innovations surface in the new year that will change our view of e-Learning. In the meanwhile, let’s all keep being creative and push the available technologies to their highest potential to benefit our learners.

Simulations and games are becoming powerful tools in e-Learning. But have you ever imagined of using a commercial game engine and turn it into a language learning platform?

"The Sim" has to be one of the most well known game was ever created. It is also the most popular girls' game in the gaming industry. An interesting research at U.S.C. and M.I.T. turned the simulated immersion within video games become an effective way of acquiring a foreign language. Check out the original article here: http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num1/purushotma/default.html

3. LMS, “To be or not to be”?
According to the statistics, the LMS market has grown over 20% in the year 2004. Along with the $600 million revenue, the LMS market is facing many new challenges:
- Enterprise software giants merge their products into the training fields. We have seen Oracle、Peoplesoft and SAP are rapidly moving into the market. By the way the acquisition of Peoplesoft by Oracle will very likely change the equilibrium of this competition in the year 2005.
- New web based application technologies emerged (dot net, J2EE, Flex, etc.) in the year 2004, many LMS providers are changing their product infrastructure and product delivery. For example, companies like GeoLearning, Learn.com and KnowledgePlanet are all providing to their users with a new generation of solutions with simple installation, simple interface and generic solutions.
- There are almost “too many” LMS that are out there in the commercial market, many institutions and organizations use more than one LMS for their day-to-day training practices. Multiple LMS means multiple “versions” of contents that are not compatible with each other. Challenges in reusability, portability, efficiency and much more would surface.
- Learning Object based trainings are becoming more mature now days. Shared learning contents are entering the mainstream of the e-Learning market with almost zero cost. These contents are much favored by both the learners and trainers simply due to its low cost and reusability.
- Rapid Learning is demanding the market for more up-to-date, more modular and more innovative approaches through the training process. New LMS providers are pressured to re-structure their platforms in order to adopt third party tools and vary formats of learning contents.
- Open source industry is growing rapidly. Many innovative, learner centric, FREE learning management systems and tools are surfacing. This type of LMS obviously will change the way that commercial LMS dominating the e-Learning industry.
In general, LMS market is still growing. However, there are many challenges ahead in the commercial LMS. Many e-Learning analysts predict the pure commercial based learning management systems may fade out in the year 2006.

Here comes the year 2005, I feel this is a good time for us to look back and summarize what have we experienced in the year 2004 and what do we see coming in the new year.

According to the newest report from B&A, the year 2004 was a good year for the global e-Learning industry. The overall marketing value in e-Learning has exceeded 14 billion dollars and a nearly 30% increase in the technology based training market.

The e-Learning industry is finally reaching its maturity. Both consumers and the providers are becoming more realistic in regard to the service delivery. The consumers are no longer “overly excited” about the launch of new technologies but rather concentrate on how can the online learning packages solve their problems.

According to the newest statistics, the “winner” in this growing industry is still the “corporate training” market. This market mainly focuses on practical problem solving such as online IT Trainings, Web casting, mixed learning, client training, and many more.

Here are some highlights from 2004:

1. Rapid e-Learning became main stream.
Initiated in the year 2003, Rapid e-Learning has become the new “star” in the e-Learning industry. Courseware and content authoring has always been the bottleneck for online teaching/training. Since the demand of web based learning increase at a “rapid” pace, “Rapid e-Learning” becomes the only feasible response to the market. According to B&A, over 72% of corporate training solutions relied on “rapid learning” in the year 2004. Many predict the market for Rapid e-Learning will continue to grow simply due the “time-critical” demand in many e-Learning cases.

2. Synchronized teaching/learning comes into the mainstream:
Internet2 has become more realistic in the year 2004; bandwidth upgrades constantly take place in varies of places around the world. Many e-Learning system providers have turned to Synchronized teaching/learning solutions such as WebEx、Centra、Interwise etc. Macromedia also entered the market with its powerful new tool – Breeze Alive. However there is still much challenge ahead of us, how to we best apply the technologies; how to we train our instructors; how long should a class last; how should we charge. However, the solutions will surface while this market being further developed in the year 2005.

Welcome to my new blog! The year 2005 is going to be an exciting year for the e-learning industry while so many open source projects are going to be deployed and the true practices of the learning objects are yet to be experimented in the day-to-day online learning environment.

Forget about the heavy stuff, let's pause to enjoy the time we have together and hope that the world will be a better place in the new year. Please do not forget to donate to help the victims from the Tsunami disaster.